Imagination: an antidote to the plague of austerity

Transition Network
Rob Hopkins

"What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.... If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine."
Sylvia Plath, from Notebooks, February 1956

Our theme for November is austerity and Transition responses to it. It is a subject that our Social Reporters are exploring with great gusto at the moment. Caroline Jackson recently documented what the unfolding of spending cuts look like in her community in Lancaster, concluding with the question "there’s a challenge for us in Transition here – I wonder how we will respond?" That's what I'd like to explore here, and to ask "what is Transition's unique contribution to the challenges of austerity?"

In the UK, as elsewhere, debates around austerity tend to polarise along political divides. The Right argue that the economy is saddled with huge debts and that we have to "get our house in order" before anything else, cutting back in all areas of government expenditure (although whilst also bailing out the banks, cutting taxes for the rich and not collecting corporate taxes). The Left argue that's really the last thing we need to do, that actually what we need to do is to borrow more money in order to stimulate growth and kick start economic growth again. Both miss the point completely. In The Power of Just Doing Stuff I quoted FEASTA's Graham Barnes who wrote:

“The austerity versus Keynsian spending debate is about as useful as arguing whether the Earth is flat or sitting on the back of a pile of turtles.”

The reality is we have reached the end of the age of cheap energy, and, almost certainly, of economic growth. Our urgent imperative is to begin a steep reduction of carbon emissions (10% a year, if Kevin Anderson is right), and we stand atop mountains of debt accumulated in the process of generating GDP (creating one dollar of growth in the 1970s required $1.74 of debt, it's now $5.67) and an increasingly fragile economic system. Under such circumstances it's not about how we recreate the kind of blunt, “gross value added” growth that both left and right have long used as a measure, rather how we get real about our situation and respond accordingly. Whether austerity is the right approach or not, the reality is that as a government-led approach to the economy, it looks likely to be here to stay for some time to come, with Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls pledging to match to coalition government's spending cuts.

I could spend this entire post delivering a long rant about austerity: how there is easily enough money to overcome it, and to tackle the climate crisis, locked up in offshore banking accounts (beautifully explored in Nick Shaxson's latest report 'The Finance Curse'), how in the US (and almost certainly in the UK and elsewhere too) the bulk of what little economic growth there has been over the past couple of years actually goes to the rich, not to everyone else, or in pointing out, as the Red Cross did recently when looking at austerity across Europe, that it simply doesn't work as an economic approach:

"Whilst other continents successfully reduce poverty, Europe adds to it. The long-term consequences of this crisis have yet to surface. The problems caused will be felt for decades even if the economy turns for the better in the near future … We wonder if we as a continent really understand what has hit us."

I could bring it closer to home, stating how the use of food banks in the UK has increased threefold on this time last year, up to half a million people over the last 12 months, how some families receiving food parcels from food banks are sending them back because they are too poor to be able to afford to heat the food the parcel contains, or how, in the case of council funding cuts, the drastic cutting back of public services has only just begun. Newcastle City Council has spoken of how it is being forced to make "bloody great cuts", cutting all arts funding, and showing how by 2017 it looks like it will be unable to even meet its basic legal responsibilities as a Council. At the same time, bonuses in the City of London are up 64%, and RBS and Lloyds are enjoying combined half-year profits of £3.5bn.

It's shitty and grim and however much we might rail against it, it looks unlikely that a change of government (all the major parties at least) would do much different. The reality is that the age of cheap energy is over, and our living off the fat of a hundred years of surplus energy is coming to an end. There are, of course, activist avenues open to you if you want to use them, campaigns for transparency in international finance, UK Uncut and so on. I think we need something else though, something that sits alongside those more campaign-based responses, something without which we will never make any headway.

Keep reading Here >>

The Quicksand of Socialism…

Liberal Logic 101

'Panicking' families brace for billions in cuts to food-stamp benefits

Benefit cuts to food stamp recipients kick in Friday, a move by Congress that will siphon $5 billion

off a program that helps one in seven Americans put breakfast, lunch and dinner on the table.

As president of the Food Bank for New York City, Margaret Purvis expects those cuts will draw even more people to organizations that already provide 400,000 meals a day to hungry city folks.

"Our members are panicking," she said as time wound down before the benefit decreases go into effect. "We're telling everyone to make sure that you are prepared for longer lines."

Needy Americans who receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are expected to suffer an average loss of $36 a month from a $275.13 per household benefit. There are a near-record 47.6 million Americans, representing 23.1 million households, on the program. The cost of the program will hit $63.4 billion in 2013.

Keep reading on nbcnews >>

'People think everyone who is poor gets welfare, and it's just not true'; How the myth of the welfare queen died

In Plain Sight

Peter Dicampo / for NBC News

Nicole Oman works in the property management office of the YWCA Family Village in Issaquah, WA, where she also lives, on August 12, 2013. Photo by Peter DiCampo.

By Allison Linn, Staff Writer, NBC News
Here’s one thing both critics and supporters of the modern welfare system agree on: The direct assistance program as we knew it in the 1980s and 1990s is dead and gone.

“It’s a very different program than it was in the past. The comment about welfare queens is much less justified now,” said Ron Haskins, a key adviser of the Republicans’ welfare reform effort who now works at the Brookings Institution.

Two decades after President Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it” -- and nearly four decades since President Ronald Reagan repeatedly derided the “welfare queen” while on the 1976 presidential campaign trail -- far fewer families are receiving cash and voucher assistance, and a larger share of less educated single moms are working.

“People think everyone who is poor gets welfare, and it’s just not true,” said Heather Hahn, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute.

Still, experts are deeply divided on how successful tax and welfare reform efforts of the 1990s have been in improving the lives of less educated single mothers, especially in the wake of the Great Recession and weak recovery.

About 1.72 million families received direct assistance during an average month in 2012 through Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, according to the latest data from the federal government’s Office of Family Assistance. That’s about half the 3.94 million families who received TANF in 1997, according to an Urban Institute report funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In addition, about 62 percent of never-married moms ages 20 to 49 with a high school degree or less were working in 2011, according to an analysis of Current Population Survey data prepared by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal-leaning think tank. That’s up from about 51 percent in 1992, but down from 76 percent in 2000, before two recessions hit low-skill workers hard.

Welfare-to-work
Welfare has not been the same since the mid-1990s, when the old program, called Aid to Families with Dependent Children, was replaced by TANF. The new program requires that recipients do 20 to 30 hours a week of work-related activities, such as job hunting or community service, among other stipulations.

Most states also only allow adults to collect TANF for a maximum of five years over the course of their lifetime, or less.

“The expectation is that you need to be looking for work,” said LaDonna Pavetti, vice president for family income support policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “And if you don’t, you will either have your benefits reduced or you’ll lose them entirely.”

Many more low-educated single moms did start working soon after the program was introduced, but experts say welfare-to-work cannot take all the credit for that. The late-1990s welfare reform effort also coincided with the expansion of the earned income tax credit, which provides financial assistance to low-wage workers, and a strong labor market.

“There really were three factors: One was welfare reform, one was expansion of the EITC and one was (the) economy,” Pavetti said. “Welfare reform was not the biggest role in that.”’

Peter Dicampo / for NBC News

Nicole Oman at home with her son Holden, age 12, and daughter Madison, age 10, in their apartment.

Working, but struggling
These days, Kathryn Edin, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, said the good news is that many single mothers who used to be longer-term welfare recipients are now workers who only need assistance once in a while.

But the bad news for single moms with low education and skills is that in the past decade or so, it’s become increasingly difficult to find a stable, full-time job that pays well. That means some moms may now be working very hard, and still find that their families are at poverty or near-poverty levels.

A person working a full-time, minimum wage job would take home $15,080 a year. That’s below the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2012 poverty threshold for a family of one adult and two children under 18.

About 41 percent female-headed households with children under age 18 were living in poverty in 2011, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s up from 33 percent in 2000.

Many also fret about a group of women who were not able to make it into employment at all and who may now be in deep poverty.

“What ended up happening … is a lot of families fell through the cracks,” Edin said. Her recent research has documented a sharp increase in extreme poverty among the families with children that have been most affected by welfare reform.

Most experts say that even in a low-wage job, a single mother is better off financially than on welfare because welfare payments are so low. In July 2011, the maximum monthly TANF payment for a family of three ranged from $170 to $923 a month, depending on the state, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

But many concede that one optimistic hope for welfare reform – that women who entered low-wage work would gradually get better-paying jobs – has not generally materialized.

“The idea that these moms are going to go into the labor force, they’re going to get skills, they’re going to move up, they’re going to make more money … that did not happen very much,” said Haskins, who also advised President George W. Bush on welfare in 2002.

From homeless to employed
These days, the small group of adults who do end up receiving TANF are often at rock bottom.

Nicole Oman is an example. The mother of three children received $454 a month from TANF after she divorced her husband of 14 years and got into another relationship she described as unhealthy.

That was in 2011, and Oman and her children were staying in a homeless shelter where she was required to do around 30 hours of chores, training and therapy for victims of abuse.

After completing the shelter’s program, Oman used a community job search program offered through TANF to land a position with a residential YWCA facility in Issaquah, Wash., outside Seattle.

She now typically earns about $1,150 a month handling some of the YWCA Family Village at Issaquah’s tax compliance requirements. She also receives several hundred dollars a month in food stamp benefits, now known as SNAP.

Oman, 38, also was able to move into a subsidized two-bedroom apartment in the YWCA community, saving her a long bus ride from another temporary housing facility.

After spending years in homeless shelters, Oman revels in having a job and her own apartment.

“The thing that this process makes you is grateful for the craziest little things,” she said

For Oman, it’s having her own kitchen, which means she can cook meals for her family for the first time in years.

For her 10-year-old daughter, it was learning that the bus route near their new apartment would drop them right in front of a major grocery store, instead of having to walk a long way to a less desirable store.

The family’s grocery trips recently got even easier. A few weeks ago, Oman was able to buy a 2001 Ford Taurus. It’s the first time she’s been able to afford a car in nearly three years.

Oman says the job has helped her get back on her feet by giving her more than just a paycheck.

“The gals that I work with, they’ve helped me so much … in rebuilding myself,” she said.

Michael Tanner: "We’ve made poverty too ’comfortable"

www.nationalaffairs.com

inplainsight

What if, instead of operating a variety of anti-poverty programs, the government simply mailed every poor person in America a check big enough to lift them out of poverty? That, says the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner, would make more sense than what we do now – and, he says, we’d still have money left over.

Michael Tanner, CATO
 Institute senior fellow.

Here’s Tanner’s math: By his count, the federal government spends more than $668 billion a year on a total of 126 anti-poverty programs, including those that address housing, hunger, health care, and cash assistance. They range from TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), which most people associate with traditional welfare, to much smaller programs for Indian tribes, at-risk youth, and others. If you divide Tanner’s total by the roughly 46 million people with incomes below the poverty line, you get nearly $15,000 for every poor man, woman, and child in the U.S.

Tanner acknowledges that poor individuals don’t receive that much money, and that’s his point: government spending isn’t laser-targeted to those most in need. In fact, he says, “throwing money at the problem has neither reduced poverty nor made the poor self-sufficient. It is time to re-evaluate our approach to fighting poverty.”

You’ve taken a fair amount of heat for saying that America should “focus less on making poverty more comfortable.” What do you mean by that? Is poverty ever comfortable?

Poverty is never a good thing. But most of the programs we have to combat poverty are based on taking people who are in poverty and giving them a little more income so their poverty doesn’t feel quite as bad. Instead, we should be focused on how to we get more people out of poverty.

What do you think we are doing wrong?

The problem is that our welfare programs aren’t targeted at the right things: education, pregnancy prevention, and job creation. They’re targeted at giving people who are poor the resources to live in poverty.

We know that if you drop out of high school you’re likely to be poor. If you graduate from college, your chances of escaping poverty are much greater.  

We know that if you’re a woman, don’t get pregnant if you’re not married. That’s not a moral judgment, it’s an economic one. It’s simply more difficult to raise a child if you have one income rather than two.

And get a job, any job, even a low-wage job, and stick with it. Even a low-paying job is better than no job at all. People are more likely to move out of poverty if they have a low-paying job than if they are on welfare.

And we need to create more jobs. The fact is, we still have an anti-job atmosphere. Too many taxes, too many regulations. We don’t do a very good job of creating an environment that’s going to create more jobs.

What do we do about the millions of people who are in poverty right now? They are poor, they don’t have skills, they don’t have a good education, they don’t have or can’t get a job. Do we pull the safety net out from under them?

We should target our aid to those people who need the help the most. We have created a situation in which there are a certain number of people who are not going to be able to become an economically viable family unit anytime soon, and we probably have to support them in the short term. In the long term, however, we want to give people in the future more of an opportunity to avoid poverty and to get out of poverty.

It’s unfair to compare my approach to utopia. Let’s compare it to the real world and in the real world, the approach I’m talking about would mean fewer poor people than there are today. Would there be zero? No. I don’t know if a society in the history of the world has ever had zero. Poverty in many ways is the natural condition of man. Throughout most of mankind’s history, most people were poor. The question is, how do you create more prosperity?

People on my side of this have often appeared to be hard-hearted, by arguing on a dollars-and-cents basis. But you shouldn’t measure compassion by inputs. You measure by outcomes. And by that measure, we’re failing. And the burden is on the poor, who are the ones suffering in poverty.

So you think it would be more compassionate to blow up and restructure the system?

It’s not fun to live in poverty. Poor people don’t want to be poor. Most poor people would like to work. Most poor people would like to be non-poor. But we’re not giving them that opportunity. The goal should be that each person gets to achieve their full potential. Most people trapped in the welfare system are (NOT?) getting to do that.

It was Ronald Reagan who said, we fought a war on poverty and poverty won. Do you agree with that?

Let’s put it this way: We are certainly not beating poverty. We may have had a draw but that’s not where we want to be.

Immigration Bill Gives Amnestied Residents 'Immediate' Access to Welfare

breitbart

By Matthew Boyle 

The immigration bill introduced to the Senate a week and a half ago would, if passed, allow illegal immigrants to access state and local welfare benefits immediately, Breitbart News has learned. The financial impact of allowing potentially millions of immigrants onto state and local public assistance could overwhelm these programs' budgets.

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) uncovered this loophole in the bill and many others, and he will circulate a memo detailing the gaps in the bill on Tuesday. Breitbart News exclusively obtained a copy of the memo before its public release.

“The Gang of Eight made a promise that illegal immigrants will not be able to access public benefits,” Sessions said in a statement to Breitbart News. “We already know that, once granted green cards and ultimately citizenship, illegal immigrants will be able to access all public benefit programs at a great cost to taxpayers. We have, however, identified a number of loopholes that would allow illegal immigrants to draw public benefits even sooner than advertised.”

If the bill were signed into law, America’s 11 million illegal immigrants would be legalized within six months, when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano submits her border security plan to Congress. Illegal immigrants would immediately be eligible for Registered Provisional Immigrant (RPI) status, making them legal to live and work in the country.

As Sessions’ staff points out in the memo, “state laws frequently extend benefits to anyone ‘lawfully present’ in the U.S.” The Sessions team points to a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) brief that details how the only requirement many state and local governments have with regard to immigrant access to public benefits is that they are “lawfully present.” The term “lawfully present” is a legal definition.

According to page 91 of the bill, all illegal immigrants granted legalized RPI status would legally be considered “lawfully present.” That section reads as follows:

‘‘(4) TREATMENT OF REGISTERED PROVISIONAL IMMIGRANTS.—A noncitizen granted registered provisional immigrant status under this section shall be considered lawfully present in the United States for all purposes while such noncitizen remains in such status, except that the noncitizen—
‘‘(A) is not entitled to the premium assistance tax credit authorized under section 36B of            the Internal Revenue Code of 1986;
‘‘(B) shall be subject to the rules applicable to individuals not lawfully present that are set forth in subsection (e) of such section; and         
‘‘(C) shall be subject to the rules applicable to individuals not lawfully present that are set forth in section 1402(e) of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (42 U.S.C. 18071).”

In evaluating whether an illegal immigrant qualifies for RPI status, Sessions’ staff points out, the legislation “explicitly forbids” the Department of Homeland Security from using current law, which blocks entry to those who could become "public charges," i.e. dependent on government welfare programs.  

“Therefore, when those here illegally who are unable to support themselves are legalized, much of the immediate fiscal burden will fall on state and local governments,” Sessions’ staff wrote in the memo.

In addition to that loophole, Sessions and his staff found several more loopholes that allow current illegal immigrants access to public benefits even on the federal level before the promised wait time of 13 years from the bill’s passage.

In the memo, Sessions’ staff notes that current illegal immigrants who are “granted RPI status will immediately become eligible for federal benefits through citizen and permanent resident dependents, with no requirement that they support their household as a condition of receiving or maintaining legal status.” That means any current illegal immigrant who subsequently has dependent children, who are, by right of birth, U.S. citizens would qualify for federal welfare benefits through them.

Taxpayer-funded assistance for Boston suspect?-Outrage that deceased brother was on welfare