The Nation recently published a stunning overview of the working poor and underpaid. One of the most powerful data points in the piece described how empty the decline in unemployment actually is: having a job doesn't exempt anyone from poverty anymore. About 12% of Americans (43 million) are considered poor, and yet they are employed. They earn an individual income below $12,140 per year, and slightly more than that for a family of two. If you include housing and medical expenses in the calculation, it raises the percentage of Americans living in poverty to 14%. That's 45 million people.

At that level of income, there's almost no way to pay for food and shelter in any sizeable American city. That means people now can both be employed and homeless.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergeorgescu/2018/08/22/americas-real-economy-it-isnt-booming/?fbclid=IwAR19dvytJ4THMcesHk6m3F5ou1DX6rKBF4WYWC6bJusKdgJaqSexfN5XF_k#320433c060b7

But blacks and Browns are doing great. Just ask 'em.

Oh. Here's why. From Newsweek:

An early version of SNAP began as legislation enacted in 1959. Two years later, President John F. Kennedy implemented a pilot version of the program. In 1964, new legislation made the program permanent. Under the program, working-age adults without children can receive benefits for three months in three years. After that time limit, they must work at least 80 hours per month or participate in an education or job training program for that same amount of time. States can temporarily waive the three-month time limit when unemployment rates rise, and many did so during the economic recession that started in the late 2000s.

But states that have reimplemented work requirement have generally experienced greater drops in SNAP participation than in other states, says Ed Bolen, senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Alabama put its work requirement back in place on January 1. By May 1, SNAP participation in the state was down 85 percent in 13 counties. In Kansas, the amount of people receiving benefits was 75 percent lower around two years after its governor reinstated work requirements in 2013. In Georgia, there was a 62 percent drop on April 1, the deadline for recipients to find work under the reinstated rule.

Republican lawmakers have pushed for further limits on exemptions from the work requirement. "There are talented people across our country who aren't pursuing the full potential of their capabilities, largely because government incentives make it more profitable in some cases to stay home and collect welfare than to pursue personal growth and responsibility through work," Congressman Garrett Graves, a Republican from Louisiana, said in a statement in June. "Government needs to provide a safety net for the vulnerable, but it's become a lifestyle for some to actively choose government assistance over work."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/people-food-stamps-snap-decline-participation-640500%3Famp%3D1

So basically, because unemployment has dropped, states have the ability to tighten requirements for SNAP benefits.

Bruce Leroy said:

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BrooksBearLives said:

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That doesn't refute what I posted at all.

They can BOTH be true.

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He posted a recently (March 19) federal agency record as reference.

You posted an older (August 18) journalistic judgment (Forbes: Peter Georgescu) of weekly magazine (The Nation) that covers progressive political and cultural news, and opinions.

His March '19 - 36.3 million is a correctly referenced number.

Your source data is incorrect.

"The Nation recently published a stunning overview of the working poor and underpaid. One of the most powerful data points in the piece described how empty the decline in unemployment actually is: having a job doesn't exempt anyone from poverty anymore. About 12% of Americans (43 million) are considered poor, and yet they are employed. They earn an individual income below $12,140 per year, and slightly more than that for a family of two. If you include housing and medical expenses in the calculation, it raises the percentage of Americans living in poverty to 14%. That's 45 million people."

Your Forbes link references:
https://www.thenation.com/article/united-states-national-security-problem-not-think/

Which references the original article:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176447/tomgram%3A_rajan_menon%2C_the_wages_of_poverty_in_america/

From the original article:

"For millions of Americans, however, the greatest threat to their day-to-day security isn't terrorism or North Korea, Iran, Russia, or China. It's internaland economic. That's particularly true for the 12.7 percent of Americans (43.1 million of them) classified as poor by the government's criteria: an income below $12,140 for a one-person household, $16,460 for a family of two, and so on until you get to the princely sum of $42,380 for a family of eight.

Savings aren't much help either: A third of Americans have no savings at all and another third have less than $1,000 in the bank. Little wonder that families struggling to cover the cost of food alone increased from 11 percent (36 million) in 2007 to 14 percent (48 million) in 2014.

THE WORKING POOR

Unemployment can certainly contribute to being poor, but millions of Americans endure poverty when they have full-time jobs or even hold down more than one job. The latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that there are 8.6 million "working poor," defined by the government as people who live below the poverty line despite being employed at least 27 weeks a year. Their economic insecurity doesn't register in our society, partly because working and being poor don't seem to go together in the minds of many Americansand unemployment has fallen reasonably steadily. After approaching 10 percent in 2009, it's now at only 4 percent."

Please note how your "source" manipulated the presented information and you posted it without verifying.

Also please note that the bls data referenced in original article is from 2015 and contains this opening paragraph.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2015/home.htm

"In 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 43.1 million people, or 13.5 percent of the nation's population, lived below the official poverty level.1 (See the technical notes section for examples of poverty levels.) Although the poor were primarily children and adults who had not participated in the labor force during the year, 8.6 million individuals were among the "working poor" in 2015, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; the 8.6 million figure was down from 9.5 million in 2014."

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So you're saying that Newsweek is lying?

Bruce Leroy said:

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"So you're saying that Newsweek is lying?"

I haven't posted in reference to Newsweek.

So are you saying that the stated facts in your original post are correct in your opinion?

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Ah crap. I'm sorry. Got confused on the article I posted.

So you're saying Forbes is lying/wrong?

RD2WINAGNBEAR86 said:

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Yeah. 3,6 percent unemployment SUCKS! This is totally unacceptable. Where are Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama when we need them?

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Nobody said 3.6% unemployment sucks.

The economy has been improving for 10 years -and that's a really good thing.

But it's not perfect. Right now, many people are fully "employed" and still poor. That's not right.

Here's another angle triangulating this idea that the unemployment rate doesn't tell the whole story.

In the US and UK (which also has wonderfully low unemployment) the rate of people classified as involuntarily part time is 40% higher than it was last time unemployment was this low.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/unemployment-vs-involuntary-part-time-work-underemployment-2019-1

Which this squares a lot of what I see. That there are a LOT of people struggling. I know people losing farms and really in a rough spot.

Bruce Leroy said:

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BrooksBearLives said:

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Bruce Leroy said:

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"So you're saying that Newsweek is lying?"

I haven't posted in reference to Newsweek.

So are you saying that the stated facts in your original post are correct in your opinion?

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Ah crap. I'm sorry. Got confused on the article I posted.

So you're saying Forbes is lying/wrong?

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My previous quote from my response.

"Your source data is incorrect."

So are you saying that the stated facts in your original post are correct in your opinion?

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Honestly, I'm trying to understand what you posted. It's not as clear as you probably meant it to be.

bearassnekkid said:

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Listen, we can't have any poor people. Everybody has to be rich, ok? I mean, what kind of society are we if 2.6% of the population is poor even though they're working half a year? It's an outrage. How are we even functioning right now?

Oh, also, the solution to have a nation full of only rich people? Government, obvi.

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No one said that.

more graphs JGTBH

BrooksBearLives said:

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RD2WINAGNBEAR86 said:

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Yeah. 3,6 percent unemployment SUCKS! This is totally unacceptable. Where are Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama when we need them?

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Nobody said 3.6% unemployment sucks.

The economy has been improving for 10 years -and that's a really good thing.

But it's not perfect. Right now, many people are fully "employed" and still poor. That's not right.

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That has to be the case based on what I can see. It's still not where it was before 2008. I've been out of the country for about 10 years, and I'm slowly trying to make a move back. Advertised jobs paying over $50k per year are a needle in a haystack. That wasn't the case before the recession. 11 years later, and wages on average are lower than they once were based on my observations. Guess I'll just continue to browse from afar. How are people doing it now that housing and healthcare are about 30%+ or higher than a decade ago?

Rich guys telling the poor "You're not poor anymore."
No that's .....well rich.

RD2WINAGNBEAR86 said:

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Waco1947 said:

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Rich guys telling the poor "You're not poor anymore."
No that's .....well rich.

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So please define rich for us, Waco. How much money or what exactly qualifies someone to be "rich"?

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Easy one - You and everyone here on this board including me.

Waco1947 said:

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RD2WINAGNBEAR86 said:

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Waco1947 said:

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Rich guys telling the poor "You're not poor anymore."
No that's .....well rich.

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So please define rich for us, Waco. How much money or what exactly qualifies someone to be "rich"?

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Easy one - You and everyone here on this board including me.

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Believe it or not, I agree with your answer. Each day is a precious gift.

curtpenn said:

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Complex issue no doubt. Wonder how much high levels of illegal immigration accumulated over decades depresses wages for those on the lowest economic rungs. Wouldn't come as much of a surprise that off-shoring has taken its toll, as well. Maybe we need tariffs and a wall....?

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Interesting you say that. The problems with illegal immigration don't seem to be cleanly stated. The amount paid for those seasonal/migrant jobs has doubled over the last 10 years.

It's less about the wages and more about being able to find someone to do the labor.

Here's some reporting/article I read recently about celery farmers who've had to doubled/tripled some of the pay they offer.

Quote:

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Worker Shortage Hurts California's Agriculture Industry

Dollar for dollar, California is the biggest agriculture economy in the country. And lately, farmers in the state have been struggling with a new problem: A shortage of workers during harvest season.

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Dollar for dollar, California is the biggest agriculture economy in this country. And lately, farmers in that state have been struggling with a new kind of problem. They don't have enough workers to harvest crops. Cardiff Garcia and Stacey Vanek Smith of our Planet Money team went to a celery farm in California to find out more.

CARDIFF GARCIA, BYLINE: We went to Oxnard, Calif., to talk with Tom Deardorff. His family has owned farms in this area for decades.

TOM DEARDORFF: There's probably 80 acres of celery here in the field that we're at right now. Every single stock of celery needs to get cut by hand.

STACEY VANEK SMITH, BYLINE: In the middle of the ocean of celery, there is a crew of about 30 workers? They walk in a row in big straw hats, hacking off celery stalks and tossing them onto this motorized platform which stretches across the field and chugs along behind them.
It is really hard and dangerous work, 10-hour days swinging a knife in the hot sun. And when the job market's strong, like it has been for the last few years, these workers have a lot of other options.

DEARDORFF: They move into - whether it's landscaping jobs, construction jobs, food service jobs.

GARCIA: So Tom Deardorff has had to compete for workers. He's raised their pay by actually quite a lot. Back in 2006, working the celery field paid about $8.70 an hour. Now it pays more than $21 an hour. We couldn't speak to any of the workers on Tom's farm. But Tom says his workers all are documented and that even doubling wages hasn't solved the labor problem.

DEARDORFF: Yeah I don't think it's an economic issue. I think it's a political issue.
GARCIA: Tom says the agriculture visas that the country offers - they're too difficult to get, they're expensive and there just aren't enough of them. Deardorff Farms used to hire more than 600 workers every year. But Tom says he can't make that happen anymore, so he's had to make changes to his business.

DEARDORFF: We've shifted away from the most labor-intensive crops - so things like vine-ripe tomatoes, we no longer grow anymore. We've also shifted a large amount of our production down into Mexico. So basically, the fact of the matter is that a foreign-born person is going to be harvesting your fruits and vegetables. So the decision is - do we want to do that within the United States, or do we want to have that foreign-born worker stay in his country and harvest your fruits and vegetables? So based on what we've seen in the political environment over the last 15 and 20 years, we have decided to go down there into Mexico.

GARCIA: And now with President Trump signaling that he wants to crack down on undocumented workers, the labor situation might get even harder.

VANEK SMITH: Even if Tom only hires documented workers, he could feel the pinch because if undocumented workers leave the area, the overall supply of farm workers goes down. So more and more farmers could find themselves moving their operations to Mexico.

GARCIA: How hard was it to make these kinds of decisions based on, like, what you were seeing?

DEARDORFF: I mean, if I was looking at spreadsheets all day long, it was a really simple decision and one we probably should have made five years before we made it. But I mean, these are ranches that my great-grandfather farmed, and we'd rather keep them active. But the economics and the politics of it are suggesting that we do otherwise. So...

VANEK SMITH: Tom says his business has become this constant calculation of how to harvest more with less because, in spite of everything - the higher pay, the different crops - his turnover rate keeps growing. Fewer and fewer of the same workers come back to his farms every year. Stacey Vanek Smith...

GARCIA: And Cardiff Garcia, NPR News, in Oxnard, Calif.

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https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607996811/worker-shortage-hurts-californias-agriculture-industry
Pretty fascinating stuff.

Bruce Leroy said:

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BrooksBearLives said:

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Bruce Leroy said:

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"So you're saying that Newsweek is lying?"

I haven't posted in reference to Newsweek.

So are you saying that the stated facts in your original post are correct in your opinion?

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Ah crap. I'm sorry. Got confused on the article I posted.

So you're saying Forbes is lying/wrong?

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My previous quote from my response.

"Your source data is incorrect."

So are you saying that the stated facts in your original post are correct in your opinion?

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It appears you're confusing "poor" and "working poor" which are not the same thing.

The 12.7% number comes from those classified as "poor" as of 2016 (the most up-to-date data at the time of the article).

The 8.6 million people number was the "working poor."

This is directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Quote:

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In 2016, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 40.6 million people, or 12.7 percent of the nation's population, lived below the poverty level.1 (See the technical notes section for examples of poverty levels.) Although the poor were primarily children and adults who had not participated in the labor force during the year, 7.6 million individuals were among the "working poor" in 2016, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; this measure was down from 2015. The working poor are people who spent at least 27 weeks in the labor force (that is, working or looking for work) but whose incomes still fell below the poverty level. In 2016, the working-poor ratethe ratio of the working poor to all individuals in the labor force for at least 27 weekswas 4.9 percent, down 0.7 percentage point from the previous year. (See table A, chart 1, and table 1.)

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https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2016/home.htm

So, with respect, that appears to confirm the article's numbers, unless I'm missing something.

Have any solutions to make the economy boom BBL?

If the left views free market economics as just ideological cover for the rich, then we must go further and ask why they think that.

The reason why teaching people sound economics doesn't make them supporters of free market capitalism is because they don't WANT to believe that free market capitalism is a good thing. They WANT to believe that it's wrong and so they do. People are first and foremost religious. This means they first put their faith into a worldview they want to be true. They will only accept reason and evidence if reason and evidence are consistent with their chosen worldview.

This means that the only way to convince people to support free market capitalism is to get them to want to support free market capitalism. This requires a change in their faith, or the world view of which they want to be true. People's views on politics and economics tend to come rather indirectly from their religious and cultural views. Therefore, you're probably not going to get very far in convincing people of free markets by presenting directly free market arguments. Rather their religious and cultural views must first be changed to enable them to want to support free markets.

It is indeed, easier to sell socialism than liberty. Socialism is quite superficial and not even considered socialism but in a lot of instances just "government correction of capitalist shortcomings".

I did want to add that moral superiority trumps facts, reason and logic. The left, on a perch of moral superiority, loves to point to any sign of a moral shortfall in the right. They maximize and feign moral outrage at any sign of it in the right and attempt to ignore or minimize it in themselves. Witness the Virginia governor's (Northam) refusal resign and be knocked off his morally superior perch. Actually, all three top Democrats in Virginia are refusing to resign for perceived lapses in moral judgement.

Moral superiority is a form of political correctness designed to stop debate or discussion. A minimum wage superficially looks to benefit the poor. Any understanding of economics tells us this is not true. I do not expect any minimum wage earner to have a grasp of any level of economics and all he sees is an immediate improvement in the size of his paycheck. The left can roil the minimum wage earner to demand through protest and strike, that is; social disruption, a higher minimum wage which may be, if it doesn't cost him his job, initially of benefit and the left appears to be the champion of the poor. We know in the long term an increase in the minimum wage earner would at best leave the employee at best treading water but is more than likely be detrimental.