There Is No Place For Us by Brian Goldstone

There is one common thread when reading about homelessness in America--it is always gut wrenching and unfair. This is no exception. The twist is that the five families that the author follows in Atlanta are all working. The people in this book work a lot, and earn very little. Sleeping in cars, crashing with friends or paying for a decrepit room in an extended-stay hotel, they are trapped in an endless circle of poverty and uncertainty. Politicians have been incentivized to define homelessness narrowly, including only people living in shelters or on the street. A true measure of homelessness in America would be six times the official figure, pushing the number up to more than four million. It always leaves me wondering how you can feel exceptional when as a country you step on the most impoverished amongst us. The allowance for wages that do not add up to being able to feed, cloth, and house one's family is what underlies this tragedy. That things like food stamps and Medicaid serve to make people depend on government subsidies when the companies that employ people should be shouldering that burden.

Preschool Education

My deepest wish on this subject is that it had been a Republican idea.  It makes perfect sense for it to be part of the platform for the party that has traditionally been seen as being pro-business and putting a greater emphasis on ensuring the economic health of the country.  Unfortunately, the emphasis has been on the effects of poverty and how we can right a wrong by providing preschool as a leg up.

That is just one way to see it.  To be competative in the world market in the 21st century America desperately needs to better prepare students to compete in that economy.  Our K-12 schools are woefully behind the world leaders, and there are very few things that can be done to fix that in the short run.  But adding preschool education for all students is a clear cut, managable, and quick way to start better preparing a work force for the challenges ahead.  And it makes sense for our country--surely even the plutocrats (as they like to be called--I prefer robber barons, but apparently calling them thieves hurts their feelings) want to have skilled labor that can make them money.  Let's create tax payers, starting at age three or four. Every study out there says it is money well spent, for all of us, not just the kids who go to preschool.

Don't take my word for it--here are the words of James Heckman, a Nobel prize winning economist from the University of Chicago (ie. an Economics Department that is well to the right of center):
1.  Inequalities in early childhood experiences and learning produceinequalities in ability, achievement, health, and adult success.
2.  While important, cognitive abilities alone are not as powerful as a package of cognitive skills and social skills--defined as attentiveness, perseverance, impulse control, and sociability.  In short, cognition and personality drive education and life success, with character development being an important and neglected factor.
3.  Adverse impacts of genetic, parental, and environmental resources can be overturned through investments in quality early childhood education that provide children and their parents the resources they need to properly develop cogniftive and personality skills that create productivity.
4.  Every dollar invested in high quality early childhood education produces a 7-10% per annum return on investment--which is significantly higher than other investments are yielding, and translates into more qualified workers, better productivity for the country, and more tax payers.  It may also translate into fewer by products of poverty, like crime, poor health, more jails, and more subsidized benefits--all of which would improve the quality of life of Americans and make us richer.



Affordable Health Care

The plague of disonfomation and outright manipulation and lying about the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is understandable when you look at this chart.  Only 8% of the people polled felt that news media was a reliable source of information, and yet 81% of them are getting their information from this source that is held in such low esteem.  It is this disconnect that makes us all look foolish, but there is big money behind the disinformation--no, you do not need to get a rectal exam in order to quality for health insurance, but the Koch brothers want you to think that.  Why? Because the Affordable Care Act will save consumers and the government money.  So who loses?  The robber barons, that is who. 

Here are some facts.  While only 37% of Americans viewed the ACA favorably in a March Kaiser poll, most liked what the healthcare bill is scheduled to do. Over 55%, and up to 88%, of Americans regard the following facets of Obamacare at least somewhat favorably: tax credits to small businesses to buy insurance, closing the Medicare "doughnut hole", creating insurance exchanges, giving rebates to customers of insurance customers that spend too much on administrative costs, and the employer mandate. Even Republicans like all of them except the Medicaid expansion, increase in Medicare tax, employer mandate, and individual mandate.
Indeed, the only requirement of Obamacare most people didn't like was the mandate for all people to join it. Now, about that.  There is a lot of help out there for the poorest amongst us, those who currently cannot afford health care, and many people don't know about this.  More than a third of people are unaware of the health insurance exchanges, subsidy assistance to individuals, or the Medicaid expansion. The latter two provisions of the law have actually seen a decrease in the percentage of people who knew these policies were in the bill, since it first passed. And that it would cost them more--again, not so for the majority of people, especially those who can ill afford it.  I have friends who are self-employed who found out this week that they can get health insurance with better coverage for 1/5 of what they have been paying.
More worryingly, more people than not thought that Obamacare includes a public option, undocumented immigrant insurance, "death panels", and cuts to Medicare. The Affordable Care Act contains none of these.  The fact is most of Obamacare is liked by the public. The issue is that the provision that is not liked is the best-known. 

Which is not an accident, I fear.  So what are House Republicans afraid of?  That they are wrong about this.  That the law will be incredibly popular and successful, and they will be shown to be like the Emperor who has no clothes.

Children at Risk for Hunger in America

Food for thought on Thanksgiving, both heart warming and heart breaking at the same time. A school in rural Missouri started filling backpacks with food for children they suspected weren't getting enough to eat over the weekends. They started in two places--the kids who ate breakfast and lunch at the school were one at risk group, and then the kids who just seemed listless. The program was under the radar, but families who were in it referred families who weren't, and families who regained employment started donating food for those who were without jobs. They thought about what food to provide--it had to be healthy. There needed to either be no preparation or food that could be prepared by even a young child (like Ramen) because often these kids are left alone. They put the food in ordinary backpacks and the kids who are in the program just go by the office and pick them up after school lets out on Friday, bring them back on Monday, and no one is the wiser (until this article was published, at least). They were very careful about privacy, avoiding shame and stigmatization.

The article brought tears to my eyes. Literally. Ethan is studying the Depression, and the issue of shame was a big one then too. Until people realized that they weren't alone and communities started to see that they were in it together and needed to band together and help each other. Those who had room took in boarders. The boarders provided money for food for all. Lots of people left home related to poverty and shame, but those who stayed and faced their situation were helped by those around them.

I hope we are equipped to deal with hunger on this level again. The backpack program has tripled the number of children in it over the past year. Now that the combination of unemployment and those deemed unemployable is hovering close to 20%, that number is likely to rise. It represents a barometer of how the country is faring through this economic crisis--these are the canaries in the coal mine, and what they tell me is frightening and I am not sure what to do about it.

One thing is to start talking about it. I think this is the softly ticking bomb that won't go off for another decade when these undernourished kids don't reach their educational potential because they didn't have enough nutrition for brain development. While I contribute a can or two to food drives and am philosophically attuned with donating extra food at large catered events to the folks that feed those in need every day, I think this is probably no where near enough. It is time the backpack program to happen everywhere. Children hoarding their backpack food so that they can make it through Christmas break should not happen.