Tag Archives: income

Uber and Lyft passengers are ultra-wealthy. Will this keep cities from investing in transit?

Turns out, a lot of Uber and Lyft users are rich. And not just a little rich: According to a new report, 45 percent of their customers in dense urban areas make over $200,000 per year. Eek. Only around 13 percent of Uber and Lyft passengers have incomes below $50,000. That could be bad for public transit — and the climate.

For years, ride-hailing companies have claimed their services will be a net-positive for energy use, traffic congestion, and urban planning. But research over the last year has suggested otherwise. Uber and Lyft pull riders away from public transit – rather than just away from their personal cars – and according to the same study, all those extra vehicles are choking up city streets.

In New York City subway ridership has fallen for the second year in a row, and transit authorities are blaming the rise of Uber and Lyft. And, given the new study, it could mean that it’s higher income transit riders that are increasingly avoiding mass transit.

The danger of this trend is that the most affluent city residents won’t see any reason to invest in — and vote for — big transit projects, which are essential to lowering transport emissions and creating more livable cities. “If the affluent voter or the swing voter is not taking the bus anyway, it’s really easy for people to just say: ‘Oh, we can just take Uber and forget about any kind of public transport,’” says Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who researches transportation. Meanwhile, low-income residents who depend most on mass transit could be left behind.

Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers-funded conservative lobbying group, has used ride-hailing to attack public transit projects around the country. Organizers often use Uber, Lyft, and autonomous vehicles as examples of the future of public transit, ignoring the fact that these services will be out of reach for many low-income residents.

“If you’re wealthier and your subway doesn’t work [well], it’s not as much of a burden to take an Uber instead. But if you’re less wealthy and trying to get to work, you could easily lose half a day’s pay trying to find a different way of getting around,” Gelinas says.

And right now, no one using ride-hailing services is paying full price. “TNCs [transportation network companies] are at the moment still pretty heavily subsidized by venture capital,” says Carter Rubin, mobility and climate advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “These companies don’t make money, so everyone is getting a nice discount.”

For the time being, that means that Uber and Lyft are more accessible to low-income residents than they would be otherwise — but it also means that prices could shift at any time.

In some ways, Uber and Lyft have been a boon to low-income and minority communities. A recent study shows that their cars service areas that taxis have traditionally avoided, and that people of color face less discrimination when hailing a Lyft or Uber than a taxi.

But it’s worrisome that what some view as the transportation method of the future is, at the moment, mostly accessible to the ultra-rich among us.

And ride-sharing can’t save us from climate change: only high-density public transit can. As Rubin tells Grist: “The idea that TNCs and autonomous vehicles will get us out of our transit problems — it just doesn’t square with the geometric realities of our climate goals.”

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Uber and Lyft passengers are ultra-wealthy. Will this keep cities from investing in transit?

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People of color and low-income residents still haven’t gotten the help they need after Hurricane Harvey.

A new report by Kaiser Family Foundation and the Episcopal Health Foundation found economic and health disparities among those affected by Harvey.

Sixty-six percent of black residents surveyed said they are not getting the help they need to recover, compared to half of all hurricane survivors. While 34 percent of white residents said their FEMA applications had been approved, just 13 percent of black residents said the same.

And even though they are receiving less assistance, black and Hispanic respondents and those with lower incomes were more likely to have experienced property damage or loss of income as a result of the storm.

Additionally, 1 in 6 people reported that someone in their household has a health condition that is new or made worse because of Harvey. Lower-income adults and people of color who survived the storm were more likely to lack health insurance and to say they don’t know where to go for medical care.

“This survey gives an important voice to hard-hit communities that may have been forgotten, especially those with the greatest needs and fewest resources following the storm,” Elena Marks, president and CEO of the Episcopal Health Foundation, said in a statement.

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People of color and low-income residents still haven’t gotten the help they need after Hurricane Harvey.

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Inmates are risking their lives to fight California’s raging fires.

A new report by Kaiser Family Foundation and the Episcopal Health Foundation found economic and health disparities among those affected by Harvey.

Sixty-six percent of black residents surveyed said they are not getting the help they need to recover, compared to half of all hurricane survivors. While 34 percent of white residents said their FEMA applications had been approved, just 13 percent of black residents said the same.

And even though they are receiving less assistance, black and Hispanic respondents and those with lower incomes were more likely to have experienced property damage or loss of income as a result of the storm.

Additionally, 1 in 6 people reported that someone in their household has a health condition that is new or made worse because of Harvey. Lower-income adults and people of color who survived the storm were more likely to lack health insurance and to say they don’t know where to go for medical care.

“This survey gives an important voice to hard-hit communities that may have been forgotten, especially those with the greatest needs and fewest resources following the storm,” Elena Marks, president and CEO of the Episcopal Health Foundation, said in a statement.

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Inmates are risking their lives to fight California’s raging fires.

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A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee finally got to grill Scott Pruitt on Thursday.

A new report by Kaiser Family Foundation and the Episcopal Health Foundation found economic and health disparities among those affected by Harvey.

Sixty-six percent of black residents surveyed said they are not getting the help they need to recover, compared to half of all hurricane survivors. While 34 percent of white residents said their FEMA applications had been approved, just 13 percent of black residents said the same.

And even though they are receiving less assistance, black and Hispanic respondents and those with lower incomes were more likely to have experienced property damage or loss of income as a result of the storm.

Additionally, 1 in 6 people reported that someone in their household has a health condition that is new or made worse because of Harvey. Lower-income adults and people of color who survived the storm were more likely to lack health insurance and to say they don’t know where to go for medical care.

“This survey gives an important voice to hard-hit communities that may have been forgotten, especially those with the greatest needs and fewest resources following the storm,” Elena Marks, president and CEO of the Episcopal Health Foundation, said in a statement.

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A House Energy and Commerce subcommittee finally got to grill Scott Pruitt on Thursday.

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Trump Released This Letter to Prove He Has No Russian Ties. We Annotated It.

Mother Jones

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The White House on Friday released a one-page letter from Trump’s private tax attorney, Sheri Dillon, that was intended to debunk the notion that President Trump has any Russian business dealings or sources of income. Dillon is the same lawyer who vowed at a January 11 press conference that Trump would meaningfully separate himself from the Trump Organization—something that never happened. No surprise: Dillon’s new letter is hardly worth the paper it’s printed on, raising as many questions about Trump’s business activities as it answers.

So, we marked up the letter with some questions and observations of our own.

Click here for a larger version.

Annotations by Andy Kroll.

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Trump Released This Letter to Prove He Has No Russian Ties. We Annotated It.

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So How Are Millennial Men Doing?

Mother Jones

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James Pethokoukis has a pair of posts up today that reignite a longstanding question: What’s the right way to measure inflation? And what does that mean about earnings and income mobility over time?

These are both complicated questions, but we can start with a very simple chart. If we want to compare, say, 30-year-old men to their fathers, and their fathers to their fathers, we can do it pretty easily. The Census Bureau collects data on median cash earnings (i.e., not counting health care, employment perks, or government benefits) and then all we have to do is adjust for inflation. But which measure of inflation?

The CPI story is grim: In the previous generation, young men earned about 8 percent more than their fathers. That’s not great, but it’s better than nothing. However, in this generation, millennial men earn 10 percent less than their fathers.

The PCE story is different. In the previous generation, young men earned 22 percent more than their fathers. That’s pretty good. In the current generation, millennial men earn about the same amount as their fathers. Stagnation like that is bad news, but at least millennials aren’t literally losing ground.

So which should we believe? There are arguments for both, and it’s a political hot potato too since inflation measures show up in all sorts of benefit calculations. It would be nice if the economic community could thrash out agreement on an overall best measure, and then make it available as a standard series going back 70 years, but if it turns out that the new measure leads to (for example) lower cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security benefits, you can expect a massive pushback. Republicans have shown a particularly aggressive form of this kind of political hackery in the past, approving of new inflation measures that would decrease benefits, but opposing the same measures if they meant that people might pay higher taxes.

All that conceded, we really should be able to agree on a good, general-purpose inflation measure. We can still have lots of different measures for specialized purposes, but the headline inflation rate should be something that, say, 90 percent of economists can agree about. (There will always be a few outliers.)

In a way, though, this doesn’t matter too much for the question of how millennial men are doing. On one measure, their market earnings have dropped from 124 percent of per-capita GDP to 72 percent. On the other measure they’ve dropped from 108 percent to 72 percent. That’s pretty grim either way.

For more on this, Pethokoukis points us, first, to a new study by Bruce Sacerdote, which suggests that consumption has increased substantially over the past several decades, once you adjust for inflation bias and include the growth of government benefits. On a less happy note, he also points us to a study by Scott Winship about income mobility. Winship concludes that although there’s still a fair amount of income mobility within the broad middle class, there’s very little at either end. Poor kids stay poor, and rich kids stay rich.

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So How Are Millennial Men Doing?

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New Plan to Crush ISIS Surprisingly Similar to Old Plan

Mother Jones

Yesterday a reader asked me what was happening with the new plan to annihilate ISIS, which was supposed to be ready to go at the end of February. It’s done, I told him, but it hasn’t been released yet. He wrote back, asking how I knew stuff like this. I told him my secret source: I think I read about it in the New York Times.

All well and good, but what’s in the plan? My secret source this time is NBC News:

Now, the Pentagon has given Trump a secret plan, but it turns out to be a little more than an “intensification” of the same slow and steady approach that Trump derided under the Obama administration, two senior officials who have reviewed the document told NBC News.

The plan calls for continued bombing; beefing up support and assistance to local forces to retake its Iraqi stronghold Mosul and ultimately the ISIS capital of Raqqa in Syria; drying up ISIS’s sources of income; and stabilizing the areas retaken from ISIS, the officials say.

Gee, I thought we were supposed to be bombing the shit out of ISIS and taking Iraq’s oil, but apparently that plan got lost somewhere between Election Day and now. Or did it? After all, there’s no chance that President Trump is going to announce this new plan as an “intensification.” He’s going to go on TV and claim that it’s the biggest military operation since D-Day. It makes Rolling Thunder look like kids with popguns. It’s more strategically brilliant than the Inchon landing. And it will be a more famous victory than even the Gipper’s invasion of Granada.

When you hear all this stuff, just remember that it’s Trump’s usual “truthful hyperbole.” In reality, the new operation is just going to be a modest uptick in the tempo of the Obama plan that’s been gradually and steadily making progress for the past two years.

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New Plan to Crush ISIS Surprisingly Similar to Old Plan

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Republicans Unveil Their Health Care Plan. It’s a Bloodbath.

Mother Jones

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Republicans have finally released their shiny new health care plan. It’s pretty much the same as the discussion draft that leaked a couple of weeks ago, and includes the following basic features:

Subsidies (in the form of advanceable tax credits) are age-based, starting at $2,000 for young people and going up to $4,000 for older folks.
The subsidies begin to phase out above incomes of $75,000 ($150,000 for households). This will affect about 10 percent of the population and probably reduces the cost of the bill by about 5 percent.
Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion is frozen in 2020 and then gradually phased out.
The bill allocates about $10 billion per year for high-risk pools run by states. This is far too little to work effectively.
The tax meant to pay for everything was removed.
Insurers are required to cover everyone who applies, even if they have pre-existing conditions. However, if you have a coverage gap longer than two months, insurers can impose a premium surcharge of 30 percent for one year. This “continuous coverage” provision is designed to motivate people to buy insurance, since the bill repeals the individual mandate.
The funding formula for Medicaid is changed to a “per-capita allotment,” which is a fancy way of saying it gets cut.
All the Obamacare taxes on the rich are repealed.

Oh, and the bill includes a one-year ban on funding for Planned Parenthood. Conservatives love this, but it’s also likely to generate some sure no votes in the Senate. Remember that Republicans can only afford two defections in the Senate. Any more than that and their bill fails.

Needless to say, there’s not yet an analysis from the Congressional Budget Office about how much the GOP plan will cost or how many people it will cover. It’s safe to say that on the cost side, it will be a lot cheaper than Obamacare. In fact, since the tax credits are so stingy, it’s likely that very few people in the bottom third of the income spectrum will use them. They leave insurance too expensive for most poor people to afford.

Because of this, my horseback guess is that the Republican plan will be used by about 3 million people, compared to 10 million for Obamacare. The Medicaid expansion will be unchanged for a while, continuing to cover about 10 million people. Total cost for subsidies + high-risk pools + Medicaid expansion will run about $25 billion per year, compared to $100 billion for Obamacare.

Three million is far too small a pool for any kind of successful program, and the pre-existing conditions clause ensures that the pool will be not just small, but very, very heavily weighted toward the very sick. It’s a disaster for insurance companies, who will almost surely refuse to participate.

That’s my guess, anyway. It’s a bloodbath. More detailed analysis from think tankers will be available soon, and the CBO will weigh in eventually too. It’s not going to be pretty.

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Republicans Unveil Their Health Care Plan. It’s a Bloodbath.

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Ivanka Trump Meets With Congress to Pretend That Her Father Cares About Children

Mother Jones

Bloomberg reports on Ivanka Trump’s first foray into policymaking:

Members of the House and Senate met with the president’s eldest daughter in the Roosevelt Room at the White House last week to discuss her proposed child care tax benefit, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting….It’s not clear whether Ivanka Trump is finding much appetite on Capitol Hill for her proposal. A deduction for child care expenses is both costly and regressive because it would favor wealthier families with two working parents. The deduction would cost the federal government $500 billion in revenue over a decade, according to an estimate by the Tax Foundation, a politically conservative, nonprofit research group.

Let’s see. It would cost $500 billion and fund a touchy-feely welfare program. On the bright side, it would benefit wealthy families more than the poor. Decisions, decisions….

As for the regressiveness, here’s a quick stylized example for a plan that allows, say, a deduction of up to $5,000 for child care expenses:

Income of $500,000, tax bracket = 39.6 percent, total value of deduction = $1,980
Income of $70,000, tax bracket = 15 percent, total value of deduction = $750
Income of $25,000, tax bracket doesn’t matter because you’re not paying any income taxes, total value of deduction = $0.

Everybody in the world with even a passing knowledge of tax policy is well aware of all this. Tax deductions are next to useless for the working and middle classes. That’s why anyone who actually wants to help the non-rich proposes tax credits with a fairly low income cap.

In other words, this is typical Trump. Launch Ivanka onto Capitol Hill with a high-profile proposal and get plenty of good PR for it. But the proposal itself does little for the working class, and Congress won’t pass it anyway. I think I should start keeping a list of Trump proposals that fit this model.

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Ivanka Trump Meets With Congress to Pretend That Her Father Cares About Children

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Don’t Blame Oroville on Environmentalists

Mother Jones

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Victor Davis Hanson is a native Californian who hates California because it’s become too brown and too liberal. Today he takes to the LA Times to use the Oroville Dam disaster as a way of riding all his usual hobbyhorses:

The poor condition of the dam is almost too good a metaphor for the condition of the state as a whole; its possible failure is a reflection of California’s civic decline.

….The dam was part of the larger work of a brilliant earlier generation of California planners and lawmakers….The water projects created cheap and clean hydroelectric power…ensured that empty desert acreage on California’s dry west side of the Central Valley could be irrigated…spectacular growth in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles Basin.

….Yet the California Water Project and federal Central Valley Project have been comatose for a half-century….Necessary improvements to Oroville Dam, like reinforced concrete spillways, were never finished….A new generation of Californians — without much memory of floods or what unirrigated California was like before its aqueducts — had the luxury to envision the state’s existing water projects in a radically new light: as environmental errors….Indeed, pressures mounted to tear down rather than build dams. The state — whose basket of income, sales and gas taxes is among the highest in the country — gradually shifted its priorities from the building and expansion of dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, bridges and highways to redistributionist social welfare programs, state employee pensions and an enormous penal archipelago.

LOL. The reason the Oroville Dam wasn’t upgraded ten years ago is because all those salt-of-the-earth farmers that Davis admires didn’t want to pay for the upgrades via higher water rates. Here’s the San Jose Mercury News:

Environmentalists noted Friday that they had tried in 2005 to persuade the federal government to require the state to cover the emergency spillway with concrete. But the agency that was relicensing the dam, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, declined after opposition from the state Department of Water Resources and the State Water Contractors, a group of 27 water agencies who were concerned about the cost.

Hanson should have listened to his initial instincts: the Oroville Dam is too good a metaphor for the condition of the state as a whole:

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Don’t Blame Oroville on Environmentalists

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