Tag Archives: income

10 Things Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Protection Agency Has Done For You

by BraydenUqe Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the watchdog agency conceived of and established by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in the wake of the financial crisis, had a hard time getting on its feet. The GOP tried everything it could to hobble the bureau, but to no avail. Over the past couple of years, the CFPB has issued dozens of protections shielding consumers from shady practices by mortgage lenders, student loan servicers, and credit card companies. Here are ten things the CFPB, which was created in 2011, has done to protect the little guy:

1. Mortgage lenders can no longer push you into a high-priced loan: Until recently, lenders were allowed to direct borrowers toward high-interest loans, which are more profitable for lenders, even if they qualified for a lower-cost mortgage—a practice that helped lead to the financial crisis. In early 2013, the CFPB issued a rule that effectively ends this conflict of interest.

2. New homeowners are less likely to be hit by foreclosure: In the lead-up to the financial crisis, lenders also sold Americans “no doc” mortgages that didn’t require borrowers to provide proof of income, assets, or employment. Last May, the bureau clamped down on this type of irresponsible lending, forcing mortgage lenders to verify borrowers’ ability to repay.

3. If you are are delinquent on your mortgage payments, loan servicers have to try harder to help you avoid foreclosure: During the housing crisis, loan servicers—companies that collect payments from borrowers—were permitted to simultaneously offer a delinquent borrower options to avoid foreclosure while moving to complete that foreclosure. New CFPB rules force servicers to make a good faith effort to keep you out of foreclosure. That’s not all: Loan servicers will now face civil penalties if they don’t provide live customer service, maintain accurate mortgage records, and promptly inform borrowers whose loan modification applications are incomplete.

4. Millions of Americans get a low-cost home loan counselor: In Jan 2013, the CFPB required the vast majority of mortgage lenders to provide applicants with a list of free or low-cost housing counselors who can inform borrowers if they’re being ripped off.

5. Borrowers with high-cost mortgages get an outside eye: Lenders who sell mortgages with high interest rates are now required to have an outside appraiser determine the worth of the house for the borrower. If a borrower is going to be paying sky-high prices for a fixer-upper, at least she’ll know it beforehand.

6. Fly-by-night financial players will be held accountable: Part of the CFPB’s mandate is to oversee debt collectors, payday lenders, and other under–regulated financial institutions that profit off low-income Americans. The bureau is preparing new restrictions on debt collectors, and considering new regs on payday loan industry. In the meantime, the bureau is cracking down on bad actors individually.

7. Folks scammed by credit card companies get refunds: In October 2012, the CFPB ordered three American Express subsidiaries to pay 250,000 customers $85 billion for illegal practices including misleading credit card offerings, age discrimination, and excessive late fees. This past September, the CFPB ordered JPMorgan Chase to refund $309 million to more than 2.1 million Americans for charging them for identity theft and fraud monitoring services they didn’t ask for.

8. Student lenders face scrutiny: The CFPB oversees private student loan servicing at big banks to ensure compliance with fair lending laws. In December, the agency announced that it will also start supervising non-bank student loan servicers, which are companies that manage borrowers’ accounts. Many of these servicers have been accused of levying unfair penalty fees and making it hard for borrowers to negotiate an affordable repayment plan.

9. Service members get extra protection: In June, the CFPB ordered US Bank and its non-bank partner Dealers’ Financial Services to refund $6.5 million to service members for failing to disclose fees associated with a military auto loan program. In November, the CFPB ordered the payday lender Cash America to pay up to $14 million for illegally overcharging members of the military.

10. Consumers get a help center: If your bank or lender does anything you think is unfair, the bureau has a division dedicated to fielding consumer complaints. The agency promises to work with companies to try to fix consumers’ problems.

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10 Things Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Protection Agency Has Done For You

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Can You Ever Have Too Many Choco Pies?

by JulioSteiner Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points today to a story from a few months back about cuts in benefits to workers at North Korea’s Kaesong Industrial Complex:

Due to financial difficulties at Kaesong caused by the complex’s five-month halt in operations…the number of Choco Pies distributed will be reduced and North Korean workers — known to resell Choco Pies on the black market for a considerable profit — will have a major source of income cut.

Before the closure of the complex, those working in chemical and heat treatment factories would receive five to 10 Choco Pies a day and those working night shifts would receive up to 20. Choco Pies would then be resold on the black market for 500 to 600 North Korean won each. However with the new regulations restricting each worker to $0.20 worth of snacks a day, the workers will receive a maximum of two Choco Pies.

Choco Pies. Can anyone explain Choco Pies to me?1 Here in Irvine we have lots of Asian supermarkets, and every one of them features enormous floor stacks of Choco Pies. Not just during certain holidays, and not just during special promotions. All the supermarkets. All the time. And judging from the selection of other sweets in these stores, Choco Pies must account for upwards of half of their sweet sales.

There’s no American equivalent I can think of. It would be as if every supermarket greeted its customers with a gigantic display of, say, Snickers bars, which accounted for 50 percent of all candy bar sales.

I bought a box of Choco Pies once. They were OK, but it was hard to see anything special about them. So what’s up? Is this just one of those particular cultural things for which there’s no real explanation? Or is there some fascinating historical reason for the immense popularity of Choco Pies among Koreans? Anyone know?

1Not among North Koreans, of course. That’s just a hook for this post. Their black market value in a place like North Korea is pretty obvious.

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Can You Ever Have Too Many Choco Pies?

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Here’s How to Tell if Marco Rubio is Serious About Fighting Poverty

by DelmarMonahan Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wrote briefly about Marco Rubio’s poverty reform proposal, and I was….unenthusiastic. I don’t believe that Rubio is really serious; I don’t believe Republicans will follow his lead even if he is; and I imagine that once Rubio provides us with details, his proposal will turn out to be little more than a plan to cut spending on the poor.

Jared Bernstein followed up last night with a bit more on those pesky details. For example, Rubio proposes that we should get rid of most federal anti-poverty programs and simply give the money to the states, where they can experiment with different approaches. But there’s a problem with block grants like this:

“Revenue neutrality” may sound technical and inoffensive, if not fiscally sound, but what it really means is the safety net will be unable to expand in recessions. Let’s see the details, but typically under these arrangements, states will be unable to tap the Feds for unemployment benefits, nutritional assistance, and all the other functions that must expand to meet need when the market fails. This would be a huge step backwards, essentially enshrining poverty-inducing austerity in place of literally decades of policy advancements to meet demand contractions with temporary spending expansions.

The chart on the right shows what Bernstein is talking about. The blue line shows TANF, the basic welfare program that was block-granted as part of the mid-90s welfare reform. During the Great Recession, spending on TANF didn’t budge. Conversely, both SNAP (food stamps) and unemployment insurance rose during the recession, as they should have. Will Rubio’s plan include automatic stabilizers based on eligibility requirements? Or will it strangle safety net programs by not allowing them to grow when the economy is bad? We’ll have to wait and see.

Rubio also wants to replace the EITC with wage subsidies. I’ve pointed out before that the experience of other countries that have tried this is decidedly inconclusive, so it’s something to be cautious about. Still, if it’s done right it has the potential to be an effective program. However, Bernstein is worried about Rubio’s apparent proposal to change the program to be more generous to married couples:

What Sen. Rubio appears to be up to here is targeting the so-called marriage penalty—the idea that since EITC eligibility is based on family income, combining incomes through marriage can lead formerly eligible workers to lose eligibility.

But it sounds to me like he’s losing the income targeting of the program and will end up shifting current EITC spending away from single parents with kids to married couples with kids (along with childless adults, who get little—too little—from the EITC). Given that kids in single parent families are already more likely to be poor than those in married families, the only way this idea could not increase child poverty would be if he spent considerably more on it than is being expended on the EITC. And that’s not likely what he’s got in mind.

This would fit with Rubio’s belief that government programs should encourage marriage, a popular notion in conservative circles. Now, it so happens that I think we should encourage marriage. In fact, I wish this were a more popular notion among the educated liberal class, which pretty clearly thinks marriage is a great thing but is often skittish about “imposing” its values on others. I say: be less skittish! Nobody wants to lock others into bad or abusive marriages, but generally speaking, marriage has a ton of benefits: for the couple itself, for their children, and for society. I’m all for it.

That said, I’m pretty skeptical that the government should be in the business of encouraging or discouraging marriage, and I’m even more skeptical that offering a few more or a few less dollars in welfare programs is likely to have any effect anyway. So I share Bernstein’s concerns. However, there’s no special reason to think the status quo is ideal in this regard, so if Rubio’s proposal ends up shifting spending a bit, I’m happy to evaluate it on the merits.

Still, the devil is really in the details here. EITC is a program with a lot of history behind it, and we know that it works pretty well. Wage subsidies show some promise, but they’re untested and extremely sensitive to program design. We’ll know how serious Rubio is about this stuff based on how much thought he ends up putting into his final proposal. I’ll be waiting.

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Here’s How to Tell if Marco Rubio is Serious About Fighting Poverty

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Being Smart Isn’t Always Enough to Make it in America

by c7u433n Posted on December 12, 2013

Mother Jones

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Via James Pethokoukis, here’s an interesting tidbit of income mobility data from a new Brookings report. The chart below is a little tricky to read, but basically it shows how likely you are to make more money than your parents. You’d naturally expect smart kids to do better than dimmer kids, so it tracks that too.

Take a look at the green column on the far left. It’s for kids who grow up in the very poorest families. If you have high cognitive ability, you have a 24 percent chance of becoming a high earner as an adult. That’s not too bad.

But if you come from a high-income family, you have a 45 percent chance of becoming a high earner as an adult. Same smarts, different outcome.

No society will ever get this perfect. Still, there’s a huge difference between 24 percent and 45 percent. Better schools, more extracurricular opportunities, different skin color, bigger networks of connected friends, higher odds of going to college, and the simple ability to get in the door all give richer kids a huge leg up that poor kids don’t have. We obviously have a ways to go before everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed in America.

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Being Smart Isn’t Always Enough to Make it in America

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Obamacare Will Prevent Millions of People From Being Gouged by Hospitals

by AngelikaSantacr Posted on December 8, 2013

Mother Jones

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When President Obama said that if you like your health insurance, you can keep it, he was clearly taking some liberties with the strict truth.1But as Ezra Klein points out this weekend, the reason he pressed this point so hard is that Americans have an understandable fear of losing their health insurance. And why not? You can lose it if you lose your job. Or if you lose access to Medicaid. Or if your insurance company decides to effectively eliminate your plan by jacking up its price. And that’s not even counting the millions of people who don’t have health coverage in the first place.

So, yes, it’s true that Obama was wrong when he guaranteed that every single person could keep their current plan if they wanted to:

What Obamacare comes pretty close to guaranteeing, though, is that everyone who needs health insurance, or who wants health insurance, can get it.

It guarantees that if you lose the plan you liked — perhaps because you were fired from your job, or because you left your job to start a new business, or because your income made you ineligible for Medicaid — you’ll have a choice of new plans you can purchase, you’ll know that no insurer can turn you away, and you’ll be able to get financial help if you need it. In states that accept the Medicaid expansion, it guarantees that anyone who makes less than 133 percent of poverty can get fully subsidized insurance.

Health insurance isn’t such a fraught topic in countries such as Canada and France because people don’t live in constant fear of losing their ability to get routine medical care. A decade from now, that will be true in the U.S., too. But it’s not true yet, and paradoxically, that’s one reason health reform is so difficult. The status quo has left people rightly fearful, and when people are afraid, change is even scarier.

Yep. I want to add one more point to this that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves: Hospitals routinely charge uninsured patients rates that are 3-4x higher than those paid by insured patients. A heart attack that gets billed—profitably!—to Blue Cross at $50,000, can end up costing you $200,000 if you’re unlucky enough to suffer that heart attack while you’re uninsured. Think about that: for decades, the health care industry has deliberately taken ruthless advantage of the very people who are the weakest and most vulnerable—those who are poor or unemployed—and seems to think that this is a perfectly decent and moral way to conduct business.

It’s not. It’s shameless and obscene. It’s like kicking a beggar and stealing his coat just because you know the cops will never do anything about it.

This is something that Obamacare goes a long way toward fixing. If you’re covered by private insurance through an exchange, you’re not just protected against catastrophic illness. You’re also protected against being charged outrageous rates for non-catastrophic problems—broken legs, asthma attacks, etc.—just because hospitals have the brute power to do so.

Because of Obamacare, you no longer have to fear being shut out of the insurance market. But that’s not all. You no longer have to fear being gouged and possibly bankrupted because you’ve been shut out of the insurance market. Access to reasonable rates2 is one of the key benefits that Obamacare delivers to millions, and it deserves more attention.

1Though, let’s be honest, not that big a liberty. The vast, vast majority of people will see little or no change in their coverage thanks to Obamacare, and of the ones who will, most will be able to buy similar or better coverage at a lower price. The problem of rate shock isn’t an invented one, but it is a much exaggerated one.

2Reasonable by American standards, anyway.

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Obamacare Will Prevent Millions of People From Being Gouged by Hospitals

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Charts: Why Fast-Food Workers Are Going on Strike

by u60uurf Posted on December 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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This Thursday, fast-food workers in more than 100 cities are planning a one-day strike to demand a “livable” wage of $15 an hour. They have a point: The lowest-paid Americans are struggling to keep up with the cost of living—and they have seen none of the gains experienced by the country’s top earners. While average incomes of the top 1 percent grew more than 270 percent since 1960, those of the bottom 90 percent grew 22 percent. And the real value of the minimum wage barely budged, increasing a total of 7 percent over those decades.

More of the numbers behind the strike and the renewed calls to raise the minimum wage:

Median hourly wage for fast-food workers nationwide:
$8.94/hour

Increase in real median wages for food service workers since 1999:
$0.10/hour

Last time the federal minimum wage exceeded $8.94/hour (in 2012 dollars):
1968

Change in the real value of the minimum wage since 1968:
-22%

Median age of fast-food workers:
29

Median age of female fast-food workers:
32

Percentage of fast-food workers who are women:
65%

Percentage of fast-food workers older than 20 who have kids:
36%

Income of someone earning $8.94/hour:
$18,595/year

Federal poverty line for a family of three:
$17,916/year

Income of someone earning $15/hour:
$31,200/year

Income needed for a “secure yet modest” living for a family with two adults and one child…
In the New York City area: $77,378/year
In rural Mississippi: $47,154/year

Growth in average real income of the top 1 percent since 1960:
271%

What the current minimum wage would be if it had grown at the same rate as top incomes:
More than $25

How would you and your family fare on a typical fast-food paycheck? How much does it really take to make ends meet in your city or state? Use this calculator to get a better sense of what fast-food workers are up against.

How many people are in your household? One Adult No Children
One Adult One Child
One Adult Two Children
One Adult Three Children
Two Adults No Children
Two Adults One Child
Two Adults Two Children
Two Adults Three ChildrenWhich state do you live in? Which area do you live in? (Area data not available for households without children.)How much do you make in a year? $

In order to make $___ a year, the typical fast-food worker has to work __ hours a week.

A household like yours in ___, ___ needs to earn $__ annually to make a secure yet modest living. A fast-food worker working full time would have to earn $__ an hour to make that much.

The average fast-food employee works less than 25 hours a week. To make a living wage in ___, ___ at current median wages, s/he would have to work __ hours a week.

In __ hours, McDonald’s serves __ customers and makes $__. That’s about __ Big Macs.

var median_fast_food_worker_wage = 8.94; // Source: National Employment Law Project, July 2013; http://nelp.3cdn.net/84a67b124db45841d4_o0m6bq42h.pdf
var work_weeks_per_year = 52;
var months_per_year = 12;
var average_fast_food_worker_hours_per_week = 24.4;
var average_weeks_in_a_month = 4.348;
var hours_worked_at_full_time = 40;

var days_in_2012 = 366; //leap year
var McDonalds_customers_per_day_in_2012 = 69000000; // Source: McDonalds 2012 Annual Report
var hours_in_day = 24;
var mcD_systemwide_restaurants = 34480;
var mcD_served_per_hour = McDonalds_customers_per_day_in_2012 / hours_in_day;

var mcD_earnings_in_2012 = 27567000000; // Source: McDonalds 2012 Annual Report http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/content/dam/AboutMcDonalds/Investors/Investor%202013/2012%20Annual%20Report%20Final.pdf
var mcD_earned_per_hour = Math.round(mcD_earnings_in_2012 / days_in_2012 / hours_in_day);

var cost_of_big_mac = 4;

var first_state = ‘AK’;
var first_locale = ‘Anchorage, AK HUD Metro FMR Area’;
var state_abbr =
‘AL’ : ‘Alabama’,
‘AK’ : ‘Alaska’,
‘AS’ : ‘America Samoa’,
‘AZ’ : ‘Arizona’,
‘AR’ : ‘Arkansas’,
‘CA’ : ‘California’,
‘CO’ : ‘Colorado’,
‘CT’ : ‘Connecticut’,
‘DE’ : ‘Delaware’,
‘DC’ : ‘District of Columbia’,
‘FM’ : ‘Micronesia1’,
‘FL’ : ‘Florida’,
‘GA’ : ‘Georgia’,
‘GU’ : ‘Guam’,
‘HI’ : ‘Hawaii’,
‘ID’ : ‘Idaho’,
‘IL’ : ‘Illinois’,
‘IN’ : ‘Indiana’,
‘IA’ : ‘Iowa’,
‘KS’ : ‘Kansas’,
‘KY’ : ‘Kentucky’,
‘LA’ : ‘Louisiana’,
‘ME’ : ‘Maine’,
‘MH’ : ‘Islands1’,
‘MD’ : ‘Maryland’,
‘MA’ : ‘Massachusetts’,
‘MI’ : ‘Michigan’,
‘MN’ : ‘Minnesota’,
‘MS’ : ‘Mississippi’,
‘MO’ : ‘Missouri’,
‘MT’ : ‘Montana’,
‘NE’ : ‘Nebraska’,
‘NV’ : ‘Nevada’,
‘NH’ : ‘New Hampshire’,
‘NJ’ : ‘New Jersey’,
‘NM’ : ‘New Mexico’,
‘NY’ : ‘New York’,
‘NC’ : ‘North Carolina’,
‘ND’ : ‘North Dakota’,
‘OH’ : ‘Ohio’,
‘OK’ : ‘Oklahoma’,
‘OR’ : ‘Oregon’,
‘PW’ : ‘Palau’,
‘PA’ : ‘Pennsylvania’,
‘PR’ : ‘Puerto Rico’,
‘RI’ : ‘Rhode Island’,
‘SC’ : ‘South Carolina’,
‘SD’ : ‘South Dakota’,
‘TN’ : ‘Tennessee’,
‘TX’ : ‘Texas’,
‘UT’ : ‘Utah’,
‘VT’ : ‘Vermont’,
‘VI’ : ‘Virgin Island’,
‘VA’ : ‘Virginia’,
‘WA’ : ‘Washington’,
‘WV’ : ‘West Virginia’,
‘WI’ : ‘Wisconsin’,
‘WY’ : ‘Wyoming’

var selected_state = jQuery(“#selected_state”);
var selected_locale = jQuery(“#selected_locale”);
var selected_household = jQuery(“#selected_household”);

for (var state in bfjo)
var option = jQuery(” + state_abbrstate + ”);
selected_state.append(option);

var fill_locale_selector = function(state_object)

selected_locale.html(“”);

for (var locale in state_object)
var option = jQuery(” + locale.replace(/,.*$/, ”) + ”);
selected_locale.append(option);

}

fill_locale_selector(bfjofirst_state)

selected_state.bind(“change”,
function()
var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var state_object = bfjostate;

fill_locale_selector(state_object);

)

/*
var fill_household_selector = function(locale_object)
var selected_household = jQuery(“#selected_household”);

selected_household.html(“”);

for (var household in locale_object)
var option = jQuery(” + household + ”);
selected_household.append(option);

}

fill_household_selector(bfjofirst_statefirst_locale)
*/

selected_locale.bind(“change”,
function()
var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var locale = $(“#selected_locale option:selected”).val();
var locale_object = bfjostatelocale;

//fill_household_selector(locale_object);

)

enable_disable_locale = function()
var household = $(“#selected_household option:selected”).val();
if (household === ‘1P0C’ else
selected_locale.attr(‘disabled’, ”);

}
selected_household.bind(“change”,
function()
enable_disable_locale();

);
enable_disable_locale();

jQuery(“#calculate_this”).bind(“submit”,
function()

var state = $(“#selected_state option:selected”).val();
var locale = $(“#selected_locale option:selected”).val();
var household = $(“#selected_household option:selected”).val();
var salary = parseInt($(“#input_salary”).val());

var annual_living_wage = bfjostatelocalehousehold;
console.log(state);
console.log(locale);
console.log(household);
console.log(annual_living_wage);
var hourly_for_living = annual_living_wage / months_per_year
/ average_weeks_in_a_month / hours_worked_at_full_time;

var hours_to_live_per_month = annual_living_wage / months_per_year / median_fast_food_worker_wage;
var weeks_to_live_per_month = hours_to_live_per_month / hours_worked_at_full_time;

var salary_monthly = salary / months_per_year;
var hours_to_salary_monthly = salary_monthly / median_fast_food_worker_wage;
var weeks_to_salary_monthly = hours_to_salary_monthly / hours_worked_at_full_time;

var hours_living_a_week = hours_to_live_per_month / average_weeks_in_a_month;
var hours_salary_a_week = hours_to_salary_monthly / average_weeks_in_a_month;

var commify = function(number)
while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(number.toString()))
number = number.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);
}
return number;
}

var salary_string = commify(salary);
var yearly_living_wage_string = commify(annual_living_wage);
/*
while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(salary_string.toString()))
salary_string = salary_string.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);

while (/(d+)(d3)/.test(yearly_living_wage_string.toString()))
yearly_living_wage_string = yearly_living_wage_string.toString().replace(/(d+)(d3)/, ‘$1’+’,’+’$2′);

*/

jQuery(“#calculated”).show();
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_hours”).text(Math.round(hours_to_live_per_month));
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_state”).text(state_abbrstate);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_state2”).text(state_abbrstate);
if (household === “1P0C” || household === “2P0C”)
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale”).text(”);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale2″).text(”);
else
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale”).text(locale.replace(/,.*$/, ”) + ‘,’);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_locale2″).text(locale.replace(/,.*$/, ”) + ‘,’);

jQuery(“#salary”).text(salary_string);
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_time”).text(Math.round(hours_to_salary_monthly));

jQuery(“#living_hours_per_week”).text(Math.round(hours_living_a_week));
jQuery(“#living_hours_per_week2”).text(Math.round(hours_living_a_week));

jQuery(“#salary_hours_per_week”).text(Math.round(hours_salary_a_week));
jQuery(“#fast_food_calculator_living_wage_annual”).text(yearly_living_wage_string);

jQuery(“#mc_d_customers_served”).text(
commify(
Math.round(
Math.round(hours_living_a_week) * mcD_served_per_hour
)
)
);
jQuery(“#mc_d_money_earned”).text(
commify(Math.round(Math.round(hours_living_a_week) * mcD_earned_per_hour))
);

jQuery(“#big_mac_count”).text(
commify(
Math.round(
Math.round(hours_living_a_week)
* mcD_earned_per_hour
/ cost_of_big_mac
)
)
);

console.log(hourly_for_living);
var hourly_for_living_clean = Math.round(hourly_for_living * 100)
.toString().replace(/(d+)(d2)/, ‘$1’+’.’+’$2′);
jQuery(“#living_wage_hourly”).text(hourly_for_living_clean);

return false;

}

)

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Charts: Why Fast-Food Workers Are Going on Strike

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We Should Pay Less Attention to Seniors and More Attention to Workers

by neogrom Posted on November 25, 2013

Mother Jones

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Our story so far: a few days ago I wrote a post describing the Social Security Administration’s MINT forecast of retiree income. As the chart on the right shows, they project that retiree income will continue its steady rise, increasing from $20,000 in 1970 to $46,000 in 2041 (adjusted for inflation). Based on this, I questioned whether the much-talked-about “retirement crisis” was for real.

Dean Baker responded to my post, for which I’m grateful. He basically made five points:

  1. Social Security is a big part of the reason for rising retiree income. No argument there.
  2. Income replacement rates have declined from 95 percent for Depression-era workers to 84 percent for future retirees. This is true. However, as I explained on Friday, this is more because of sluggish income growth among workers than it is because retiree incomes are in any real trouble.
  3. 65-year-olds are living longer and are more likely to be working these days, which is part of the reason for strong incomes among seniors. Again, no argument there. But income is income, regardless of where it comes from. (It’s also worth noting that longer lifespans are primary a phenomenon of the well-off, not those with lower incomes.)
  4. Medicare premiums are increasing, which is an added expense for seniors.
  5. The MINT projections include imputed rent as part of income. In some cases this is fine, since living rent-free in a paid-off house does indeed have the same effect as cash income. In other cases, where retirees live in large houses with large imputed rents, it can give an inflated idea of how well off a retiree is.

The first three of these items don’t really change the picture. They’re just observations about the nature of the income that retirees are likely to have. Item #4 is relevant, but I think it’s cherry picking. Every age group has expenses that others don’t, and those expenses rise and fall differently. The only way to judge this fairly is to look at overall inflation rates for various age groups, and most efforts to do this have yielded only modest and ambiguous results. Finally, item #5 is a good point. It probably inflates the MINT projections modestly.

Overall, then, I don’t think this affects my point too much. If you revised the MINT projections to take into account CPI-E and made an adjustment for possible overestimates of imputed rent, the projected income line would probably go down a bit. But not very much. We’d still be looking at a world in which, relatively speaking, retirees are doing quite a bit better than current workers. In fact, their incomes are growing more strongly than pretty much any other age group.

This is why I’m not on board with calls to expand Social Security. Rhetoric and pretty charts aside, I simply don’t see any real evidence of a looming retirement crisis that urgently needs to be addressed, and I think focusing on it just distracts us from our real problem: sluggish wage growth among workers. And the funny thing is that Baker basically agrees:

Seniors income has been rising relative to the income of the typical working household because the typical working household is seeing their income redistributed to the Wall Street crew, CEOs, doctors and other members of the one percent….We can argue about whether young people or old people have a tougher time, but it’s clear that the division between winners and losers is not aged based, but rather class based.

That’s precisely right. I’m not willing to dismiss the relative problems of young and old quite as quickly—I think the young are being pretty badly screwed these days, and unlike seniors they have no one in Congress who really cares about them—but this is essentially a class problem, not an age problem. We should be doing everything possible to raise low and middle incomes regardless of age. If we do that, retirees will benefit, but so will everyone else.

This is obviously a lot harder than a simple crusade to expand Social Security. But the latter helps plenty of people who don’t really need it, while the former helps those who do. If part of helping those with low and middle incomes means changing Social Security payouts to reduce the future growth rates of high earners and increase the future growth rates of lower earners, that’s fine with me. But if I can borrow Baker’s headline, we need to keep our eye on the ball here. Let’s stop inventing crises that don’t really exist. If we want to move the Overton Window, let’s move it for the thing that really matters: the fact that the fruits of economic growth now accrue almost entirely to the rich, with the rest of us treading water at best. That’s the transcendent economic problem of the 21st century.

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We Should Pay Less Attention to Seniors and More Attention to Workers

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Walmart Ads Target "Low Income" Consumers With Junk Food

by LynnePilkington Posted on November 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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In 2011, Walmart pledged to offer healthier grocery options by reducing the sugar and sodium content of packaged foods, rolling out a “Great For You” food label, and making fresh fruits and vegetables more affordable. It has done that to an extent, but those are not typically the products that it markets to its “low income” shoppers.

A November 13 advertising circular specifically aimed at low income customers included discount coupons for a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, a 10-pack of Kool-Aid Jammers drinks, and a 9.5-ounce bag of Cheetos. Only 3 of the 36 discounted items in the ad were labeled “Great For You,” while 10 of them touted high-sugar, high-sodium, or high-fat junk foods. The ad did not include any coupons for fresh fruits or vegetables.

By contrast, coupons appearing at the same time in a separate, more broadly targeted “Grocery” advertising page included yellow onions, whole carrots, and Bartlett pears.

At some point after November 13, Walmart changed the name of its “Low Income” coupon page to “Stretch & Save.” Walmart did not respond to questions about why it changed the name and why its Stretch & Save customers don’t deserve healthier options.

Early this year, Michele Obama appeared at a Walmart store in Springfield, Missouri, to tout the retail giant’s move towards healthier offerings. “For years, the conventional wisdom said that healthy products just didn’t sell,” she said from a podium set up in the produce section. “Thanks to Walmart and other companies, we are proving the conventional wisdom wrong.”

But Walmart’s advertising strategy seems to suggest that the retail giant still isn’t willing to market fresh fruits and vegetables to the shopping demographic that most needs them. It’s hard to say why. Maybe Walmart has figured out that ads for Bartlett pears won’t get the poor through the doors. Or maybe its mediocre and low-margin produce just isn’t profitable enough.

Either way, one would hope Walmart, as a corporate citizen, could see value in marketing healthy foods to low-income shoppers, given that those shoppers are also its workers. Then again, controlling its employees’ healthcare costs typically hasn’t been a big part of Walmart’s business plan.

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Walmart Ads Target "Low Income" Consumers With Junk Food

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Smart people say food prices are falling — depends what you mean by ‘food’

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on March 11, 2013

Smart people say food prices are falling — depends what you mean by ‘food’

By Susie Cagle

Excellent infographicker Dorothy Gambrell recently broke down falling American food costs and some changing tastes for Bloomberg Business Week.

Bloomberg Business Week

Click to embiggen.

Beef prices and consumption are both way down, while fresh fruit prices decreased less than any other category. Overall, though, it looks like food is getting a lot cheaper! And that’s true, ish, but it’s not the whole picture.

Over the past century, food costs as a percentage of income have been dropping like overripe fruit that you forgot to pick off the tree. But those lower prices aren’t exactly adding up for the poor. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic finds that poor families are still spending the same percentage on food that they did 30 years ago, while middle-income and richer folks are paying significantly less.

Overall, the falling burden of food costs is good news for lower- and middle-class families. It means they can devote more money to things like health care and education and energy and homes, which are getting expensive faster than their wages are rising. But we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that those accelerating costs are putting pressure on poor families to spend less on food.

In other words, we can’t rule out that the lowest-income households only spend one-sixth of their money on food, not only because real food prices are falling, but also because they’re forced to consume less, as mortgages and gas prices eat into the budget.

As a part of those food costs, Thompson breaks down at-home and eating-out budgets. The poor spend more than twice as much eating at home than they do at restaurants, while the rich spend only slightly more on home-cooked meals. Thompson presumes this means the poor are eating at home way more often. That could be, but this analysis only takes into account dollars spent, not the number of meals those dollars bought. Folks making less money may be eating out, too — after all, fast food is cheap as hell.

And as Thompson himself points out, Americans are eating out far more than we used to. Here’s his graph comparing overall eat-at-home and eat-out trends over the last century, as a percentage of total meals eaten.

the Atlantic

How many of those meals might have been off the McDonald’s $1 menu? And how many of them might have been bought with food stamps? In some states, fast food restaurants are some of the only places people can buy hot prepared meals with food stamp benefits, making them extra palatable and convenient for the working poor.

At the Nation, Greg Kaufmann points to A Place at the Table, a new film which highlights the hungry plight of the poor and the assistance programs aimed at alleviating, but not solving, the problem.

In the last 30 years, America’s soup kitchen and food bank ranks have grown from 200 to 40,000 (assistance that isn’t taken into account when we talk about how much the poor spend on food). To blame, according to the filmmakers: Big Ag lobbyists and subsidies for corn and grain that leave pricier fresh produce out of poor hands. “Since 1980, costs for fruits and vegetables increased by roughly 40 percent leaving financially struggling families with little choice when it comes to cheapest calories at the local mini-mart,” writes Kaufmann.

But, but, that pretty graph said they were cheap now…

[B]eyond reforming the formidable lobby that prevents Congress from fixing kids’ nutrition in America, the film hints at what else is needed. At the end of the day, even if we’re funding healthy meals for all Americans and feeding our kids properly, we haven’t fixed the root problem of poverty. … [I]f working American families aren’t afforded a livable wage, then we will forever be reacting to hunger, not preventing it.

A lack of a farm bill has left the future of food benefits in limbo for months. Now cue the sequestration that’s set to make this all even worse. Our food may be getting cheaper, McDonald’s included, but we have a lot of work to do if we’re serious about getting good food to those millions of grumbling American bellies.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Smart people say food prices are falling — depends what you mean by ‘food’

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Americans spent 4 percent of household income on gas in 2012

by hanhuogekennog Posted on February 4, 2013

Americans spent 4 percent of household income on gas in 2012

By Philip Bump

In 2012, Chevron made $26.2 billion in profits. Exxon, $44.9 billion. Shell, $26.59 billion. At today’s prices, that’s enough to buy almost 25 billion gallons of gas in California.

Last year, Americans paid record-high average gas prices, a fact that is certainly linked to the oil companies’ massive profits.

How much did Americans spend on gas? From the U.S. Energy Information Administration:

Gasoline expenditures in 2012 for the average U.S. household reached $2,912, or just under 4% of income before taxes, according to EIA estimates. This was the highest estimated percentage of household income spent on gasoline in nearly three decades, with the exception of 2008, when the average household spent a similar amount. Although overall gasoline consumption has decreased in recent years, a rise in average gasoline prices has led to higher overall household gasoline expenditures.

EIA

Click to embiggen.

Four percent of household income went to gasoline in 2012. But here’s the kicker:

U.S. gasoline consumption fell in 2011 to 134.2 billion gallons, its lowest level since 2001. However, at the same time, EIA’s average city retail gasoline price rose 26.1% in 2011, and another 3.3% in 2012, when it reached $3.70 per gallon. The effect of the higher prices in 2011 and 2012 outweighed the effect of reduced consumption.

We are paying more for gas even though we’re using less. Allowing just three oil companies to rake in nearly $100 billion in profits.

Hat-tip: Ed Crooks.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Americans spent 4 percent of household income on gas in 2012

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