Tag Archives: number

Poverty Keeps Getting Worse and Worse for Working-Age Adults

by AltaG65eacunv Posted on September 17, 2014

Mother Jones

The Census Bureau released its annual poverty report today, and the headline number shows that the official poverty rate declined from 15.0 percent to 14.5 percent. This decline was driven entirely by a drop in the number of children living in poverty.

This gives me an excuse to make a point that doesn’t get made often enough. You’ll often see charts showing that the overall poverty rate has remained roughly the same since the late 60s, and that’s true. But this is largely due to more generous Social Security benefits, which have reduced elderly poverty from over 30 percent to under 10 percent.

There’s been no such reduction among working age adults. In fact, just the opposite. The low point for working-age poverty was about 9 percent, reached in 1968, and since then it’s steadily increased. There are small variations from year to year, but basically it went up to about 10-11 percent in the 80s and then increased to 13.6 percent during the Great Recession. It’s stayed there ever since.

The safety net has helped most of these folks tread water, but it doesn’t change the fact that the market economy has gotten steadily bleaker for the poor over the past 40 years. It’s great that we’ve made such significant inroads against elderly poverty, but aggregates can fool you about the rest of the country. Among everyone else, poverty has only gotten worse and worse.

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Poverty Keeps Getting Worse and Worse for Working-Age Adults

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The Strange History of Tacos and the New York Times

by BlondelMcBurney Posted on August 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Neil Irwin does a bit of interesting gastronomic sleuthing today using a New York Times tool that counts the number of mentions of a word in the archives of the Times. The question is, how fast do new food trends go mainstream? Take, for example, fried calamari:

Now, of course, every strip-mall pizza place and suburban Applebee’s serves fried calamari. But not all that long ago it was an exotic food. The term “fried calamari” did not appear in the pages of The New York Times until 1975, according to our nifty Times Chronicle tool, and didn’t show up frequently until the 1980s. Lest you think it is only a change in vocabulary, the term “fried squid” made only a couple of scattered appearances before that time.

Fried calamari made a voyage that dozens of foods have made over the years: They start out being served in forward-thinking, innovative restaurants in New York and other capitals of gastronomy. Over time, they become more and more mainstream….In the last decade alone, the list includes tuna tartare, braised short ribs, beet salad and pretty much any dish involving pork belly, brussels sprouts or kale. In an earlier era, the list might include sun-dried tomatoes, pesto and hummus.

Fascinating! But readers with long memories will recall that I was surprised at how recently tacos became mainstream. In 1952 they were apparently uncommon enough that the Times had to explain to its readers what a taco was. So how about if we use this nifty new search tool to get some hard data on taco references? Here it is:

Sure enough, there are virtually no mentions of tacos in the 40s and 50s. There’s a blip here and there, but they don’t really get commonly mentioned until the 70s.

But that’s not what’s interesting. Back in 1877, a full 3 percent of all Times articles mentioned tacos! In fact, tacomania was a feature of the Times during all of the 1870s and 1880s, before suddenly falling off a cliff in 1890. What’s up with that? Why did tacos suddenly become verboten in 1890? Did a new editor take over who hated tacos? And what’s the deal with the blip from about 1917 to 1922? Did World War I produce a sudden explosion of interest in tacos?

This is very weird. Does anyone have a clue what’s going on here?

UPDATE: On Twitter, Christopher Ingraham suggests that this is an artifact of bad text recognition of ancient microfilm. I don’t have access to the full version of Times Chronicle, but a look at some of the summaries of articles that allegedly mention tacos makes this seem like a pretty good guess. It’s quite possible that there are no genuine mentions of tacos until the 40s or 50s.

This is a sadly boring explanation, but it seems pretty likely to be right. However, I’m still curious about the sudden dropoff in 1890 (did archive copies suddenly improve? did the Times start using a different font?) and the blip after World War I.

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The Strange History of Tacos and the New York Times

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These 7 Charts Show Why the Rent Is Too Damn High

by colord8609 Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

More Americans than ever before are unable to afford rent. Here’s a look at why the rent is too damn high and what can be done about it.

Part of the problem has to do with simple supply and demand. Millions of Americans lost their homes during the foreclosure crisis, and many of those folks flooded into the rental market. In 2004, 31 percent of US households were renters, according to HUD. Today that number is 35 percent. “With more people trying to get into same number of units you get an incredible pressure on prices,” says Shaun Donavan, the former secretary of housing and urban development for the Obama administration.

It’s not just working-class folks who have been pushed into the rental market. More middle-class Americans are renting too.

Alongside the foreclosure crisis, the financial collapse and ensuing recession jacked up unemployment and squeezed incomes. Check out how rental costs compare to renter incomes over the past quarter century:

Republicans, in an effort to shore up what they say is a dangerous budget deficit (it’s not, really), have pushed to cut spending on federal programs, including housing assistance. Nearly all government housing aid programs have taken funding cuts in recent years.

In 2013, about 125,000 families lost access to housing vouchers—which make up the largest share of rental assistance—due to across-the-board budget cuts. “Budget cuts were doing exactly the wrong thing,” Donovan says.

Those cuts come on top of years of stagnating rental voucher aid. Even though the government increased funding for housing vouchers between 2007 and 2012, the program was not able to reach more households because that extra money was eaten up by higher rents and lower incomes.

Because federal housing assistance was not able to keep up with the growing population of low-income people created by the recession, the number of very low-income renter households that received some form of housing assistance dropped from 27.4 percent in 2007 to less than a quarter in 2011.

What happens when you combine a shortage of rental units with lower incomes and less federal support? You get the “worst rental affordability crisis in history,” and a lot of people finding it harder to get by.

The share of households spending more than a third of their income on rent has grown by 12 percent since 2000. Today, half of all renters pay more than 30 percent of their monthly income in rent. For 28 percent of Americans, more than half of their salaries go toward rent.

The rental crisis is worse in certain areas of the country:

And the crisis has hit people of color harder than whites.

The stimulus act Congress passed in the wake of the recession directed $1 billion into rental housing. And HUD is not sitting on its hands while the rental market goes to shambles. The department has launched several programs aimed at bolstering the number of low-income and public housing units.

But these initiatives aren’t enough to stem the unfolding rental crisis, Donovan says. Legislation in Congress aimed at reducing the government’s role in housing finance would take a bigger bite out of the problem. It would direct nearly $4 billion a year to affordable rental housing. The bill was recently approved by a key Senate committee. And as far as its chances in the obstructionist, GOP-dominated House? “I think better than most people might think,” Donovan says. “I say that because I do think there’s a confluence of more and more people understanding that the status quo is unacceptable.”

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These 7 Charts Show Why the Rent Is Too Damn High

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Jim Carrey Movies, Ranked

by LeannaFraley Posted on July 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Mask came out on July 29 1994. It was Jim Carrey’s second blockbuster. (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective had hit theaters that February.) But where does it stand in the Jim Carrey canon? Here are all the Jim Carrey films*, ranked.

1. Liar Liar
2. The Truman Show
3. Man on the Moon
4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
5. Yes Man
6. Bruce Almighty
7. Fun With Dick And Jane
8. Dumb & Dumber
9. The Mask
10. A Christmas Carol
11. I Love You Philip Morris
12. Kick-Ass 2
13. Simon Birch
14. Me, Myself, & Irene
15. Batman Forever
16. Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
17. Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
18. The Cable Guy
19. Mr. Popper’s Penguins
20. How The Grinch Stole Christmas
21. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
22. The Number 23
23. Anchorman 2
24. Horton Hears a Who!
25. The Majestic
26. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls

(*Note: This is a ranking of “Jim Carrey movies,” a la feature-length movies in which Jim Carrey appears beginning with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Movies that feature Jim Carrey from before Ace Ventura: Pet Detective are not “Jim Carrey movies.” They are just movies that Jim Carrey happened to appear in.)

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Jim Carrey Movies, Ranked

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The US Economy Imploded Last Quarter

by GeoffrePutilin Posted on June 25, 2014

Mother Jones

Yikes. In the first quarter GDP didn’t grow by an anemic 0.1 percent. Nor did it shrink by 1 percent. According to the Commerce Department’s final tally, it shrunk by 2.9 percent.

Everyone is brushing this off because other economic signals suggest it was a one-off event. And maybe so. But even if it is, it probably knocks about 1 percent off the full-year figure compared to a more normal growth rate of, say, at least 2 percent. The only way it turns out to be a nothingburger is if this number really is an anomaly and the economy makes up for it with supercharged growth for the rest of the year.

I have my doubts about that. I just don’t buy the tired excuse that the Q1 number was weather related. Something happened.

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The US Economy Imploded Last Quarter

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It’s Time to Acknowledge Reality: Obamacare is Working Pretty Well

by JulianaWillifor Posted on June 18, 2014

Mother Jones

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A new paper concludes that “rate shock” under Obamacare has been generally more modest than we thought:

Using data from the Current Population Survey, we find that the average prices increased by 14 to 28 percent, with similar changes in California and the federal exchange states; we attribute the increase primarily to higher premiums in exchanges associated with insurer expectations of a higher risk population being enrolled.

This doesn’t take into account federal subsidies, which would lower this number even further. What’s more, rates most likely would have gone up about 10 percent even if Obamacare had never existed. Taken together, this suggests that the average premium increase thanks to Obamacare has been very small. And of course, that small increase buys you a policy that in most cases is considerably more robust than older policies.

In related news, HHS reports that people who qualify for tax credits are paying an average of $82 per month for their policies. This is roughly a fourth of what they’d pay without subsidies. The chart on the right shows how this breaks down: more than two-thirds of those who qualify for subsidies are paying less than $100 per month. Fewer than 20 percent are paying more than $150. In a nutshell, then, we now know that (a) the system works, (b) enrollment targets were largely met, and (c) health insurance under Obamacare is pretty affordable. Matt Yglesias explains what this means:

These three factors together should end the phony war over Obamacare and let the real debate begin — not the debate over whether the program “works” but the debate over whether economic resources should be devoted to providing health insurance to people at the bottom of the income distribution or to providing tax cuts to people at the top.

….Obamacare is a large-scale effort to improve living standards for people in the bottom half of the income distribution by giving them additional economic resources. One of America’s political parties doesn’t like that idea in any non-health context and they don’t like it for health care either. They think the money it costs to provide those subsidies should be taken away, and it should be given to high-income households in the form of tax cuts.

This is an excellent and important policy debate to have. One of the great ideological issues not just of our time and place, but of democratic politics across eras and countries. Should economic resources be distributed more equally or less equally?

Yep. It’s time to stop arguing over minutiae. Fundamentally, Obamacare “works.” It’s not perfect, but after nine months we can now say that it does indeed provide health coverage to the poor and the working-class in a reasonably efficient manner, and it does this largely by a combination of taxing and/or reducing payments to the relatively well off.

I think this is a good idea. Republicans don’t. But this, rather than the cacophony of nonsense we’ve been subjected to over the past several years, is what we should be arguing about.

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It’s Time to Acknowledge Reality: Obamacare is Working Pretty Well

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For Republicans, Fear and Confusion Are All They Have Left

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on May 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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We know that 8 million people have signed up for Obamacare on the exchanges. But how many of them have actually paid their premiums? Yesterday, as part of their long, twilight effort to convince everyone that the Obama administration is lying about the enrollment numbers, Republicans issued a laughable report saying the number was only 67 percent. A third of the enrollees are phantoms!

As it happens, I didn’t bother writing about this because, as political deceptions go, it was about as sophisticated as a kindergartner throwing a mud pie. The Republican numbers only went through April 15, even though a ton of people signed up at the end of March and don’t even owe their first premium payment until the end of April. Of course there are lots of people who haven’t sent in their checks yet. So how do Republicans justify this dumb talking point? Michael Tomasky asked:

Talking Points Memo’s Dylan Scott got hold of the questionnaire the committee sent to insurers, and it’s a joke. One industry source—not a Democratic operative—told Scott: “Everyone who saw it knew exactly what the goal was.”

I asked the GOP staff at the committee if they had a counter to the argument that their numbers were incomplete and in essence rigged. On background, one staffer there basically told me that they didn’t have a counter. The committee press release makes it clear, I was told, that these data represent payments only through April 15, and the committee will seek another report May 20.

In other words, this staffer is saying: Yep. Which makes it rather hard to avoid the conclusion that the committee knowingly put out a bad number. Why would a committee of the House of Representatives do something like that? Well, what am I saying? We know why.

Republicans got what they wanted: some headlines suggesting that Obamacare enrollment rates were lower than the White House says. And of course, it became a routine talking point on Fox News. Mud has been thrown on the walls, and by the time the final numbers come out, plenty of people will remain confused.

And that’s all Republicans care about right now: manufacturing doubt. They know perfectly well that by next month, when the final numbers come out, something like 90 percent of enrollees will have paid their premiums and total signups will be over 7 million. But they don’t care. As long as people are confused, life is good for Republicans. So confusion is what they’re selling.

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For Republicans, Fear and Confusion Are All They Have Left

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How CO2 is killing the cutest snails you haven’t seen

by LatanyaSoper Posted on May 2, 2014

Snail Ails

How CO2 is killing the cutest snails you haven’t seen

By

Russ Hopcroft, UAF/NOAA

Today’s pteropods – pea-sized oceanic snails – may look pretty cute, but they must’ve done something truly rotten to rack up enough bad karma to end up in the world as they know it today. If they can manage to survive being gobbled up by fish such as salmon, herring, and mackerel, they still have to worry about ocean acidification melting off their shells.

Pteropods rely on aragonite – an form of calcium carbonate – to make their wee little shells, but when excess CO2 cranks down the ocean’s pH, that easily erodible base material starts to dissolve. It’s a phenomenon we’ve known about for a while, but a new study shows just how bad it is out there for these miniature mollusks: More than half of the ones found in the waters just off the West Coast now show severe shell damage — they’re thinned out, pitted, and pocked.

The sad state of their husks probably has to do with the fact that, since the industrial revolution, these waters have one-sixth of the aragonite available. Scientists project that this number will continue to dip, meaning that by 2050 pteropods shells will be dissolving at a rate three times higher than what we see today.

But it’s not really just about the snails. Because pteropods are at the base of the food chain, what happens to them shakes up the ecosystem from the ground up. So, even if what’s happening to the pteropods themselves isn’t enough to melt your heart (though, really, how could it not?), the fact that they’re having a rough time translates to fewer cute ocean critters all around – as well as fewer of the ones that we most like to munch.


Source
Sea Change: Vital part of food web dissolving, The Seattle Times

Samantha Larson is a science nerd, adventure enthusiast, and fellow at Grist. Follow her on Twitter.

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How CO2 is killing the cutest snails you haven’t seen

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Fox News and the Rise of Racial Animus in the Obama Era

by ArleenFriese Posted on May 1, 2014

Mother Jones

Today, using questions from the General Social Survey, Nate Silver tries to quantify the effect of Barack Obama’s election on the racial attitudes of white Republicans and Democrats. On several of the most overtly racist questions (“blacks are lazy,” “blacks are unintelligent”) there’s little evidence of change. But on two of the questions with more political salience, there’s evidence of a pretty substantial effect.

The chart on the right illustrates this. The number of white Republicans who believe the government spends too much money on blacks had been trending slowly downward for years. Based on that trend, you’d expect the number today to be a bit above 20 percent.

Instead, it took a sharp upward jump in 2010 and again in 2012, ending up a bit over 30 percent. In other words, among white Republicans, it appears that the election of a black president has increased the belief that blacks get too many government bennies by about 10 percentage points. This belief is now at levels not seen since the anti-busing days of the 70s.

I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this beyond the obvious ones. As you might suspect from some of my posts over the past few years, I basically blame Fox News and conservative talk radio for this state of affairs. Without Fox fanning the flames of racial animus over the past several years, I suspect we wouldn’t see this effect. That’s just a guess on my part, but I think it’s a pretty good one.

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Fox News and the Rise of Racial Animus in the Obama Era

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Running Away From Obamacare Is a Fool’s Errand

by Cheryle07G Posted on April 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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Are red-state Democrat senators certain losers to Republican challengers in this year’s midterm election? According to recent polling, no. The races are all pretty close. But Greg Sargent points out that these Democrats do indeed have an Obamacare problem:

In Arkansas, 52 percent would not vote for a candidate who disagrees on Obamacare, versus 35 percent who are open to doing that. In Louisiana: 58-28. In North Carolina: 53-35. It seems plausible the intensity remains on the side of those who oppose the law. This would again suggest that the real problem Dems face with Obamacare is that it revs up GOP partisans far more than Dem ones — exacerbating the Dems’ already existing “midterm dropoff” problem.

However, in Kentucky, the numbers are a bit different: 46 percent would not vote for a candidate who disagrees with them on the law, while 39 percent say the opposite — much closer than in other states. Meanwhile, Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear — the most outspoken defender of Obamacare in the south — has an approval rating of 56-29.

I’m keenly aware that I’ve never run for dogcatcher, let alone had any experience in a big-time Senate race. So my political advice is worth zero. And yet, polls like this make me more, not less, invested in the idea that running away from Obamacare is a losing proposition. Electorates in red states know that these Democrats voted for Obamacare. Their opponents are going to hammer away at it relentlessly. It’s just impossible to run away away from it, and doing so only makes them look craven and unprincipled.

The only way to turn this around is not to distance yourself from Obamacare, but to try and convince a piece of the electorate that Obamacare isn’t such a bad deal after all. You won’t convince everyone, but you don’t need to. You just need to persuade the 5 or 10 percent who are mildly opposed to Obamacare that it’s working better than they think. That might get the number of voters who would “never” vote for an Obamacare supporter down from the low 50s (Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina) to the mid 40s (Kentucky). And that might be enough to eke out a victory.

Needless to say, this works best if everyone is pitching in. And surely this is the time to start. The early website problems have been resolved and the initial signup period has been a success. Conservative kvetching has taken on something of a desperate truther tone, endlessly trying to “deskew” the facts and figures that increasingly make Obamacare look like a pretty successful program. There are lots of feel-good stories to tout, and there are going to be more as time goes by. What’s more, the economy is improving a bit, which always makes people a little more sympathetic toward programs that help others.

Obamacare isn’t likely to be a net positive in red states anytime soon. But it’s not necessarily a deal breaker either. It just has to be sold—and the sellers need to show some real passion about it. After all, if they don’t believe in it, why should anyone else?

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Running Away From Obamacare Is a Fool’s Errand

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