David “Robin Hood” Brooks

The main reason this is numerically bogus isn’t because the government doesn’t include these programs in poverty line calculations — the main reason is because a whole lot of the money spent under these programs doesn’t go to people in poverty.

If we took the definition of “antipoverty spending” used by Reagan, Brooks etc. and divided it up evenly among poor people, then we’d sure spend a lot more on poor people and less on middle class and upper class people — so, yes, doing it this way would really help poor people more. Then the next thing that would happen would be that antipoverty spending would be cancelled, because the only reason that the U.S. public tolerates these programs is because they provide significant social insurance for middle and upper class people.

#2 – this isn’t quite right, and it may not be right at all.

The programs at issue are all means-tested. Sop if you’re middle or upper class, this money isn’t going to you.

It’s true that Medicaid provides social insurance for middle class people, in the sense that if you run out of money and need long term care when you’re old, Medicaid will step in and your children don’t have to bankrupt themselves, but at that point you really are poor, and Medicaid does a thorough check to make sure you are poor (eg no recent transfers of assets to relatives).

So there isn’t any spending on people with substantial assets included in these figures.

The problem is that the different programs have different eligibility requirements that don’t necessarily correspond to the federal poverty line. Some of this money is going to the “near poor” who are not included in the numerator of the fraction, thus inflating the per person amount. The question is, how much, and how does that distort the conclusion?

I did a little googling to try to figure out whether there’s a significant apples-and-oranges problem but it’s not a simple question and I don’t have time for it now. Maybe someone else knows the answer.

Does anyone actually think a republican administration or congress would set up such a transfer, some kind of requirement that, say, 90% of poverty monies be given to the poor as a direct transfer? ? When dumbshit states are now micromanaging the kind of food that food stamp recipients can buy? David ‘fucking’ Brooks has an agenda, everybody knows he has an agenda – government vis-a-vis the ‘poor’ is always wrong. This line makes his masters happy and it makes his masters’ slaves happy. Everything that needs to be said, even can be said about David ‘fucking’ Brooks has been been said better than anybody else could say it by drifty lol these many years. See
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-church-of-lyintology-ctd.html

PS – the guy who apparently originated the $14,000 per person figure – Ron Haskins of Brookings, although he calculated a number closer to $13,000 – acknowledged the possibility that the figure is overstated due to the differences in eligibility cut-offs.

“[S]ome of the money in programs that provide cash or in-kind benefits directly to households goes to individuals and families that are not below the poverty level.”

http://www.brookings.edu/research/testimony/2012/06/05-poverty-families-haskins

But by how much? That still seems to be uncalculated. At least, I can’t find it.

I’m not going to go through the math in this comment thread, but the high-dollar programs tend to have significant tails up into the middle class. Take EITC for an example. Here’s an eligibility chart. Here’s the Federal poverty level. A married couple with one child has FPL $20K, but you still get an EITC of up to $1,000 if your married household with one child makes up to $37.5K.

And the time element is really pretty significant. It’s easy to say that Medicaid only covers elderly who are really poor. But it’s very, very common for middle class families to reach a point where medical expenses for an elderly parent would bankrupt them if they weren’t covered by Medicaid, even though the family is not poor and only the elderly person is poor (i.e. their savings have been used up).

WL: EITC was invented by Milton Friedman.

What other clue than Friedman’s brandname does any sentient being need, that this is the scorpion asking the frog from a ride across the river?

@13 LFC
You raise a good point that a lot of people who qualify for different types of aid are inherently hard to reach regardless of what form the aid comes. Some combination of not having a fixed adress, not having a bank (for obvious reasons), not being terribly literate and innurred to the fact that quite a lot of the system is out to fleece them in some way or another makes the prospect of handing over a $14,000 check (or whatever one might agree is the right amount) something that might be easier said than done.

This isn’t always the case to be sure, and is by no means a justification for not trying, but its why these programs have so a certain amount of bureaucracy…open arms requirements become ripe for fraud, restrictive requirements look to be ‘administered cruelly and indifferently.’ Whichever way it balances it, the program is then open to criticism regardless of the good it ultimately does.

Every single person commenting should read this right now:

http://www.demos.org/blog/5/4/15/david-brooks-makes-basic-poverty-mistakes

“David Brooks has a misinformed piece on poverty in the New York Times. Blame for some of the mistakes falls on Brooks. Blame for others falls squarely on Brookings’ Ron Haskins for promoting distorted interpretations of poverty data for decades.”

From the invaluable Matt Bruenig.

Brooks’ critics are right about the poverty rate statistic, but most are missing his broader point. He buried his lede, but here it is:

***It is wrong to say federal efforts to tackle poverty have been a failure. The $15 trillion spent by the government over the past half-century has improved living standards and eased burdens for millions of poor people. But all that money and all those experiments have not integrated people who live in areas of concentrated poverty into the mainstream economy.***

Brooks doesn’t want anti-poverty spending to leave people in grinding poverty, albeit with benefits, but to make the poor into a self-sustaining lower middle class. Matt Bruenig understood what Brooks was actually hoping for and explained why it won’t happen. To wit, most of the poor aren’t able to work.

Joshua Holmes: “To wit, most of the poor aren’t able to work.”

Geez, it couldn’t be racism, could it? Not in the 21st century.

To vary my comments about the mistaken emphasis of the left on workers, I’ll go on a bit about the center and right. Unless we have some kind of ecological crash, in which case no one knows what will happen, there never will be a stable system in which everyone works ever again. We have overproduction, and fixing it by producing even more only makes that ecological crash more likely. So the center-right is in a desperate struggle to keep people working even when they manifestly don’t need to work, because without work as a source of personal value and social stability, the entire center-right world system falls apart.

I’m inclined to think that that’s the real reason for increasing income and wealth inequality. It’s not that the people at the top even can use more wealth to take even more control over society: they already have it. It’s that they need to keep on sucking up more of it in order to leave the people at the bottom desperate, because if it were ever redistributed, you couldn’t keep on with this nonsense about how the poor need to become a self-sustaining middle class by working harder.

mpowell @ 15

I don’t think there should be means-testing at all. (I favor public provision of social insurance for a variety of purposes, including retirement, disability and medical care. If it were up to me, we’d have public provision of auto liability insurance.)

My argument is that it is stupid to argue as if statistics can refute resentment.

Ron Haskins is a hack, not a legitimate researcher. This sort of sleight-of-hand pervades his work, such that anything based on that work – especially his statistics – should be held under great scrutiny before being repeated.

As for David Brooks, well, isn’t the whole culture and anarchy thing getting old by now?

‘many liberals hold… you can have capitalism with… no class stratification’

In Britain in 90s we were told we already had it!

“You have to have at least two classes, a capitalist class which privately owns and controls the means of production, and a working class, whose labor power the capitalist class exploits.”

I think that’s kind of antiquated. Look at the Corey Robin post on Baltimore then vs Baltimore now: those in power used to use their power to force people to work, now they force people not to work. It’s fundamentally not labor power being exploited any more, and labor power is not the base on which society depends. Society is just as happy to have people doing make-work that doesn’t really produce anything: exploitation is much more about simply keeping people in the social relationship of worker to boss than it is about actually extracting labor.

I doubt whether ruling classes ever generally stayed in power because they commanded means of production, but in any case our current ruling class commands the means of distribution (i.e. the financial system), and the means of violence.

A fraction of those employed people are actually producing needed goods and services. A lot of them are satisfying elite appetites for luxury services and taking the place of slaves, servants etc. And a lot of them are occupying make-work positions that serve to give them social status rewards over those unemployed, and thus cement the system together: they’ll defend their jobs against those below them, the unemployed will struggle to join them or become “valid” targets for police repression etc.

Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We’re spending 45 billion dollars on welfare.

Did he mean “even after adjusting for inflation”?

How can you have capitalism without a class system? You have to have at least two classes, a capitalist class which privately owns and controls the means of production, and a working class, whose labor power the capitalist class exploits.

They could be the same people. For example, you work for your living until the age of 65 (making you a member of the working class) and then you retire and live off the income stream from your pension fund’s holdings of stocks and bonds (making you a member of the capitalist class).

@33 and 34
The better way to think of “living off one’s pension” in the context of this discussion is that the money available to you in retirement is unpaid wages resulting from your working class life. Cynically, such person was made deliberately poorer throughout their working life in-exchange for ‘being taken care of’ in their retirement. Its a promise that tends to guarantee consistently having less than your labor should have merited in exchange for security and peace of mind, which of course is a trade many are happy to make.

The beauty from the rentier standpoint is of course, if the business succeeds its a promise that can be afforded (up to a point) and if the business fails or circumstances change the promise can be modified or broken entirely – its a promise with all upside for the capitalist and all downside for the worker. I’d assert that the hypothetical pensioner described @33 remains quite distinctly ‘working class’ regardless of the specifc nature of how his income gets paid.

“These folks all work damn hard.”

As an actual executive, I ‘worked’ long days & weeks, but ‘work’ often meant ‘flying in business class to Paris’ or ‘sitting all day in a conference room talking, while catered meals came and went’. Which is to say, almost not work at all. Conversely, as an infantry soldier, I never worked harder, or for less money. I once calculated that my then-current rate of pay per actual hours worked was 11 cents – in 1984.

By and large, successful people don’t work harder. They may be smarter, or luckier, or more determined, or less honest. If they wanted the joy of hard work, they’d be digging ditches.

“if the business succeeds its a promise that can be afforded (up to a point) and if the business fails or circumstances change the promise can be modified or broken entirely”

There are many pension funds invest in a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds, and are not tied to the success or failure of any one business. Certainly the U.S. system likes to make abusive, broken-promise systems whenever possible, but not all of them are like that.

At any rate, I’m trying to question the basic analytical distinctions that people make, and that Anarcissie’s #27 is an example of. This is difficult because whenever I do this people here assure me that really no one believes in any of this and that we all believe in pretty much the same thing. But I don’t think that any of the structures of power in the contemporary U.S. really map onto the capitalist / prole distinction in any useful way, not unless you go through many layers of “you know what I really mean when I say those words”.

Mass immigration into the United States and Green cards is part of the the 500 LB Neo-Liberal Gorilla we don’t talk about. We’ve added 50 million wholly unnecessary residents and who knows how many workers strictly to arbitrage wages down.

If companies could not get cheap labor in the door, wages would higher and companies would have to make efforts to train where there weren’t employees and it would help all of us,

What we needed twenty years ago was the economic policy espoused Pat Buchanan, what we go? Well a big mess all in the name of free trade.

RP @ 39: . . . I don’t think that any of the structures of power in the contemporary U.S. really map onto the capitalist / prole distinction in any useful way . . .

I was going to write a concurring comment, but, as is my wont, the draft grew too long and wooly to be useful and I ditched it. (Yes, even I think some of my comments are too long. The thing is, I like wooly . . . — my wooly, other people’s, not so much.)

It is remarkable, really, the extent to which the available structures of thought, left and center, seem designed to prevent thinking clearly about the particulars of our present context. Mainstream, neoclassical economics may be even worse than 19th century Marx.

You can adopt the vocabulary of an elaborate economics, and it freights in a lot of meaning, but it is like trying to speak ancient Greek to the internet generation — all the key terms are loaded with complex connotations derived from a context that is irrelevant. About our lived context, we are apparently struck dumb. (“But, hey, you know, that’s cool.”)

I thought you did OK, with your observations. The actual political economy is complex, and without some kind of supporting analytic superstructure, the risk of gross oversimplification complements the risk of being sucked into the vortex of someone’s half-understood, half-translated Greek.

I am more ambivalent than you are about the economic value of hierarchy — two cheers for bureaucracy and all that. It is pervasive — half of the U.S. labor force works in organizations with more than 100 employees and only something like 8% are self-employed (though that latter number is not a very hard statistic). Bureaucracy has its own logic, quite distinct and apart from Capital, and it is historically novel. The modern multinational industrial corporation was just being birthed when Marx died. Piketty and Saez have documented how financial managers and the executive class have shouldered in to stand alongside traditional capitalist rentiers among the 1%. The distribution of income has been heavily skewed over the last couple of decades to the tippy top by what appears to be a wave of disinvestment: CEOs (aided by the 21st century overseer class of professional middle managers) and vulture capitalists taking apart the public and private structures for fun and profit. By its own logic, it is not a stable or “equilibrium” process — at some point, the structure collapses or is exhausted as a quarry. But, even if the present economy, like every phase of the industrial revolution before it, is “transitional”, it is still remarkable the extent to which the economy today is about harvesting soylent green.

For a left politics, a naive observer might wonder why it is apparently so difficult to organize a reform movement out of simply opposing the most egregious instances of predation. A partial answer is that such a large part of the professional and creative classes that could supply leadership for reform are being employed in the work of dismantling and displacement.

Did you see the John Oliver video essay on cheap fashion? CEOs become billionaires leading 1st world retail bureaucracies sweatshopping remote third world places to produce ultra-cheap, high fashion clothes that celebrities gush over on teevee.

Another useful essay I saw this last week was Lambert Strether’s May 5 essay on the Naked Capitalism blog, Note for an Elite Playbook: The Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone. I thought it was one of the best takes on the 21st century meaning of “rentier”.