Gene Marks is apparently not a poor black child in West Philadelphia

PhillyGrrl and Dan Denvir have already hopped on Gene Marks for his "if I were a poor black child" piece for Forbes, but it really is breathtaking in its awfulness. Marks writes about what he would do, as a poor black child in West Philadelphia, to stop being so poor.

Shorter Marks: "If I were a poor black kid, I'd use all the advantages I have from not being a poor black kid."

Sound too harsh? Check out these two, entirely representative paragraphs: 

If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study. I’d become expert at Google Scholar. I’d visit study sites like SparkNotes andCliffsNotes to help me understand books. I’d watch relevant teachings onAcademic Earth, TED and the Khan Academy. (I say relevant because some of these lectures may not be related to my work or too advanced for my age. But there are plenty of videos on these sites that are suitable to my studies and would help me stand out.) I would also, when possible, get my books for free at Project Gutenberg and learn how to do research at the CIA World Factbookand Wikipedia to help me with my studies. 

I would use homework tools like Backpack, and Diigo to help me store and share my work with other classmates. I would use Skype to study with other students who also want to do well in my school. I would take advantage of study websites like Evernote, Study Rails, Flashcard Machine, Quizlet, and free online calculators.

All you have to do to not be a poor black child is hop on your computer and go online!

Here's the problem: That's not actually an option for lots and lots and lots of poor kids in this town. At one North Philadelphia school, it's estimated that only 25 percent of the students have access to a computer and the Internet at home. A year ago, the Knight Foundation estimated that 40 percent of Philadelphia residents do not have home Internet service. 

And the Public Health Management Corporation not-so-long-ago released this survey of Philadelphia Internet habits. Among the findings:

• Philadelphia residents are more likely to be non-Internet users than are their suburban counterparts. More than a quarter (27.3%) of Philadelphia adults do not use the Internet. 

• For those who do not use the Internet, the most common reason cited was lack of access. More than one-third of adults who do not use the Internet (36.5%) indicated they did not have access or did not have a computer.

• Poverty was also a factor. Adults living in poverty are much more likely to be non-Internet users than are non-poor adults: 42.5% of adults living below the federal poverty line do not use the Internet, versus 16.0% of adults living above the federal poverty line.2 Latino adults (34.7%) and black adults (28.1%) are more likely to be non-Internet users than white adults (15.6%).

There aren't really numbers here to indicate the level of access that Philadelphia's "poor black kids" have to online resources like the ones described by Marks, but it's not hard to draw a conclusion from all the other numbers: That access is most likely insufficient.

There are other problems with his essay: He urges kids—the one, ahem, reading Forbes—to aim at getting in a magnet school. Which sounds great, but isn't easy: They have restricted-size enrollments, and getting in can be a bit of a crapshoot.

Overall, the tone of Marks' essay reminds me of an old Sam Kinison bit about hunger in Africa. The answer to the problem, Kinison would scream, is to go "LIVE WHERE THE FOOD IS!" Which is both obvious and dumb. It's nice, I guess, that Marks is thinking about the plight of poor black kids in Philadelphia. It's just too bad there's little evidence he's tried to understand the challenges that are actually involved.

 

Millionaires and food stamps, revisited

Back in October, I issued a challenge:

But how many millionaires are gaming the system to get food stamps? I'm guessing maybe ... this guy. Maybe there are a few others out there. But I'll pull a number out of my posterior and guess that 99.99 percent of all food stamp recipients are not millionaires. And I defy anyone to prove otherwise.

The New York Times tries to get an answer today, and doesn't really come up with a number:

Department of Agriculture officials dismissed the notion of millionaire food stamp recipients. “Federal law is clear,” said Aaron Lavallee, a spokesman for the department. “The program is intended for households with income not exceeding 130 percent of poverty.”

Among the 46 million Americans who receive the assistance — roughly one in seven Americans — few seem to be millionaires.

That's not entirely satisfying, because we don't know how few are millionaires—even if we can surmise, as the Times does, that precious few are. But maybe we can extrapolate from the unemployment insurance numbers:

From 2005 to 2009, millionaires collected over $74 million in unemployment benefits, according to an estimate by Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who has paired with Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, to push to end the practice.

According to Mr. Coburn’s office, the Internal Revenue Service reported that 2,362 millionaires collected a total of $20,799,000 in unemployment benefits in 2009; 18 people with an adjusted gross income of $10,000,000 or more received an average of $12,333 in jobless benefits for a total of $222,000.

Now, we know that more than 20 million Americans collected unemployment insurance in 2009. If I'm doing the math correctly—never my strong suit—that means that roughly 1 percent of 1 percent of unemployment insurance beneficiaries were millionaires.

Now, unemployment insurance is linked to one's employment status—no matter how much you make, you're eligible if you lose your job. Food stamps are linked to your income: Which means it's probably very much harder to get such benefits if you're a millionaire. Republicans can produce the occasional anecdote, but I feel comfortable sticking with my assertion that 99.99 percent of all food stamp recipients are not millionaires.

None of which would be worth mentioning, except that Republicans are using the specter of millionaires receiving poor-people entitlements as justification to start to trim the safety net. It's "welfare queens" all over again, and it's dishonest.

Poverty: It's worse than you think

Remember how the New York Times said the other day the Census Bureau's new, fuller accounting of poverty would likely reduce the poverty rate in America? Remember how I bought it?

I was wrong:

There were 49.1 million poor using the SPM definition of poverty, more than the 46.6 million using the official definition of poverty with our universe. For most groups, SPM rates are higher than official  poverty rates.

So that's embarrassing.

The Times' logic wasn't crazy: By adjusting poverty estimates to include more than cash income—things like food stamps and other government-based assistance, and adjusting for regional cost-of-living differences—it seemed likely that the poverty rate would come down. What's a welfare state for, after all?

But the new estimate also improves on the older count by more fully reflecting how people must spend their money. The official definition of poverty from 1964 to this year reflected the cost of food for a small family; the new measure also includes things like taxes, work expenses, child care costs, and out-of-pocket medical bills. On, roughly, the necessities of life—not frivolities.

And it turns out when you actually have to factor in the costs that people have to pay to actually be productive members of society, the poverty rate goes up. This shouldn't be a surprise. (Those medical costs, actually, take up a huge chunk of the bill—which I, about to have my third surgery of the year tomorrow, find not even mildly surprising.)

As Kevin Drum points out, this new measure would be more useful if we had a sense of the trend over time. The country has grown more urban over time, and cities generally cost more to live in than rural areas—they also have more job opportunities—so I wouldn't be surprised to see poverty rates track with the citifying of the nation. It would also be interesting to see what the '90s-era welform reform bill did to these numbers.

Final thought: One conservative line of thought is that if poor people would just get married and have babies, they'd be more likely to enter the middle class. I think that confuses correlation with causation. The new Census measure seems to view kids, economically at least, as a drain on the family resources. It's a good reason not to view everything in economic terms, but I also can't think of any way in which my 3-year-old son actually adds to my income. The new Census figures suggest that kids are less impoverished because of welfare-state programs—and the new methodology suggests not that poor people can escape poverty by making babies, but that people who have escaped poverty are more free to do so. In any case, this report should be fodder for a whole new round of debates.

What will the new poverty measures mean?

According to the New York Times, the poverty rate in America is about to fall—not because anybody's material circumstances have changed, but because the Census Bureau is adopting a "fuller" accounting of citizen well-being that looks beyond their cash income to also measure the government assistance they receive, as well as account for differences in costs-of-living for local areas. Here's the Times' chart giving an overview of the likely numerical changes:

I'm not sure how detailed the Census numbers will actually end up being: It would be nice if we could determine what percentage of the people who remain in poverty are employed, so that we have a sense of how many of these folks are "working poor"—that is, trying to provide for themselves, but unable to completely do so in the jobs they're able to obtain.

And as the Times notes: "Monday’s release are likely to offer fodder both to defenders of safety-net programs and fiscal conservatives who say the government already does much to temper hardship and needs to do no more." True. But more information will help—the debate should be based on detailed honest data, and not our worst ideological fears. (And that goes for both liberals and conservatives: If things are more hunky dory than we thought, we should focus our priorities and solutions accordingly.) On the surface, though, it looks like the liberals have something to crow about: The safety net really does save lots of people from poverty—which means our Great Recession hasn't been as devastatingly painful as it might otherwise have been.

That said, I'm not sure the Times frames the debate quite accurately: Conservatives aren't just arguing the government "needs to do no more"—many are arguing that government should do less, which seems to me like a recipe for disaster in this economy. Loosening the safety net probably won't grow the economy in any appreciable way, but it might devastate many lives. Republicans would help all of us if they focused less on contempt for the poor and a bit more on measures to give folks the way to earn their way up out of poverty—reducing the need for and strain on the safety net.

The poor are making poor choices. Right?

I want to read more deeply into this new paper about how debt is swamping the middle class—which makes the suggestion that the leverage problem is holding back America's economy. But in a quick overview, I couldn't help but notice this:

• The debt is highest among the middle class. Middle-income families before the crisis had a debt-to-income ratio of 155.4 percent in 2007, the last year for which data are available, for families with incomes between $62,000 and $100,000, which constituted the fourth quintile of income in our nation in 2007. This ratio is higher than for any other income group. Families in the top 20 percent of income (with incomes above $100,000) had a ratio of debt to income of 123.6 percent, and families in the third quintile (with incomes between $39,100 and $62,000) owed 130.7 percent of their income. Households in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution (with incomes below $39,100 in 2007) owed well below 100 percent of their income.

In the Facebook thread on my payday loans post yesterday, there was some discussion—typical in these circumstances—that the poor are poor, and dragged down by the burdens of debt, because of the poor choices they make. And in some cases, I'm sure that's true. But honestly: It appears that the low-income folks of America might be the only ones not taking on far more debt than they can possibly afford.