According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than 25 percent of Americans would have been poor last year if not for the social safety net.
The safety net was responding to the downturn even without the Recovery Act initiatives. Between 2007 and 2010, the share of Americans that the safety net kept out of poverty rose from 9.5 percent to 10.8 percent. This increase mostly reflects the growth of programs like unemployment benefits and SNAP, which expand automatically to help people hit by the recession and then shrink as the economy recovers.
But these automatic increases wouldn’t have been enough by themselves to prevent a large increase in poverty in the recession. Without the temporary Recovery Act initiatives, the poverty rate would have jumped from 14.9 percent to 17.8 percent between 2007 and 2010, and 6.9 million more people would have become poor than actually did.
Jeffrey Sachs and Niall Ferguson Debate Occupy Wall Street
CNN:
On GPS this weekend, historian Niall Ferguson squared off against economist Jeff Sachs on occupy Wall Street. Here’s a transcript of what they had to say (you can also watch the lively debate in the video above):
Fareed Zakaria: Jeff, you were at Occupy Wall Street. You’ve in a sense lent it support. Why do you do that? What do you think is going on there?
Jeffrey Sachs: Well, I think they have a basically correct message that when they say “we are the 99 percent,” that they’re reflecting the fact that the top one percent not only ran away with the prize economically in the last 30 years, but also took the power, manipulated it, twisted it, broke the law. Brought the world economy to its knees actually, and it’s time to correct things. And I think that that’s what Occupy Wall Street is really about. The fact that every marquee firm on Wall Street broke the law in a major way, it’s now paying a series of fines. Some people are going to jail. People are disgusted about this.
Fareed Zakaria: But isn’t what has caused the one percent or five percent of the top to do well, these very broad forces of technology, the information revolution which have empowered global knowledge workers, which have empowered capital rather than labor? So if it’s all these much bigger structural forces, is it going to be remedied by some kind of political solution like a Buffett tax?
Cathy Young has a very worthwhile article in the Aug/Sept issue of Reason on the irrationality of the Sharia panic.
The push for Shariah bans is puzzling, to say the least. Since Muslims make up about 1 percent of the U.S. population, and government establishment of religion is prohibited by the Constitution, a Shariah takeover in America is about as likely as a zombie apocalypse. Yet to proponents, this is a threat that must be stopped while there’s still time. A closer look at the purported evidence for “creeping Shariah,” however, shows a lot of skewed and garbled facts—and issues by no means unique to Muslims or Islam.
…
Excusing illegal acts because they are sanctioned by a defendant’s culture or religion is a very bad idea for many reasons. It subverts equal justice, hinders the integration of immigrants, and perpetuates oppressive customs that many hope to escape. But the “cultural defense” in U.S. law goes back more than 20 years, and most controversies related to it have not involved Muslims. In 1989 a Chinese immigrant in New York City received five years’ probation for bludgeoning his unfaithful wife to death; the defense argued that he had been provoked by the extreme shame attached to cuckoldry in Chinese culture. The decision angered many people, especially advocates for battered women. But no one tried to depict it as a warning sign of the yellow peril.
Full article here.
Photo via motherjones.
Huntsman Calls His Rivals ‘Unelectable’
NYT:
Jon M. Huntsman Jr., the former Utah governor who has been stuck in the second tier of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, took an aggressive new tone during a televised interview on Sunday, saying that recent remarks from two of his major rivals were “extreme” and “unrealistic.”
He was referring, respectively, to two of the most conservative Republican candidates – Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and the latest entry in the contest, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas – both of whom have far overshadowed him in polling of Republican voters.
Mr. Huntsman singled out two areas of commentary by Mr. Perry that have drawn particular criticism – Mr. Perry’s skepticism about the human causes of global warming as an unproven theory, and his suggestion that actions by Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, to give the economy a boost might be “treasonous.”
He warned against the Republican Party becoming what he called “the anti-science party,” which he said would create “a huge problem” in 2012. In an appearance on the ABC News program “This Week,” Mr. Huntsman added, “I think when you find yourself at an extreme end of the Republican Party, you make yourself unelectable.”
Mr. Huntsman also scoffed at Mrs. Bachmann’s suggestion that, if elected president, she would help bring the price of gasoline to below $2 a gallon.
“I just don’t know what world that comment would come from,” Mr. Huntsman said. “That is completely unrealistic. And, again, it’s talking about things that, you know, may pander to a particular group or sound good at the time, but it just simply is not founded in reality.”
Huntsman will lose, but with his dignity intact — meaning he is better positioned than ever for 2016, after the current GOP field collapses in on itself next November. More here.
