Mayor Gray’s Budget Would Mean No More Money for Many Critical Needs

As I said yesterday, Mayor Gray’s proposed Fiscal Year 2014 budget provides more money for some, but little more — in some cases, no more — for programs that address low-income residents’ critical needs.

For example …

There will be $700,000 more for permanent supportive housing — reportedly enough to accommodate 45 more chronically homeless individuals and/or families than the program is serving now.

But there probably won’t be money to ensure that homeless families with no place to stay can sleep safely indoors unless it’s freezing cold outside.

Nor will there be money to increase the number of locally-funded housing vouchers they could use to help pay market-rate rents until they can afford the full rent on their own.

This could actually mean fewer of these so-called tenant-based housing vouchers because the DC Housing Authority will get less money for Housing Choice (formerly Section 8) vouchers due to sequestration.

There will be no more money for child care subsidies, though the unreasonably low reimbursement rates providers get account, at least in part, for the fact that parents of some 9,000 infants and toddlers can’t get affordable child care.

In this case, what looks like level-funding — perhaps a small increase even — will mean somewhat over $1.5 million less because sequestration will cut a portion of the District’s federal child care funding.

There will be no more money for adult literacy services — in fact, apparently $734,000 less, though I’m told the budget document may be misleading.

Even without the cut, the District will be investing considerably less than it once did to address a problem that affects not only the job prospects and daily lives of more than a third of adult residents, but the children they’re raising.

Adult literacy programs need more money not only for these “functionally illiterate” residents, but for more proficient high school dropouts, who can get the equivalent of a high school diploma by passing the GED tests.

These tests will get harder next year — and require computer proficiency. Adult literacy programs thus need to invest more in teacher training and equipment to get their students up to speed (literally and figuratively).

One would think that the District’s abysmal 59% GED pass rate would have led the Mayor, who’s so concerned about employment here, to put more money into these programs.

Ditto for adult job training, which the Mayor’s budget would cut by $624,000 — considerably more if measured against what the program will have this year if the DC Council approves his proposed supplement.

There will be no money to protect families in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program from running up against the five-year time limit in cases where the parents have been excused from regular work activity requirements for compelling reasons, e.g., needs to care for a sick or disabled family member, domestic violence trauma.

There will, however, be money to protect long-term TANF families from further benefits cuts for another year.

This is a further indication that the Department of Human Services doesn’t have the resources it needs for its program revamp. Nor will it in the Mayor’s proposed budget, according to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s analysis.

Because even if it completes the remaining 9,000 or so assessments that are supposed to produce suitable work preparation plans for TANF parents, there won’t be enough training slots for them.

For a family of three, the reprieve will mean a continuing cash income of $257 a month, instead of the regular $428 — 23.9% less in real dollars than the year TANF was created.

The Mayor might have considered increasing TANF benefits, as a few states have recently done. All he chose to do was replace “lost” federal dollars, which weren’t really lost, but merely funds the District didn’t have left over, as it did the year before.

I understand that the Mayor has competing interests to balance. He wants to make the city an appealing place for higher-income people to live — good for the local economy, essential adequate revenues.

He’s got to worry about the stability and quality of the District’s own workforce.

And he understands that the city’s future hinges in part on how well it educates the next generation — though apparently not that all the early learning opportunities, libraries, modernized schools and the like can’t compensate for resources parents lack to provide for their kids’ basic needs.

Yet his budget truly is, in many respects, what its title says. It’s investing in tomorrow while ignoring investments needed today.

Needed, at any rate, if the District’s prosperity is going to benefit everyone, as the Mayor rightly says it should.

Panel to Address Poverty in DC and What to Do About It

On Tuesday, March 5, the Fair Budget Coalition will host a panel discussion on poverty in the District of Columbia — “The State of the District’s Poverty: What’s the Story Behind the 600 Kids at DC General?”.

As the online invitation suggests, the Coalition is linking the record-high number of children in DC General — the District’s main shelter for families — to funding cuts in both safety net programs and others that benefit low-income residents.

A look at the District’s poverty rates is surely worthwhile. As I’ve written before, both the overall rate and the child poverty rate are well above the national rates — and considerably higher than the rates in 2007, just before the recession set in.

But, as I’ve also written, the Census Bureau’s poverty thresholds are unrealistically low. For a single mother with two children, for example, the 2011 threshold was just $18,123.

The Wider Opportunities for Women’s Basic Economic Security Tables for the District show that the family would need about $85,680 for basic necessities, child care and taxes, plus some extra for rainy day and retirement savings – if the mother had employer-sponsored health insurance and retirement benefits.

This is higher than the 2011 median income for District households as a whole, but nearly $22,000 lower than the median for households classified as white/non-Hispanic.

One of many indications that the growing economic prosperity Mayor Gray’s recent State of the District address celebrated hasn’t done much for the “have-nots” in the city.

The challenge Fair Budget faces is that no panel can specifically address all the programs that could alleviate hardship — and narrow the huge income gaps here — if the Mayor and the DC Council invested more money in them.

The event can provide a framework for the programs, however, and draw some links among them. Also identify priorities for addressing critical weaknesses.

We know, for example, that the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program aims to prepare parents for work that will, at the very least, reduce their need for safety net benefits.

The District has invested resources in making TANF job training more effective. It’s also launched several initiatives to match job seekers with employers that might hire them.

But many parents won’t be able to work unless they have child care — and a subsidy to make it affordable. Consider, for example, that the average annual market rate local centers charge for infants is $2,400 more than a full-time minimum wage worker earns.

Yet the District’s subsidy program reimburses providers at such low rates that many have gone out of business. The remainder perforce generally limit the number of subsidized children they’ll take.

So there are more than 9,000 infants and toddlers on center waiting lists, according to the Fair Budget invite.

We’ve thus got one program that’s doing more to address barriers to work and another that should, but isn’t because it’s egregiously under-funded.

Similarly, the employment prospects of more than 36% of D.C. adults are extremely limited because they’re functionally illiterate.

Yet local funding for adult education programs was cut in Fiscal Year 2011 and again in Fiscal Year 2012. It’s at its twice-reduced level in the current budget, I’m told. (The budget for the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, where adult ed. is housed, is notoriously opaque.)

Well, I could go on, but point is made, I hope. As with any complex problem, poverty has a lot of inter-related parts. And the District government has a lot of parts that affect it, for good or ill.

If the Mayor truly wants to “improve the quality of life for all,” as his One City Action Plan says, then he should fashion a budget that reflects a comprehensive commitment to both the safety net and poverty reduction.

Like all elected officials, he’ll tend to want what he believes his constituents want seriously enough to consider when election time rolls round.

So a good turnout at the Fair Budget Coalition’s event would send a helpful message. And I expect it to be both informative and a launching pad for this year’s grassroots budget advocacy.

And who wouldn’t be inspired to launch after listening to panelists who know poverty first-hand — and while sitting among some of the families from DC General who’ll be there too?

The hour-long event begins at 3:30 p.m. in Room 412 of the Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. You’ll need a photo ID to get past the guards.

And Fair Budget asks that you RSVP to Janelle Treibitz, 202-328-5513 or janelle@fairbudget.org.

UPDATE: The event will be in Room 123 instead of Room 412, as originally planned.

Blame Game Not the Real Sequestration Story

The manager of a LinkedIn group I belong to asked whether Congress should delay the sequester the President “had demanded as part of the Budget Control Act.”

This set off a long string of responses — and long answers from the manager. As you might guess from the original question, the debate centered largely on whom to blame and why.

I mention this back-and-forth because it resembles much of the news coverage of the impending across-the-board cuts — and the op-eds as well.

We get blow-by-blow reports on who said what, who’s got the upper hand and how we got into this mess to begin with.

We get justifications of the President’s call for a balanced alternative. We get rehashes of the Republicans’ talking points. See, for example, this classic by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Now this isn’t the whole of the media stream, of course. We’ve also had coverage of how sequestration will affect the economy as a whole — often, though not always combined with its impacts on the labor market.

Also some fearsome warnings about how the defense cuts will cripple our national security.

Defense contractors have been very busy folks. So much so that the economy-jobs coverage often focuses on the jobs they’ll cut — and, thanks to the Pentagon, on civilian layoffs in the Defense Department as well.

We haven’t been hearing nearly as much about the impacts of the across-the-board cuts to the many and varied programs inelegantly lumped into the “non-defense discretionary” category.

Even more importantly, we haven’t been hearing much about the people these cuts will harm — unless you count the gross job loss figures.

In point of fact, the cuts will potentially harm us all.

The Food and Drug Administration won’t conduct as many food safety inspections. And it’s already not conducting nearly as many as it should.

Our communities may have fewer firefighters and the emergency personnel we perforce count on during and after natural disasters.

Our public schools will lose teachers — either that or our state and local governments will have to pick up the costs of keeping them. That would undoubtedly mean either higher taxes or, more likely, cutbacks in other programs and services we value.

A bare handful of examples.

Those who want to get a fuller picture can read a letter to colleagues by Congressman Norman Dicks or a report, both more and less comprehensive, by Senator Tom Harkin, Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, Human Services and Education.

The figures in both of these documents are outdated because they were issued before Congress decided to postpone sequestration until the beginning of next month.

But each, in its own way, helps us understand that the real story of sequestration isn’t — or shouldn’t be — about who’s to blame for the fact we’re facing it or who will get the blame if it happens.

It’s about the people across this country who will be adversely affected — and above all, the people who can least afford more adversity.

I’m talking, of course, about low-income people who rely on safety net programs and other publicly-funded programs that offer them and their children a chance to gain a toehold in the middle class.

I’ve been struggling to tell this story for well over two weeks and haven’t been able to corral the many, many figures — the dollar losses and the losers — into a reasonably tidy post that makes them meaningful.

As fallback, here’s another bare handful of examples — these pulled from a recently-issued White House fact sheet.

• Approximately 600,000 mothers and young children will lose the specially-tailored nutrition assistance, education and health care referrals they get from WIC.
• Approximately 70,000 children will be dropped from Head Start and Early Start programs, losing the diverse services that help them enter kindergarten as healthy and ready to learn as their better-off peers.
• Nearly 1.2 million school-age children will lose access to programs and services designed to help them overcome learning disadvantages associated with poverty, limited English proficiency and other factors.
• Long-term jobless workers and their families will face unemployment benefits cuts as high as 9.4%.

These aren’t the only imminent threats to the well-being and future prospects of low-income children.

For example, some large, though unknown number of children may become homeless, since the White House says that 125,000 families are likely to lose their federally-funded housing vouchers — an even larger number than the estimate I recently cited.

At the same time, they’ll be less likely to receive short-shot assistance that could help them move to cheaper housing — and even less likely than now to gain access to shelter or housing subsidized by homeless assistance grants.

I suppose journalists will find stories in the across-the-board cuts once families start losing their housing subsidies, frail seniors their home-delivered meals, veterans their shelter access, etc.

Perhaps enough of these stories will make the impending cuts a brief, unhappy episode in our history.

Perhaps next year’s budget will, to borrow from the President, give low-income people a fair shot at a better future — and a fair enough share of our country’s great wealth to meet their basic needs.

Perhaps, but as doubtful, I fear, as the Republicans agreeing to tax increases now — or Democrats to an alternative that’s non-defense spending cuts alone.

New DC Poverty and Shared Prosperity Figures Show Uneven Progress

Last week, I took a crack at the Half in Ten campaign’s updated poverty reduction and shared prosperity indicators for the nation as a whole. It’s also updated a smaller set for each state and the District of Columbia.

Here then is what we can learn from the new figures for the District.

We can look at these in a couple of ways — in comparison to last year’s or to the same indicators for the whole country. We can also see how the District ranks among states.

But the District isn’t a state. And however much it deserves to be one, comparisons to other large cities rather than to states as a whole would be more appropriate for issues like Half in Ten’s.

So let’s just look at the indicators themselves.

On the whole, we see more progress than backsliding. But — no news to any of you, I guess — the District has a long way to go on both the poverty and shared prosperity fronts.

For some indicators, the progress would be expected.

For example, the official poverty rate for the District dropped, though it was still well above the national rate. Ditto for the unemployment rate.

We see progress that can’t be attributed simply to the improving economy, however. The backsliding calls for other — or at least, more complex — explanations too.

Good Jobs

In addition to the unemployment rate, Half in Ten provides a handful of indicators for the employment prospects of relatively young District residents. Forward movement across the board:

• The percent of freshmen who completed high school in four years increased from 56% to 62.4%* — far below the nationwide 75.5% rate, but progress nonetheless.
• The percent of “disconnected youth” dropped by 1%, leaving us with nine out of every hundred youth who were neither working nor in school.
• The already-high percent of young adults (25-34) with at least a two-year college degree rose to 62.7%.

Stronger Families

The good jobs indicators clearly relate to child, youth and family well-being. Unlike these, the indicators Half in Ten puts in the strengthening families category are a good news/bad news story.

In the good news part, the rate of births to teen mothers dropped from 50.9 to 45.4 per 1,000. Still considerably above the national 31.3 rate, but moving in the right direction.

And the percent of residents without health insurance dropped to 6.9% — well below the 15.7% national rate, which also registered a drop last year.

In the bad news part, the pay gap between men and women workers reportedly grew — and by a lot.** In 2010, it was considerably smaller than the nationwide gap. Last year, it was bigger.

And the rate of children in foster care rose from 18 to 20 per 1,000. Notwithstanding what I said about the rankings, I can’t resist noting that the District’s rate is far higher than any state’s.

Economic Security

Good and bad news for indicators in this category also.

On the good news side, the rate of food insecure District households dropped from 13% to 10.9%, while the nationwide rate rose.

And the percent of jobless District residents who received unemployment insurance benefits shot up from 36.3% to 64% — at least in part due to program reforms the District adopted to get its share of the reward money offered by the Recovery Act.

On the bad news side, the percent of District households without bank accounts — a measure of asset-building capacity — rose from 24.4% to 41%.

Might the marked increase have something to do with the new fees banks are charging — or their higher minimum balance requirements?

One economic security indicator that looks very positive is, I think, misleading.

We’re told that the number of rental units for very low-income households increased from 53 to 77 per hundred — almost 20 more than the nationwide rate.

How could that be when we know we’ve got an affordable housing  crisis here?

The answer lies in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s definition of “very low-income,” i.e., at or below 50% of the median income for families in the area.

The area HUD carves out for the District includes nearby suburbs populated by very well-off folks.

A median income for the District alone would put more units out of reach — even more if Half in Ten had linked its indicator to “extremely poor households,” i.e., at or below 30% of AMI.

Half Full, Half Empty and Now What?

So we’ve got progress on more indicators than not. But we’ve still got well over 109,000 poor District residents and lots more who aren’t getting a share of that prosperity that parts of our envisioned One City enjoy.

Our local officials could move some indicators in the right direction — or further in the right direction.

But much depends on what Congress decides to do about tax revenues and spending cuts in whatever bargain emerges to pull us back from the so-called “fiscal cliff.”

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* These figures are for the 2007-8 and 2008-9 school years. After Half in Ten published its update, the U.S. Department of Education released high school graduation rates for 2010-11. These are the first set to reflect a standardized calculation method for all states.

The District’s on-time graduation rate was 59% last year. This, at the very least, raises questions about the prior progress shown.

** The wage gap figure Half in Ten provides is significantly greater than the gap reported by the American Association of University Women. Part of the difference derives from how annual earnings are calculated, but there’s got to be some other factor too.