Drink Your Milk NOW … Eggnog Too

Well, the U.S. House of Representatives certainly treated us to an egregious display of dysfunction, didn’t it?

One of the less reported aspects was its failure to pass a Farm Bill, i.e., a piece of legislation to renew, with revisions, a host of food and agriculture programs.

So what we have now is the last permanent version of the Farm Act, signed into law in 1949.

Anti-hunger advocates aren’t worried about this — yet. SNAP (the food stamp program) won’t expire because Congress put a temporary extension into the continuing resolution that will keep federal programs funded until March.

Advocates are worried because both the draft House Farm bill and the Farm Bill the Senate passed would cut benefits for about half a million households.

Perhaps I should say remaining households, since the House version would toss at least 1.8 million — maybe as many as 3 million — people out of the program.

Many farmers are unhappy because the various programs that protect them from losses depend on the Farm Act, as do other programs that benefit them, e.g., funding for their efforts to conserve natural resources.

Still, most of these were also extended until March — about the time crop farmers start planting.

But what about dairy farmers? They, of course, produce and sell milk year round.

One of the programs that supports milk prices has altogether expired because it was created after 1949 and not extended in the CR. The other program — the Dairy Price Support Program — has reverted to its 1949 form.

Under this program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture purchases milk — or more recently, certain products made with milk — when prices fall below specified levels. The latest Farm Act set these as fixed dollar values.

But back in 1949 and for some time thereafter, the target level was set as a ratio between milk prices and farm costs, including family living costs.

Failure to pass a new Farm Bill means that the Agriculture Department will have to use the 1949 formula, with adjustments for inflation and some other technical factors.

It will thus have to buy milk to support a price that’s roughly double the current market price.

So it’s reasonable to expect that dairy farmers will initially choose to sell to the government rather than to commercial sources. The old law of supply and demand will kick in, driving up retail milk and milk product costs.

The New York Times estimates costs as high as $6.00 — or even $8.00 — per gallon of milk. At the high end, this is nearly twice the average daily SNAP benefit.

But SNAP benefits will be lower before the new year ends — even if Congress decides not to make further cuts. Which, at this point, seems unlikely.

And WIC (the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children) will be cut by 8.2% if Congress doesn’t put the brakes on sequestration, i.e., the impending across-the-board cuts to programs that depend on annual appropriations.

More than 900,000 mothers and young children will be dropped from the rolls, according to Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.

This figure, their letter indicates, was based in part on food prices projected last fall — presumably prices for foods that participating mothers can buy with WIC coupons.

Milk and cheese account for about a third of WIC food spending. Double the costs of these and we should expect to see many more low-income families denied the specially-tailored nutrition assistance and other services that help give children a healthy start in life.

Similar results, of course, if Congress replaces sequestration with a bill that shifts all the mandated savings to non-defense programs that are already subject to sequestration and/or to safety net programs the current law protects.

The latest House-passed bill does both. The SNAP cuts are even worse than what we’d seen before. And the radically-low cap on non-defense appropriations puts WIC at risk of a bigger cut than sequestration itself.

These — or some compromised version — seem to me a greater danger than a long-term lapse back to the 1949 Farm Act.

On the other hand, it’s hard to predict what this Congress will do — or more precisely, fail to do.

So we can only hope that members heeded the President’s advice and drank their eggnog because the price could skyrocket.

Suggest we all do the same to get our minds off these troubles for a bit.

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.

Census Bureau Reports 16.1% Poverty Rate

Another round of news on poverty in the U.S. — this time from the Census Bureau’s latest report on the results of analyses using its Supplemental Poverty Measure.

Once again, the national poverty rate is higher than the rate the Bureau earlier reported, using its official measure — 16.1%, as compared to 15.1%.

In other words, about 3 million more people — a total of nearly 49.7 million — were living in poverty last year.

On the other hand, the percent of people living in extreme poverty, i.e., below 50% of the applicable threshold, is 1.5% lower than the official measure shows.

We get a mixed picture for state-level poverty rates, for which the Bureau uses three-year averages. Some of the rates are higher than the official rate. Some lower.

The rate for the District of Columbia rises sharply — from 19% to 23.2%. This is higher than the rate for any state except California.

As I’ve written before, the official measure sets poverty thresholds at three times the annually adjusted costs of what used to be the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s cheapest food plan.

The SPM starts from the costs of basic living expenses, adjusted for differences among major geographic areas and also differences in living situations, e.g., renting versus owning.

To these, it adds some other “necessary expenses,” e.g., payroll taxes, health care co-pays and other out-of-pocket costs.

On the other side of the ledger, it takes account of not only cash income, but some “near-money” federal benefits like tax credits and also some in-kind benefits, e.g., food stamps, two forms of child nutrition assistance, housing subsidies.

And it uses actual household size, rather than counting only household members who are related to one another, as the official measure does.

These differences explain not only the difference between the overall SPM rate and the official rate, but shifts in rates for different age and race/ethnicity groups.

We see, for example, that:

• The child poverty rate drops from 22.3% to 18.1%, reducing the number of children in poverty by about 3 million.
• The poverty rate for seniors rises from 8.7% to 15.1%, increasing the number of poor people 65 and older by somewhat more than 2.6 million.
• The poverty rate for blacks drops from 27.8% to 25.7% — still far higher than the non-Hispanic white rate of 11%, but now 2.3% lower than the rate for Hispanics.
• The poverty rate for Asians rises from 12.3% to 16.9% — the largest percent change for any race/ethnicity group reported.
• For children, the extreme poverty rate is less than half what it is under the official measure — 5.1%, as compared to 10.3%.
• For seniors, however, the extreme poverty rate rises — from 2.3% to 4.3%.

This year’s report is unusually timely because it gives us a read on the anti-poverty effects of some benefits that are at immediate risk. It tells us that:

• Food stamp benefits lifted more than 4.6 million people, including  about 2.1 million children, out of poverty last year.
• Well over 8.6 million more people, including nearly 4.7 million children, would have fallen below the poverty threshold if their family’s disposable income hadn’t been boosted by refundable tax credits.
• Unemployment insurance benefits kept nearly 3.4 million people out of poverty — mostly adults, but about 963,400 children too.
• And Social Security — the single most effective anti-poverty program we’ve got — accounted for 25.6 million fewer poor people than there would have been without its benefits. Poverty rates for all age groups would have been higher. The rate for seniors would have soared to 54.1%.

So there are the benefits. Now here are the risks.

The farm bills now pending in Congress would cut food stamp benefits for at least half a million households — 1.3 million if the House version prevails. The House bill would also mean no more food stamps at all for as many as 3 million people.

As you’re well aware, the Bush-era tax cuts are expiring. We can be quite confident that most will be renewed.

But Congressional Republicans want to extend earlier versions of the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit, not the expanded versions that have made a significant difference to low-income working families.

The federal program that funds unemployment insurance benefits for longer-term jobless workers will also soon expire. Some two million workers and their families may face the new year with no source of cash income.

Lead Republicans in Congress are about to sit at the bargaining table with their Democratic counterparts and White House officials to thrash out an alternative to the so-called fiscal cliff.

They say they’ll be amenable to increased revenues (not to be confused with higher tax rates for the wealthiest 2%).

But the deal must also include “real changes to the financial structure of entitlement programs” — apparently something along the lines of the recommendations in the plan produced by the co-chairs of the President’s fiscal commission, a.k.a. Bowles-Simpson.

These recommendations would cut Social Security retirement benefits in several different ways. With the average benefit now only $1,230 a month, we could see more seniors in poverty if the Democrats don’t hold firm to the position they’re taking now.

NOTE: A couple of the benefits impact figures reported by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are a bit higher than mine. This is also true for figures reported by the Center for American Progress. I’m at a loss to explain the discrepancies.

Hunger Struck More Families Last Year, USDA Reports

September is Hunger Action Month — a campaign launched by Feeding America to get us involved in efforts to help end hunger in this country.

And hunger there surely is, as the latest food (in)security report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows.

Last year, nearly 174.9 million households sometimes — or often — didn’t have the resources to buy the food that all members needed “for an active, healthy life.” These are households USDA classifies as food insecure.

There were more of them than in 2010, but the percent increase isn’t statistically significant, USDA says.

The bigger news, I think, is that the number of households with very low food security, i.e., those in which at least one member sometimes scrimped on meals or skipped them altogether, rose to more than 6.8 million — 5.7% of all households surveyed.

This is statistically significant. And it puts the very low food security rate back up to where it was during the recession we’re still recovering from.

All told, nearly 16.9 million people sometimes didn’t have enough to eat. For adults, in the main, this typically meant hunger during seven months of the year — and for a few days during each of these months.

Drilling down a bit, we see that:

• Food insecurity afflicted 20.6% of households with children — nearly 8 million families.
• Children themselves were food insecure in slightly under half these households — and actually experienced hunger in 374,000 of them.
• Food insecurity rates were highest for single-mother families — 36.8% or more than 3.5 million families.
• More than 1.1 million of them — 11.6% — were so food insecure as to fall into the generally recurrent hunger category.
• Single-father households also had unusually high food insecurity rates — 24.9%. But there were far fewer of them.

The correlation with poverty is, of course, very high. So not surprisingly, we see significant race/ethnicity differences.

• Among black households, 25.1% were food insecure, as compared to 11.4% of white, non-Hispanic households.
• The very low food security, i.e., hunger, rate among black households was 10.5%, as compared to 4.6% for white, non-Hispanic households.
• The food insecurity rate for Hispanic households was 26.% and the very low food security rate 8.3%.
• Children themselves were food insecure in 14.6% of black households, as compared to 6.7% of white, non-Hispanic households.
• The child food insecurity rate for Hispanic households was 17.4%.

Well over 88% of food insecure households were poor enough to qualify for food stamps. The USDA report doesn’t tell us how many received them. It does, however, tell us how households below the program’s standard income eligibility ceiling fared.

On the one hand, a large majority managed to keep enough food on the table without food stamps for all of 2011.

The survey results don’t tell us how, though we might guess that free school meals played a part. Perhaps also the food pantries and other emergency sources that Feeding America’s network supplies.

On the other hand, nearly half (49.1%) of the households that received food stamps all year were nevertheless food insecure. And more than one in five (22.3%) were so food insecure that at least one member of the household didn’t always have enough — or anything — to eat.

The new Farm Bill the Senate passed would nevertheless reduce food stamp benefits for about half a million households.

The version pending in the House would do the same. It would also cut off all benefits for at least 1.8 million low-income people, plus free school meals for about 280,000 prospectively hungry children.

If we’re going to end hunger in America — a doable thing in this very wealthy country — the very least our elected representatives can do now is avoid making it worse.

Sad that anyone should have to say something so blatantly self-evident.