Last week, the Senate Agriculture Committee finished a bill that cuts the program by $4.1 billion over the next 10 years. This is slightly less than last year’s proposed cut, but only because the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate has changed.

The House Agriculture Committee boosted its food stamp cuts to approximately $21 billion* over the same 10-year period. This $4.5 billion increase over last year reflects substantive changes in the proposed legislation.

Senate Agriculture Committee’s Cut

The Senate Agriculture Committee decided again to impose a restriction on a provision commonly known as “heat and eat.”

As things stand now, states can give households the maximum allowance for household utility costs if they receive any benefit from the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

In some, but not all cases, this entitles them to a larger food stamp benefit because it reduces their adjusted income.

The Senate Agriculture Committee’s bill would restrict “heat and eat” to households that receive more than $10 a year from LIHEAP — directly or as a payment to their utility company.

CBO earlier estimated that this change would reduce benefits for nearly 500,000 households by an average of $90 a month.

Since then, sequestration has cut LIHEAP funding by nearly $270.8 million — this on top of cuts totaling $1.6 billion since Fiscal Year 2010.

So the 15 states and the District of Columbia that now use the “heat and eat” option will be hard put to protect all beneficiaries from benefits cuts, but not as hard put as under the House Agriculture Committee’s bill.

House Agriculture Committee’s Cuts

Last year, the House Agriculture Committee’s Farm Bill adopted the same “heat and eat” restriction as the Senate’s.

Its new bill raises the minimum LIHEAP benefit required to $20 in any given year. This would increase the number of households affected to about 850,000, according to CBO estimates reported by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Most of House Agriculture’s food stamp savings, however, come from a restriction it would again impose on an option known as categorical eligibility.

At this point, states can, in some cases, use the same gross income and asset limits for food stamp eligibility as they use for programs they fund out of their Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant or funds they spend to meet their maintenance-of-effort requirement.

The alternative cut-offs may be used for households that receive any TANF-funded benefit or service, as well as those that receive cash assistance from the Supplemental Security Income program or a state general assistance program.

They enable some low-income people — mainly working families and seniors — to receive food stamp benefits although the standard gross income and/or asset limit would disqualify them.

These are hardly people who don’t need food assistance, as CBPP explains.

A working family may have a gross income higher than 130% of the federal poverty line, but far less than the FPL after allowable costs are deducted.

A senior may have somewhat more than $3,250 in retirement savings to supplement a Social Security benefit that leaves him/her well below the FPL, as would be the case for a former minimum wage worker.

So-called broad-based categorical eligibility, i.e., eligibility based on receipt of any TANF benefit, enables people like these to receive food stamps.

All but 10 states use it to ease the standard, very restrictive asset maximum — $2,000, except for seniors. Fourteen states and the District use it to allow a somewhat higher gross income as well.

The House Agriculture Committee eliminates broad-based categorical eligibility by restricting cat-el to households that receive cash assistance from TANF or one of the other aforementioned programs.

CBO has estimated that 1.8 million fewer low-income people would receive food stamp benefits. The Office of Management and Budget put the figure at 3 million.

CBO also estimates that 210,000 children wouldn’t get free school meals any more because their eligibility depends on their family’s participation in the food stamp program.

So they’d be doubly deprived — as would their parents, who’d have to pay for all their kids meals, as well as their own.

The House Agriculture Committee’s bill also cuts funding for the nutrition education program that’s part of SNAP.

The $274 million cut would come on top of a $110 million cut Congress made in January — this to offset the costs of averting a milk price spike that would otherwise have resulted from its failure to pass a Farm Bill last year.

So families who don’t get dumped out of the food stamp program will get less help in learning how to make healthy food choices they can afford.

This is already a challenge. But it will soon get harder, even without any new “heat and eat” restriction, because earlier raids on the food stamp program will reduce benefits for all participants at the end of October.

To top off the savings, the House Agriculture Committee eliminates the bonuses USDA has been awarding states for outstanding performance and notable improvements in key aspects of program administration.

The bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures told the Committee last year that the bonuses had proved effective, noting that the payment error rate was at a record low.

But the Committee’s bill would end them anyway, just as last year’s bill would have.

So we’ve got two very different bills — and an upcoming battle royal in the House.

What the end result of all this will be is anybody’s guess.

What’s clear, however, is that House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas is spinning his bill when he says that it “won’t take a calorie off the plate of anyone who needs help.”

Even the Senate Ag Committee’s Farm Bill would. And it’s not nearly so bad.

* The somewhat smaller figure you may have read elsewhere is the total for all the changes that have budgetary impacts in the Nutrition title of the Farm Bill . Modest increases for The Emergency Food Assistance Program and several other items account for the difference.

Serious for anyone, but especially someone like Mom, who’s approaching her 94th birthday.

I’ve been wondering whether she’d have gone to the hospital so fast if she hadn’t had Medicaid to supplement her Medicare benefits.

Would she instead have waited to see if the cough subsided and the breathing got easier, knowing she’d have to cover a deductible — and perhaps “coinsurance,” i.e., a copay — she couldn’t afford?

I doubt this would have crossed my mind if I hadn’t been reading responses to the recently-published study of the effects of expanded Medicaid coverage in Oregon.

As you may know, the researchers compared certain health-related measures for low-income Oregon residents who’d won and lost out in a lottery the state used to expand its Medicaid program.

No seniors like Mom in either group because Oregon, like all other states, provides some Medicaid coverage for all low-income Medicare beneficiaries who’ve also got quite limited savings and other financial assets.

So the researchers were comparing two groups of people between the ages of 19 and 65 — all quite poor, some insured by Medicaid and some with no health insurance.

Not surprisingly, they found that lottery winners used health services more, including for preventive care. Prescription medications as well.

They had virtually no catastrophic out-of-pocket expenses — also significantly less occasion to borrow money or skip paying other bills to pay those for their health care.

More surprisingly perhaps, they had significantly reduced rates of depression. (Any relationship here to relief from plaguing financial worries?)

On the other hand, the researchers found no significant effects on several basic health measures — diagnosis and treatment for high blood pressure and elevated cholesterol levels.

And though Medicaid apparently increased probabilities for diabetes diagnosis and medication, it had no significant effect on a measure used for diabetics’ blood sugar control — at least, not within the study timeframe.

This relatively small, highly technical study has proved a Rorschach test of people’s views of the Affordable Care Act, as a borrowed headline on The Incidental Economist says.

ACA opponents jumped on the findings, of course. The libertarian Cato Institute immediately saw “a huge ‘Stop’ sign” in front of Medicaid expansion.

Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson found confirmation for his view that the ACA has been “oversold” as a measure to improve health — as indeed, has health insurance generally.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat concluded that the study tended to support health insurance that covers only catastrophes because more comprehensive insurance doesn’t deliver better health, as ACA supporters said it would.

ACA proponents jumped on the findings too, arguing in part that protection from medical bankruptcy is a good enough reason to expand Medicaid, as the law initially required.

That, however, as they pointed out, isn’t the only benefit the study found. Many references to what one of the researchers called the “astounding finding” on improved mental health.

Some progressives also jumped on opponents for misunderstanding — or perhaps deliberately misusing — the health measure findings.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones does a nice job here. As he explains, “significant” is used in its statistical sense, not as we commonly use it to signal something meaningful or important.

The study did find “fairly substantial improvements” for measures like high blood pressure, as Drum’s annotations of one of its tables shows. But the sample size was too small for these to meet the statistical test — a 95% confidence level.

Nearly lost in the back-and-forth on the latest paper are some findings from an earlier study by the same research team.

This one looked at several health measures, including what we might consider the most determinative — mortality rates.

Samples were large enough to get statistically significant results because the team was comparing rates in three states that had expanded their Medicaid programs with rates in three  that hadn’t.

Lo and behold, mortality rates went down in the expansion states — by 6.1%. That’s 2,840 fewer deaths a year for every 500,000 people who gained access to affordable health care through Medicaid.

Which brings me back to Mom, who might not be alive if she hadn’t gone to the hospital when she did.

And who probably wouldn’t be back in her own place now if Medicaid weren’t covering the costs of a home aide and a physical therapist to help her get more steady on her feet.

This isn’t statistically significant, but it’s pretty damn significant to me and others who love her.

The bill is part of a strategy that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor developed for his caucus after the (to them) disappointing results of last year’s elections.

They’ve got an image problem, they think. For some unfathomable reason, a whole lot of voters think the Republican party cares only about the rich.

House Republicans have to show us that they’re “making life work for more Americans and their families,” as a special website Cantor created proclaims.

So he and his colleagues have decided to give working families flexibility, according to the title of the bill. “Flexibility” here refers to the ability to take time off from work without losing pay.

But not, as the proposed Healthy Families Act would. It would require most employers to provide some paid leave for personal or family health-related needs or to get help in cases of domestic violence, stalking or sexual assault.

The Working Families Flexibility Act would instead supposedly allow employees to choose compensatory time instead of overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours a week.

This means, of course, that it would apply only to workers who get paid by the hour — those at the bottom of the wage scale. They’re the least likely to have paid leave benefits. So the bill might seem a boon to them.

But it isn’t — mainly because these workers wouldn’t really have the choice the bill seems to give them.

Hypothetically, they could choose to continue getting overtime pay instead of opting for comp. time. We have to assume that many would, since $10.00 an hour — the average wage for workers without paid sick leave — is barely enough to lift a family of three above the federal poverty line.

But, as Working America argues, employers would have the upper hand. They could give workers incentives to choose comp. time, e.g., a better shift. They could pressure them.

True, the bill specifically prohibits employers from intimidating, threatening or coercing employees to accept comp. time instead of overtime pay.

But, as the National Women’s Law Center notes, we have more than enough evidence that many employers pay no mind to provisions in our labor laws that are supposed to protect low-wage workers.

Even workers who willingly chose comp. time couldn’t necessarily use it when they needed it.

An employer could legally deny a request by saying it “unduly disrupts … operations” or grant it “within a reasonable period,” rather than for the particular day(s) or hour(s) requested.

So much for taking a day off when your kid is sick — or her school declares a snow day and there’s no one else to care for her.

So much for knowing you can get a few hours off when you need to get legal protection from an abuser.

The Working Families Flexibility Act has another implication for low-wage workers. It really is, as Working America says, a “job killer” because it enables employers to get all needed work done on the cheap.

At this point, as the Fair Labor Standards Act intended, employers have a financial incentive to hire more workers — or offer some part-timers full-time jobs — when they need to get more work done because overtime is half again as costly as straight wage.

Comp. time obviously does away with the incentive.

So here you are, working mothers. You can’t be sure you’ll generally work only eight hours a day and thus have a little time to get to the grocery store, help your kids with their homework, etc.

You can’t be sure you’ll have time off when you need it — or enough time off for a major life event like childbirth because your employer can, at any time, convert all but 80 hours of your comp. time to pay.

You can’t work overtime to make ends meet. And if, like 7.6 million workers, you’ve got a part-time job, though you’d like full-time work, you’re probably stuck with the hours you’ve got.

If House Republicans hadn’t already made “flexibility” a suspect word, this bill would do it.

We see one-year decreases for the homeless population as a whole and for all the subgroups the District reports to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Decreases are longer-term for two overlapping groups — homeless individual men and women, i.e., those not with family members, and individuals classified as chronically homeless.

The District’s report attempts to account for the decreases. It attributes them to an expansion in permanent supportive housing capacity and its investments in homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing.

We’ve got sound evidence for the impact of PSH. The evidence for HPRP — the rapid re-housing component, in particular — is squishy.

It may help explain the one-year declines, but they’re no proof that rapid re-housing will end homelessness for the families that the Mayor — and his Director of Human Services — want to force into the program.

Permanent Supportive Housing

As I previously remarked, the steady drop in the number of chronically homeless individuals counted probably reflects the high priority that both federal and local policies have placed on moving these individuals into PSH.

The report itself provides additional evidence for this. At the time of the latest count, it says, 3,690 individuals and 983 families were in PSH units, thus not homeless for the purposes of the count.

Both these figures are higher than those reported in 2012 — by 18% and 8% respectively.

But this doesn’t mean that the District can take credit for providing housing with supportive services for all these formerly homeless people.

The DC Fiscal Policy Institute reports that the Department of Human Services expects to have 1,350 households in the PSH units it’s funding this fiscal year.

Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing

The PIT count report offers no basis for assessing the impacts of homelessness prevention and rapid re-housing.

A brief by the Community Partnership to End Homelessness says that 762 individuals and 643 families are “stably housed” because of HPRP.

But we have no timeframe for these figures. So we don’t know how long ago the beneficiaries received the one-shot or limited-time assistance — let alone anything about them, e.g., how much steady income they had.

We do, however, have data indicating that a goodly number of individuals and/or families didn’t stay stably housed after their rapid re-housing subsidies expired, presumably because they couldn’t afford to pay the full rent.

A presentation, also by the Community Partnership, says that two-thirds of rapid re-housing participants “exited” the program to “permanent destinations” (HUD-speak for permanent housing) and that 91% of them remain stably housed.

So about 39 out of every 100 households that had the limited-term rent subsidies are in some sort of unstable situation — either at-risk or literally homeless.

We don’t know how long the rest have been stably housed, though a recent statement by David Berns, the director of Human Services, suggests perhaps only one year.*

We do know, however, that some homeless families declined rapid re-housing because they were pretty sure they couldn’t pick up the full rent. So even if the stably-housed figure is fairly long-term, it would reflect some self-selection.

Why Fuss About the Rapid Re-Housing Data?

I’m nattering about the under-supported claims for the success of rapid re-housing because they have immediate policy implications.

As I recently wrote, the Mayor’s proposed amendments to the Homeless Services Reform Act would, among other things, give homeless families a choice between rapid re-housing and life on the streets.

At the time of the PIT count, 18% of homeless D.C. adults with children had no source of income whatever. Twenty-five percent were employed, but obviously not earning enough to pay market-rate rents here.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program was the most commonly reported source of income. The maximum TANF benefit for a family of three is less than a third of the monthly rent on a modest two-bedroom apartment.

How many families who’ve remained stably housed entered the rapid re-housing program with comparable incomes — and comparably doubtful near-term prospects for such significant improvement that they could afford full rent?

For the two-bedroom apartment, that would require a monthly income of nearly $4,707 — more than three times the District’s minimum wage.

Seems to me the DC Council should have a much better grasp on the putative — and prospective — success rates of rapid re-housing before it votes on the HRSA amendments.

A better grasp and a lot more input on other issues too.

* Berns says that “91 percent of those who have been re-housed … remained in stable housing after one year.” He’s apparently using the Community Partnership’s figure as if it were a percent of the whole, rather than of two-thirds.

And while homelessness among individual adults is now lower than in 2008, when the recession had just set in, family homelessness is still exponentially higher.

This is the top line news for the District in the just-issued report on the results of the one-night homelessness counts by communities that belong to the Metropolitan Council of Governments.

As I always say, these point-in-time counts don’t tell us how many homeless people there are — only how many meet the restrictive definition the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development mandates.

Nevertheless, they’re all we’ve got for the District’s homeless population and the subgroups reported to HUD.

So here are the figures, with some additional calculations I’ve made to indicate change over time. I’ll deal with how the report explains the recent decreases in a followup post.

The total number of homeless people counted dropped a bit — from 6,954 last year to 6.865. This represents a decrease of 1.3%, but it’s still 16% higher than in 2008.

The number of homeless families also decreased — from 1,014 to 983 or by 3%. Even with the drop, however, the number has increased by nearly 67.5% since 2008.

The count identified 3,169 homeless family members — just 18 fewer than in 2012. Of these, 1,301 were adults and 1,868 were children with them.

The number of homeless individual men and women, i.e., those not with family members, declined for the third year in a row. The latest count identified 3,696 — 22% fewer than in 2008.

These are adults only. The count identified six homeless unaccompanied youth, i.e., kids under 18 who weren’t with a family member.

This presumably reflects major flaws in the count, since a limited survey by the DC Alliance of Youth Advocates found about six times as many who’d fit the definition the count used.

Both local and federal policies have put a high priority on moving chronically homeless individuals into permanent supportive housing.

We see the results in the number counted — 1,764, as compared to 1,870 in 2012. This is the fourth year in a row that the number has dropped.

PSH probably also helps explain the relatively small number of unsheltered homeless individuals counted — 512. This is 25% fewer than in 2012.

The count isn’t complete, of course, but the percent drop is probably fairly accurate. Figures for earlier years may not be comparable because recent PIT reports suggest greater efforts to identify the unsheltered population.

All these numbers speak to choices local policymakers have made — and some facing them right now. More on this tomorrow.

As I’ve said before, NAEH relies mainly, as it must, on federal government sources. For homelessness itself, this means the limited and not altogether reliable point-in-time counts that recipients of homeless assistance grants report to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

That said, it seems reasonable to assume that the methods recipients use generally don’t change much from one year to the next. So the percent changes NAEH reports are probably fairly accurate.

What we see overall are continuing trends — not only for homelessness itself, but for factors that indicate high risks of homelessness.

Homelessness Nationwide

The total number of literally homeless people dropped by 0.4% last year — such a small decrease as to represent more or less a steady state. All told, 633,782 people were counted as homeless.

Decreases for veterans and individuals classified as chronically homeless were much larger — 7.2% and 6.8% respectively.

The number of homeless families remained virtually the same — 77,157, as compared to 77,186 in 2011. However, the rate of family homelessness rose in 27 states and the District.

And the number of homeless people in families rose by 1.4% to 239,403. NAEH translates this into an estimated 3,251 more homeless children who were with an adult.

Over the longer term, homelessness for all the individual populations counted has trended down. We see a few blips up from one year to the next, but lower figures for all since 2005, when HUD standardized point-in-time data collections.

On a less cheery note, 38.4% of the homeless people counted last year — 243,627 — had no form of shelter or housing at all, except perhaps a car, an abandoned building or some other indoor place “not meant for human habitation.”

This is virtually the same number as were counted in 2011.

The decreases in both chronic and veteran homelessness clearly reflect the priority that communities have placed on them in response to direction from HUD and, more recently, targeted funding from the Veterans Administration.

Most permanent supportive housing is for chronically homeless individuals, including veterans. Last year, there were more PSH beds than beds in emergency shelters or transitional housing — a time-limited type of housing that also includes services.

Homelessness Risk Factors

The risk factors NAEH reports fall into two related categories — income and housing costs.

On the income side, the official unemployment rate was lower in 2011 than in 2010 — down to a still high 8.9%.

This is a limited indicator, however, since it doesn’t include people employed part-time who wanted — and, in some cases, used to have — full-time work. Nor does it include people who didn’t look for work because it seemed futile.

The median household income was a bit lower in 2011 and the official poverty rate 0.6% higher, pushing the number of poor adults and children up to more than 48.4 million.

Some of them were undoubtedly beyond the risk stage.

On the housing cost side, fair market rents increased in 38 states. The nationwide FMR for a modest two-bedroom apartment, plus basic utilities rose 1.5%, making for a five-year increase of 15.1%.

More than 6.5 million households spent more than half their income for rent — 5.5% more than in 2010. And the bottom fifth on the income scale spent, on average, a mind-boggling 87% of their income.

Well over 7.4 million people in poor households were living doubled-up with friends or family members. This represents a 9.4% increase over 2010.

HUD reports tell us that doubling up is a major warning sign for future homelessness. In 2011, nearly 32% of people admitted to a shelter had been staying with friends or family immediately before.

The policy implications here seem blatantly obvious. Putting people back to work — and to work for the first time — would help reduce homelessness if the jobs paid a decent wage.

But we need much greater investments in affordable housing too — more support for construction and preservation, more funds for public housing operations and maintenance and considerably more for housing vouchers.

We see marked downturns in the rates of chronically homeless individuals and veterans. They show what could happen if our government got equally serious about the rest of the homeless population.

This isn’t the first time Congress has created a loophole in the law that mandates across-the-board cuts.

When the Agriculture Department announced that it would have to furlough the inspectors who must be in meat, poultry and egg processing plants, Congress found funding to keep the inspectors on the job.

Took part of it out of the department’s fund for grants to help more schools serve breakfast to low-income students.

I’m hardly the first to note that Congress has evinced no significant concern about other delays sequestration seems likely to cause — or those that will worsen.

Nor about other harms the cuts will cause — not merely furloughs that will create hardships for some as-yet unknown number of federal employees, but as many as 750,000 actual job losses in both the public and private sectors.

And lost benefits for jobless workers who’ve been unemployed long enough to qualify for federally-funded unemployment insurance benefits. Nineteen states have already rolled out cuts averaging $120 a week. The longer states wait, the bigger the cuts will have to be.

Some of the other cuts have also gotten considerable press coverage.

So you probably know that Head Start programs have begun paring back enrollment. Some of them already have waiting lists — a far more consequential sort of delay than some extra hours in an airport.

The U.S. Secretary of Education says that about 70,000 children won’t have the early learning opportunities and other benefits, e.g., health services, that Head Start provides.

One Head Start director warns that parents may have to quit their jobs to tend to their children — not unlikely, since unsubsidized child care can cost more than they earn.

And sequestration has taken a bite out of the block grant that helps pay for subsidized care.

Also out of federal programs that fund subsidized housing. Long waiting lists for housing assistance are already common. And the number of years applicants wait are often far longer than the number of hours fussed airline travelers waited.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 140,000 fewer households will have housing vouchers by early next year. Others, it says, may face rent increases — perhaps beyond their ability to pay.

Yet funds for homeless services will be cut too.

But I’m cherry-picking here, just as many say Congress just did. Those interested can find many other examples in the weekly reports the Coalition on Human Needs is publishing.

No one, I think, would doubt that Congress hasn’t acted to avert impacts like the aforementioned because the people affected don’t have the political clout that frequent fliers and agribusinesses do.

I think we’re looking at something more difficult to deal with than a power imbalance, however.

The air traffic controller and food safety inspector furloughs caused — or were about to cause — large, clear, nationwide impacts. In many other cases, the proverbial is only beginning to hit the fan — or more precisely, a vast number of fans.

Most of the genuine news we have about the impacts on low-income people and the programs that serve them are local — and often likelihoods rather than sure things.

This is partly because program directors, in many cases, don’t yet know what their share of the cut will be. Even those who do are mostly still figuring out how they’ll manage — and give various answers when asked.

We also don’t get a whole picture because stories tend to get written when some advocates have gotten reporters interested. And, face it, some programs have more heart-tug appeal than others.

In one respect, it’s good that we’re getting stories. In fact, this is a welcome — if unintended — side effect of the air traffic controller save.

Yet, in another respect, it’s dangerous. Because the more major media focus on a handful of programs — and the more grassroots campaigns call on Congress to save one or another — the more likely other FAA-type fixes become.

And most federal agencies, unlike FAA, don’t have a pot of money they can tap that they didn’t need to spend this year anyway.

So a reprieve for some programs will mean deeper cuts for others. Like as not they’ll be programs that benefit low-income people — especially those that don’t have an effective public voice or lend themselves so well to poignant individual stories.

House Republicans seem open to this. “The main thing,” says Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK), “is to secure $85 billion in savings. We are not wedded to where the savings come from.”

But the fundamental issue is the savings, a.k.a spending cuts. Sequestration is a singularly dumb way to address a problem that’s been blown out of all proportion, i.e., the federal deficit.

Yet, as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has testified, deep cuts at this point — even if not across-the-board — are likely to lead to less deficit reduction.

And the whole approach is unbalanced, since sequestration comes on top of $1.5 trillion in cuts and a mere $620 billion or so in additional revenues.

Congress ought to get rid of sequestration, which none of its members wanted — or thought would come to pass. And some, who will remain nameless, should back off their cuts-only/cuts-now solution to the long-term deficit.

That, I hope, will be the message that all who care about the well-being of our nation’s children, seniors and everyone in between will deliver. Because if we don’t hang together … Well, you know the rest.

I’ve been trying to digest the insights and impressions I gained. There was a lot coming at us from a lot of different angles.

And all the while, I keep thinking about what my tablemate Cathy, a recently returned citizen, said to me before the conference began. “I will live with this for the rest of my life.”

The “this,” I think, was partly the reason she was incarcerated to begin with — a nonviolent offense that involved no personal gain. She feels the charge was unfair.

She’ll live her whole life with a sense of injustice — and payments to the government for restitution in excess of $1 million.

The bigger part of the “this” are other consequences. Her family disowned her. And the case manager at the halfway house she was transferred to did nothing to prepare for the time she’d be released, though she’d have no home to go to.

“I would have been on the streets,” she said, if an acquaintance hadn’t found her a space in a shelter — a fortunate, if temporary solution to a common form of neglect that often leaves returning citizens stranded.

Top of the “this” list, however, is the red flag employers see.

Cathy has substantial work experience and in-demand skills. She got hired, criminal record notwithstanding, shortly after her release. But the company let her go, without notice or explanation. She assumes because some higher-up learned of her record.

She’s had a number of interviews since. But they’ve netted nothing — and in some cases, ended as soon as she’s disclosed her criminal conviction. The human resources person just “shuts down,” she said.

Well, Cathy is very capable and very determined. And there are people looking out for her interests, including some of the leaders at the conference.

So I believe she’ll find work. But her experience in our criminal justice system has inalterably changed her life — and in some ways, her very self, I gather.

Some would say, well, this is justice. An impartial judge decided she’d done something wrong. She was punished for it. And if the punishment lasts beyond her time in prison, so does the wrong. She can’t go back in time and undo it.

Set aside the particularities of Cathy’s case, where the question of wrong seems at least debatable.

I can’t help feeling that the justice our system purportedly metes out is enormously wasteful, both in dollars and in human lives. And the judgments commonly made about people with criminal records make the waste worse.

We incarcerate far more people than any other country in the world — nearly 1.6 million in 2011. We pay, on average, $34,135 a year for every one of them we’ve got locked up.

More than one in four released from state prisons are back within three years, draining funds that could be used for other purposes, including services that could keep them from going back through the revolving door.

“If any other institutions in America were as unsuccessful in achieving their ostensible purpose …, we would shut them down tomorrow,” says Professor James Gilligan.

The indirect costs of our propensity to imprison are greater than what we pay to lock up people who pose no risk of harm to anyone — and then to marginalize both them and formerly dangerous returning citizens who’d like nothing better than to lead ordinary, law-abiding lives.

A data analysis by two of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ projects found, among other things, that:

• Former male inmates earned 40% less than they would have if not incarcerated — a loss of nearly $179,000 by the time they reached age 49.
• Those whose earnings put them in the bottom fifth were twice as likely to be there 20 years later as low-earners who hadn’t done time.
• They were thus earning less than $7,600 in 2006 — about 46% of the federal poverty line for a family of three.

We must also consider the collateral damage to those who’ve done nothing wrong at all. More than half the people behind bars in 2008 were parents of minor-age children — most of them fathers.

Two-thirds of them were in prison for non-violent crimes. More than half had been the primary breadwinners for their families.

So families become poorer and more unstable — not only while the parent is behind bars, but afterwards.

For these as well as other reasons, children whose parents have been incarcerated get into more trouble in school. One study found that 23% whose fathers had served time were suspended or expelled, as compared to only 4% whose fathers hadn’t.

Their “prospects for economic mobility become significantly dimmer,” the Pew authors say — a fine understatement. They may, in fact, as the American Civil Liberties Union says, be in the pipeline to prison.

These are all quantifiable costs — not only to the returned citizens and their families, but to our economy as a whole.

How do we measure the psychological damages to children whose parents are taken away — not only those that result in the kinds of behaviors that get them suspended, but anxiety, depression and the like?

The psychological damage to the parents themselves? “People are coming out traumatized because of what goes on inside,” said one of the returning citizens at the conference.

How do we measure the contributions people like Cathy might make if their job opportunities weren’t constrained by their records?

Or the loss to her godchild, whose parents have severed connections?

I deferred the question in the headline here because the post was already quite long, and the answer isn’t simple. So here goes …

Social Security and the Deficit

Strictly speaking, Social Security doesn’t belong in the budget at all — at least, not in the package of spending and revenue proposals we ordinarily think of as such.

It has its own revenue stream — the payroll tax, plus an earmarked portion of income taxes paid on some of the benefits it provides. It also has $2.7 trillion in reserves, i.e., the unused portion of these taxes, invested in Treasury bonds, and the interest on these.

That’s all it’s got.

A shortfall would be dreadful, but it would have no impact on the deficit — unless, as seems likely, Congress used general tax revenues to avert a sudden, big benefits cut.

This, however, is an argument for crafting a measure that will keep the program solvent, not for putting the chained CPI in the budget.

Some say that the Trust Fund is just an accounting fiction. The Treasury bonds the reserves are invested in signify money that’s being used to help pay for items in what we ordinarily think of as the budget.

When Social Security starts drawing on its reserves, as it already has, the Treasury Department has to sell some bonds to other investors in order to pay the program what it owes — or use revenues from taxes not specifically intended for Social Security.

This doesn’t mean that Social Security is contributing to the deficit, however — any more than you or I could be said to increase the deficit if we cashed in some savings bonds a grandparent once gave us.

More Revenues Without Tax Reform

The chained CPI is probably in the President’s budget in part because it would increase tax revenues without any rate-raising or loophole-closing at all.

According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the federal government would gain $123.7 billion* over the first 10 years because tax brackets and other annually-adjusted tax provisions, e.g., the personal exemption and standard deduction, would rise more slowly.

So even a quite small increase in income could get taxed at a higher rate. The amount we’d owe wouldn’t be a whole lot greater than what we’d owe if the Internal Revenue Service continued to use the same inflation measure it’s been using.

But the tax code would be somewhat less progressive because filers at fairly low and moderate-income levels would take the biggest hits.

And at least some low and moderate-income families would get smaller reductions and/or refunds from the Earned Income Tax Credit because the maximum credit is adjusted for inflation, as are the phase-outs that gradually lower the credit when earnings reach some level above the amount eligible for the maximum.

There would be no impact on the refundable Child Tax Credit if Congress makes the current threshold for claiming it permanent, as the President has proposed.

Big if here, since we know that Congressional Republicans have wanted the EITC and the Child Tax Credit to revert to their more restrictive pre-Recovery Act forms.

Political Strategy

The revenues raised would be a small portion of the total increase the President now says he’d settle for. So it’s pretty clear the chained CPI is in the budget mainly for strategic reasons.

The received wisdom seems to be that he’s again striving for a grand bargain — offering Republican Congressional leaders the chained CPI and Medicare spending cuts they said they wanted in the fond hope they’ll agree to a scaled-back revenue-raising plan.

Or if not that, perhaps proving they’re altogether unreasonable and ought to lose their House majority next year so that Congress can get important business done.

This is what Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast thinks the President is up to — and why he thinks no one should fret about the chained CPI.

The Nation‘s John Nichols thinks otherwise. Look, he says, at how the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee is already messaging the President’s proposal as a “shocking assault on seniors.”

This is likely to depress votes for Democrats next year, Nichols predicts, citing examples from past mid-term Congressional elections.

The chained CPI proposal certainly has complicated life for Democrats in Congress now, even if they ultimately don’t have to cast an up-or-down vote on it — still TBD.

The larger issue, I think, is that the President has, to some extent, legitimized use of the chained CPI as a way to “save” Social Security — and chosen it instead of lifting the payroll tax cap.

So, as Blake Zeff at Salon asks, “How hard would it be for Republicans to push cuts through, when this [the chained CPI] is now mainstream Democratic policy?”

Cuts, I’d add, that could extend to programs specifically for low-income people, which the President’s proposal would hold harmless.

Note how House Majority Leader John Boehner grudgingly welcomes the chained CPI as an acknowledgment that “our safety net programs are unsustainable.”

This implies something far more sweeping than what the President has proposed for Social Security and Medicare, which arguably aren’t safety net programs anyway.

Well, maybe the rumblings and grumblings, mine included, are just worst-case scenarios. But I’m not ready to bet on that.

* The Office of Management and Budget estimates the revenue gain at $100 billion. Differences between CBO and OMB estimates are not unusual.

Then the President delivered a strong defense of “the commitments we make to each other,” including Social Security. So I put my draft post aside, figuring the chained CPI was off the bargaining table.

The more fool I. As you’ve probably read, it’s among the entitlement “reforms” in the President’s proposed budget.

The White House has taken great care to package it with other changes that would supposedly protect very elderly retirees and others who’ve relied on Social Security benefits for a long time. Also to shield programs that base eligibility on income.

But as economist/blogger Jared Bernstein said some time ago, the danger is that protections like these will all get swept aside, leaving only the benefits cuts.

Here then are some of the basic issues, as I see them. More to follow in a second post.

Why Do Anything About Social Security?

Our federal policymakers must do something about the Social Security retirement and disability insurance programs — and the sooner the better.

The Trust Fund will run out of money long about 2033. If nothing is done before then, the Social Security Administration will have to rely solely on what it continuously receives from payroll taxes.

That would be enough to pay about 75% of the benefits retirees would get if the Trust Fund still had reserves — a devastating loss for the nearly two-thirds who rely mainly or entirely on those benefits.

What Could Prevent the Shortfall?

At the risk of over-simplifying, our policymakers have two choices, not counting just letting the Trust Fund dry up. They could change the system to take in more or pay out less.

A switch to the chained CPI represents the latter approach because it rises more slowly than the currently-used index — the CPI-W. So, therefore, would the benefits that seniors, severely disabled former workers and eligible survivors receive.

Policymakers could instead “scrap the cap” on the amount of wage income subject to the tax that feeds the Social Security programs.

Or they could raise it enough to cover all but the top 10% of income, as it did in 1982 after Congress stepped in to shore up the program — not for the last time, incidentally.

High earners wouldn’t like this, of course. Nor perhaps would employers, since they’re responsible for half the payroll tax.

The National Federation of Independent Business has already said that its small business members “would violently oppose” it. These, as you know, are the “job creators” that our President and Congressional leaders are so fond of.

Is the Chained CPI More Accurate for Cost-of-Living Adjustments

Proponents of the chained CPI claim that it’s simply a more accurate cost-of-living measure because it reflects consumer responses to price increases. If the price of beef goes up, they buy less of it and more chicken. Etc.

Opponents argue that the index isn’t more accurate for seniors because they spend far higher portions of their income on items that aren’t amenable to switches, especially health care.

Even the CPI-W apparently understates their cost-of-living increases.

For some time now, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has maintained an experimental cost-of-living index specifically for the elderly. Over the long haul, it has risen somewhat faster than the CPI-W. And Social Security’s chief actuary expects it will in the future.

We’d probably see similar results from a cost-of-living measure for people with severe disabilities, since many of them also have disproportionately high health care costs.

So if accuracy were the real issue, Congress would give BLS the funds to fully develop its experimental index, as The New York Times, among others, has suggested.

What Other Objections Have Opponents Raised?

The over-riding objection to the chained CPI switch is that it would effectively cut benefits. The loss in any one year would be small. But losses would mount up over time because the base for each cost-of-living adjustment, as well as the COLA itself, would be lower.

The average earner, says the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, would lose a total of $4,631 by age 75 — more than three months of benefits. Another 10 years and the loss would mount to nearly a year’s worth of benefits.

We need to recall that retired workers now get, on average, only $1,261 a month — and former workers in the Social Security Disability Insurance program somewhat less.

For 36% of seniors, Social Security provides at least 90% of income — not surprising, given what we know about retirement savings. It’s the sole source of income for 29% of the most elderly.

As I mentioned earlier, the President’s budget includes a “benefit enhancement” — popularly known as a bump up. It’s supposed to restore the cumulative losses for people who live long enough to benefit.

Most who do would still get less, according to the SSS Campaign.

Those who don’t are just out of luck, of course. And they’re disproportionately lower-income people, for whom every Social Security dollar counts.

UPDATE: After I published this, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities issued a brief that provides more detail on the impacts of the chained CPI on Social Security retirement benefits.