House GOP takes another stab at food stamps bill

POLITICO

Cantor's goal is to have legislation in hand for a House vote by September. | AP Photo

By DAVID ROGERS | 8/1/13 5:54 PM EDT

House Republicans are proposing to double their food stamp savings to nearly $40 billion by rolling back waivers for able-bodied adults and targeting funds to states that are willing to impose greater work requirements on the parents of young children.
The prime mover is Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) who helped jettison the nutrition title from the House farm bill last month and is now trying to write his own version before the House goes to conference with the Senate.

Cantor has used a select working group of conservatives to help shape the package but shows signs now of reaching out to party moderates as well. And his goal is to have legislation in hand which the House can vote on in early September when it returns from the August recess.

The prime target appears to be able-bodied beneficiaries under 50 years old and without dependents — a population that has grown significantly since 2008 because of the bad economy and increased state waivers of a 20-hour-a-week work requirement.
By rolling back these waivers, large savings are possible, essentially by forcing millions off the rolls if they don’t find work after three months. Unless approached with some care, the impact could be severe in areas of chronically high-unemployment, such as the Rio Grande Valley, poor urban areas and Indian reservations, for example. And the final details of the bill have not been made public.
A second area of more modest but still controversial savings would come from using federal funds to pressure states to take a more aggressive welfare reform-like approach imposing work requirements on able-bodied parents with young children.
Currently Washington provides a 50 percent match for states that spend their own funds for employment and training programs for food stamp recipients. As proposed now, the bill would only provide this aid if the state is willing to operate welfare reform-like work activities for mothers with children over 1- years-old.
This is a significant expansion of the current food stamps work rules, which exempt mothers with children under 6.


Read More Here

Related articles

• GOP prepares bill to trim food stamps
• GOP prepares bill to cut food stamps by 5 percent
• Republican Extremism - 'House GOP drafting new food stamp bill with $40B in cuts'
• GOP to pitch $40 billion food-stamps cut
• GOP Proposes A $40 Billion Cut To The Food Stamp Program!
• Republicans Suggest Bill To Cut Food Stamps By $40 Billion
• House GOP Strikes Food Stamps Pact
• 5 Million Could Be Kicked Off Food Stamps Under Republican Cuts
• GOP prepares bill to cut food stamps by 5 percent

A Fading American Dream : Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives.

Four out of five American adults experience poverty at some point during their lifetime

• Some rural areas have poverty rates approaching 99 per cent

• Poverty among whites is inching higher, with 63 per cent of whites saying the economy is 'poor'

• By 2030, close to 85 percent of all working-age adults in the U.S. will experience bouts of economic insecurity

By Associated Press Reporter
PUBLISHED: 15:53 EST, 28 July 2013 | UPDATED: 02:24 EST, 29 July 2013

Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration's emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to "rebuild ladders of opportunity" and reverse income inequality.

Destitute: Salyers produce stand in Council, VA, doesn't generate enough income to support its owners

As nonwhites approach a numerical majority in the U.S., one question is how public programs to lift the disadvantaged should be best focused - on the affirmative action that historically has tried to eliminate the racial barriers seen as the major impediment to economic equality, or simply on improving socioeconomic status for all, regardless of race.

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy "poor."

'I think it's going to get worse,' said Irene Salyers, 52, of Buchanan County, Va., a declining coal region in Appalachia. Married and divorced three times, Salyers now helps run a fruit and vegetable stand with her boyfriend but it doesn't generate much income. They live mostly off government disability checks.

'If you do try to go apply for a job, they're not hiring people, and they're not paying that much to even go to work,' she said. Children, she said, have 'nothing better to do than to get on drugs.'

While racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live in poverty, race disparities in the poverty rate have narrowed substantially since the 1970s, census data show. Economic insecurity among whites also is more pervasive than is shown in the government's poverty data, engulfing more than 76 percent of white adults by the time they turn 60, according to a new economic gauge being published next year by the Oxford University Press.

The gauge defines 'economic insecurity' as a year or more of periodic joblessness, reliance on government aid such as food stamps or income below 150 percent of the poverty line. Measured across all races, the risk of economic insecurity rises to 79 percent.

Struggling: Renee Adams, left, posing with her mother Irene Salyers and son Joseph, 4, at their produce stand in Council, Va.

Marriage rates are in decline across all races, and the number of white mother-headed households living in poverty has risen to the level of black ones.

'It's time that America comes to understand that many of the nation's biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position,' said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty. He noted that despite continuing economic difficulties, minorities have more optimism about the future after Obama's election, while struggling whites do not.

'There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front,' Wilson said.

Nationwide, the count of America's poor remains stuck at a record number: 46.2 million, or 15 percent of the population, due in part to lingering high unemployment following the recession. While poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics are nearly three times higher, by absolute numbers the predominant face of the poor is white.

More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four, accounting for more than 41 percent of the nation's destitute, nearly double the number of poor blacks.

Sometimes termed 'the invisible poor' by demographers, lower-income whites generally are dispersed in suburbs as well as small rural towns, where more than 60 percent of the poor are white. Concentrated in Appalachia in the East, they are numerous in the industrial Midwest and spread across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains.

Desperate: People appearing to be homeless increasingly roam the streets of New York City

Buchanan County, in southwest Virginia, is among the nation's most destitute based on median income, with poverty hovering at 24 percent. The county is mostly white, as are 99 percent of its poor.

More than 90 percent of Buchanan County's inhabitants are working-class whites who lack a college degree. Higher education long has been seen there as nonessential to land a job because well-paying mining and related jobs were once in plentiful supply. These days many residents get by on odd jobs and government checks.

Salyers' daughter, Renee Adams, 28, who grew up in the region, has two children. A jobless single mother, she relies on her live-in boyfriend's disability checks to get by. Salyers says it was tough raising her own children as it is for her daughter now, and doesn't even try to speculate what awaits her grandchildren, ages 4 and 5.
Smoking a cigarette in front of the produce stand, Adams later expresses a wish that employers will look past her conviction a few years ago for distributing prescription painkillers, so she can get a job and have money to 'buy the kids everything they need.'

'It's pretty hard,' she said. 'Once the bills are paid, we might have $10 to our name.'

Census figures provide an official measure of poverty, but they're only a temporary snapshot that doesn't capture the makeup of those who cycle in and out of poverty at different points in their lives. They may be suburbanites, for example, or the working poor or the laid off.


Read More Here

Related articles

• NO WORK: 4 In 5 Americans Face Near-Poverty
• Under Obama 4 Out Of 5 U.S. Adults Struggle With Joblessness.
• For poor whites in US, hardship grows
• What vulture capitalism has done to America
• Signs of declining economic security
• Exclusive: Signs of declining economic security
• Exclusive: Signs of declining economic security
• Exclusive: Signs of declining economic security
• Exclusive: Signs of declining economic security
• 4 in 5 in US face near-poverty, no work

UK's Universal Credit : The welfare revolution may have bitten off more than it could chew ......

Too much, too fast: the government's 'welfare revolution' starts to unwind

Poor results for universal credit, work programme and youth contract

• Patrick Wintour and Amelia Gentleman
• The Guardian, Thursday 25 July 2013 16.01 EDT

Liam Byrne the shadow work and pensions secretary said: 'The welfare revolution we were promised has fallen apart.' Photograph: Lewis Whyld/PA Wire/Press Association Images

Buried beneath the news of Prince George's arrival on Monday was an announcement from the Department for Work and Pensions that staff working for the private IT firm Atos, delivering the controversial fitness-for-work assessments, were all to be retrained, owing to "unacceptably poor" standards of work.
Similarly, long awaited statistics showed Nick Clegg's £1bn youth contract scheme had helped little more than 2,000 people find long-term work. The numbers covered the first year of what was planned to be a three year scheme. It was dismissed by the shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne as a scheme with a 95% failure rate.
These were bleak indications that all was not well within two of the government's previously much trumpeted welfare reform programmes – drowned amid royal baby hysteria. It was a significant moment for a department that is rapidly getting used to making uncomfortable admissions.
Over the past few months, the DWP has had to make disappointing announcements in at least four significant policy areas: as well as the work capability assessment announcement and the youth contract figures, the department has indicated that the timetable for implementation of its main benefits reform, universal credit, is slipping back, and has released results from the much-hyped work programme that are best described as mixed.
The DWP has been successful in making the political argument for welfare changes, and polls continue to show support for cuts to benefits across all parties. A poll by Lord Ashcroft suggested that 86% of Unite members support the government's £26,000 benefit cap – but it has repeatedly stumbled on the implementation side.
Whitehall analysts wonder if the department has bitten off more than it can chew by announcing and attempting to implement a range of ambitious new policies, affecting vast numbers of people, in one term.
Officials have come under huge strain as they struggle to push forward with reform, at a time when the departmental headcount has been cut radically. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated recently that between 2011 and 2016 the department will have lost 40% of its workforce. The Public and Commercial Services union said the DWP had cut 20,000 jobs since May 2010.
Labour has been struggling to marry its fervent belief that social security is a cornerstone of social democracy with a public increasingly intolerant of "benefit culture". Its spokesmen attack specific reforms, but cannot say if they will be repealed.
Labour's own tough proposals for welfare, such as the requirement to work after two years on the dole, are either not known or little understood. Its best hope may lie in the claim Tory welfare is not working. Incompetence rather than ideology becomes the battleground.
Shadow work and pensions secretary Liam Byrne is moving in that direction. He said: "The welfare revolution we were promised has fallen apart. The work programme doesn't work, universal credit is disappearing into the sunset, and now we know that the youth contract has been a disaster and Atos is spinning out of control. Iain Duncan Smith has presided over the worst delivery failure seen in any government department for years."
Several policy analysts agree that part of the problem lies with the department's determination to introduce several major reforms simultaneously, focusing on getting them running, and less on how well they work once they have been launched.
Tom Gash, research director at the Institute for Government, which last week published a report questioning the government's skills at outsourcing and commissioning private companies to take on complex and risky government contracts, said: "The government's capacity to manage these programmes is not yet up there with their ambition."
Dave Simmonds, chief executive for the employment thinktank Inclusion, said: "Politicians are running too hard, pushing diminishing numbers of civil servants."
Anne Begg, Labour MP and chair of the work and pensions select committee, which scrutinises the work of the DWP, said: "Any one of these major reforms would be a big reform for a department to undertake in a parliamentary cycle and they have five on at once, including pension reform. The volumes of people affected are huge. It would be a miracle if everything worked instantly.Citizens Advice says the scale of reform has made this a difficult period for claimants. "Delivering complex reforms can lead to big problems, as shown by the fact that last year Citizens Advice Bureaus dealt with almost half a million problems with employment and support allowance, 54% higher than the previous year," the charity's chief executive, Gillian Guy, said, referring to the new incapacity benefit, granted to those who pass Atos-administered fitness for work tests. "Nine out of ten of our clients that we spoke to in a recent study said they are not ready for universal credit."
The DWP said: "There is no doubt that this department is pursuing and delivering an aggressive reform agenda. We've already successfully launched the benefit cap, universal credit and the new personal independence payment, and the work programme has got over 320,000 of the hardest to help into jobs. We're bringing in our reforms safely and responsibly, and our ability to deliver these changes cannot be questioned following our well proven track record for delivery."
The key areas of difficulty for the department are currently the work programme, universal credit, the youth contract and the employment and support allowance tests.

Universal credit

Something has gone wrong with universal credit, the centrepiece of the welfare revolution. It may well be rectifiable and in October 2017 everyone on benefit in and out of work will be on universal credit, as Duncan Smith had always planned and insists will still happen.
But with the changes to the speed with which universal credit will be introduced, and to the kind of caseload that will be put into the system, it is difficult to be confident.
Aware of the potential political damage, ministers are often unclear in public about the source of delay, repeatedly offering reassurance, insisting they had always planned to road-test ideas, and denying they were ever wedded to an artificial timetable set out in 2011.
The potential for disaster is evident. Universal credit merges six different benefits together and the claimant receives a single monthly household payment. It requires different payments to landlords, more online claims, and merges in- and out-of-work benefits, requiring a new benefit condition regime for those in work. It also requires close co-operation between the DWP systems and tax officials at HMRC.
The first steps have been baby steps. Universal credit went live on 29 April with just one jobcentre – Ashton under Lyne – accepting clams for universal credit and three other jobcentres, Wigan, Warrington and Oldham, testing the system before taking claims for universal credit in July. It had been intended that all four jobcentres would go live in April.
The aim was to start with the most simple caseload, such as a single unemployed claimant, to see how universal credit changes the claimant's behaviour and how the IT systems work.
It had been intended that from October that all new claimants receiving out of work benefits would move to universal credit, but earlier this month Duncan Smith told the work and pensions select committee that the credit would be introduced for new claimants in just six additional "hub jobcentres" – Hammersmith, Rugby, Inverness, Harrogate, Bath and Shotton, alongside the existing four "pathfinders".



Read More Here

Related articles

• Too much, too fast: the government's 'welfare revolution' starts to unwind
• The welfare revolution we were promised is falling apart
• Too much, too fast: the government's 'welfare revolution' starts to unwind
• Welfare reform has collapsed, says Labour as IDS plan stalls
• Working families will be 'worse off' under Universal Credit scheme
• Unacceptable: Government's verdict on company it employs to assess benefit claimants
• No benefit for your third child if you're on the dole: Tories unveil controversial ... - Daily Mail
• Controversial benefits test firm Atos slammed by Government after judging disabled and fatally ill people fit for work

Chuckle Factor : Panhandler Party

Are We There Yet?·  

Published on Jan 22, 2013

 

Have you ever seen two people beg in the same subway car at the same time?

I'm sorry to trouble everybody but I'm trying to raise money for my next video: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr...

Produced by actor/comedian/jackass Gary Lee Mahmoud of Panhandler Party Productions, LLC. Special thanks to co-producer, editor, Padcaster inventor, and all around great guy Josh Apter at the Manhattan Edit Workshop.

Also thank you to Alex Grybauskas, Dennis Mitchell, and Alan Eisenberg at Refinery NYC. Thank you to Aida Artieda for her organizational skills and Alan Kudan for some amazing audio capture.
Great performances by: Jane Aquilina, Rob King, Jen Kwok, Nick Cobb, Andrew Ginsburg, Sean Allison, and Aguileo Ramos, Rigoberto Ramos, and Leopoldo Juarez of Mariachi Aguila y Plata!
And thank you to Josh Hyman, Elyse Brandau, Justin Hoch, Jessica Solce, Lauren Potter, Dan Jamieson, Dan Katz, Rishi Gandhi, and Jaime Ordonez for some great iPhone camerawork.

Panhandler Party creator (and actor) Gary Lee Mahmoud may be contacted at garyleenyc@aol.com.

Other clips and reviews of his work can be found on his performance website at http://serfgary.com/Main.html.


http://panhandlerparty.com

 

 

Related articles

• One NY Artist: Actor and Video Producer Gary Lee Mahmoud

The Obamacare Insurance Exchange Train Is Already Coming Off The Rails

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) raised eyebrows across the country last month when he publicly fretted about an Obamacare “train wreck” as the Administration rushes to implement the many provisions of the law that take effect in 2014.
President Obama has attempted to assuage Sen. Baucus’s concerns, saying that his staff was “pushing very hard to make sure that we’re hitting all the deadlines.”

But an Obamacare train wreck isn’t a distant possibility. It’s actively happening. Delays, wasteful spending, and cost overruns have already popped up. And it’s becoming increasingly likely that the exchanges won’t be ready by October 1, when they’re supposed to open for enrollment. Mass confusion and excessive costs will result.
The federal government is set to operate exchanges in 27 states and to jointly run them with state officials in another seven. Seventeen states will create and administer exchanges on their own.
At least, that’s what’s supposed to happen. Gary Cohen, who’s in charge of the implementation of Obamacare’s exchanges, said in March that the federal government will likely end up running some of the exchanges in the 17 states that elected to set them up on their own because they won’t be ready in time.
Even the states the administration has paraded around as “pioneers” are having trouble creating government-run insurance marketplaces out of whole cloth. Connecticut, the first state approved to set up an exchange, is now struggling to get it up and running. Colorado is “stripping its opening-day goals to a minimum.”
Federal officials have struggled to come up with a comprehensible application form. Their first effort reached 15 pages. After a round of criticism, they came back with a form that’s three pages for individuals — and seven pages for families.
Henry Chao, a senior federal official working on the information technology that will run the exchanges, said in March that he was “pretty nervous” about meeting the October 1 deadline and was reduced to hoping that the exchanges don’t end up being “a Third World experience.”
And it’s not as if the feds and the states have been short on money. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will have spent $4.4 billion on state exchange grants by the end of this year. That’s more than double what the Department said would be necessary just last year, despite the fact that fewer states than the feds anticipated agreed to establish their own exchanges.
The agency has also asked for $1.5 billion to help fund the exchanges it’s setting up in states that have refused to do so on their own next year.  California is planning to use $673 million in federal money to deploy 21,000 people, known as “navigators,” to sign people up for its exchange, Covered California. Those folks get a bounty of $58 for every person they sign up — and $25 for every annual renewal.
HHS can’t even account for all the grant money it’s throwing at the states, since the money comes with little or no restrictions, guidelines, or accountability.


Read More  Here




U.S. Companies Engage In Financial Jiu-Jitsu To Get Around Obamacare

Sally Pipes Contributor

Big Pharma Accomplishes Big Things, Yet Obama Is Suffocating The Industry

Sally Pipes Contributor

Obamacare To Slash Hundreds Of Billions From Medicare Advantage Over Next 10 Years

Sally Pipes Contributor

Fed Up With Obamacare, Doctors Increasingly Prefer Cash For Care

Sally Pipes Contributor

Related articles

• The Insurance Exchange Train Is Already Coming Off The Rails (bighealthreport.com)
• New Obamacare Challenge: Lawsuit Says IRS Is Flouting the Law As Written by Congress (familysurvivalprotocol.com)
• Your Medical Info Now A Matter Of Government Trust Under Obamacare (personalliberty.com)
• All of Obamacare could hang in balance (watchdog.org)
• Sen. Reid: More funding needed to prevent Obamacare from becoming 'train wreck'... (redflagnews.com)
• Businesses Brace for Obamacare Train Wreck (1800politics.com)
• Reid: More funding needed to prevent ObamaCare from becoming 'train wreck' (ncrenegade.com)
• More dollars? Not exactly (jsonline.com)
• Unions & ObamaCare: The wake-up call (triblive.com)
• The Obamacare blame game - a contest the Democrats can't win (powerlineblog.com)

Worst cuts in wages for UK workers in ‘deepest recession since WWII’, IFS shows

Published time: June 12, 2013 11:25

Striking public sector workers march in protest through central London (AFP Photo)

The UK has been going through its deepest recession since World War II, a report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies claims. Workers experienced unprecedented pay cuts of 6 per cent over the last five years since the Global Financial Crisis began in 2008.

Between 2010 and 2011, 70 per cent of employees who stayed in the same job fronted real wage cuts, while a third of those workers faced nominal wage freezes or cuts (12 per cent experienced freezes and 21 per cent experienced cuts).
The last time that such a high proportion of workers faced real wage cuts was between 1976 and 1977, when inflation exceeded 15 per cent. The proportions of nominal wage freezes and cuts are said to be the highest since the series of wage cuts began in the mid-1970s, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies latest report. 
The period since the recession began in 2008 has seen the longest and deepest loss of output in a century. Real wages have fallen by more than in any comparable five-year period; productivity levels have dropped to an unprecedented degree, the British think tank revealed.
Average real hourly wages amongst workers who stayed in the same job have fallen faster in the private sector than in the public sector over the last few years, such that the public-private sector wage gap has increased substantially over this period.


 Read More Here

Related articles

• Wage cuts for UK workers leading to destitution, hardship and hunger on a large scale (sott.net)
• Top News: Workers suffer deepest cut in real wages since records began, IFS shows (guardian.co.uk)
• Wages blow for 1 in 3 who've had pay cut or frozen in recession (thesun.co.uk)
• Workers hit by 'unprecedented' fall in real wages since recession (standard.co.uk)
• Biggest five-year fall in wages in history, study reveals (mirror.co.uk)