Category: Class

New post at policy shop. Excerpt: The coming indignities do not stop at cutting food assistance. As the New York Times explained on Friday, the refusal of many GOP governors to expand Medicaid as part of Obamacare is scheduled to generate absurd and unsettling scenarios for the poor. As Obamacare comes on line, a gap… Continue reading Policy Shop: Ramping Up the War on the Poor

New post at policy shop. Excerpt: Of course the fixation on stocks is rather predictable. All sorts of people hold stock, but the wealthy especially. According to the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances, while 17.9 percent of all families have stock holdings, 52.4 percent of those in the wealthiest 10 percent of families do so.… Continue reading Policy Shop: Ignore the Stock Market, the Economy Is Not Back

New post at policy shop. Excerpt: There are two conceivable paths to having a low post-T&T poverty rate, this again being the rate of most significance to people’s lived lives. A country can put a lot of effort into bringing up the market incomes of low-income people. Or it can compensate for those low market… Continue reading Policy Shop: How Low-Poverty Countries Do It

A while ago, I had a post with an animation showing how much countries reduce their poverty rates with taxes and transfers. I have recreated that animation with a new stock of data coming from the OECD for 2010. It features 26 countries. Each dot represents a country (hover over to see which). The dots… Continue reading OECD poverty animation for 2010

New post at Policy Shop, which is now at Demos.org. Excerpt: Since the recession, total debt levels among the young have fallen. According to Pew, the median debt of below-35 households fell between 2007 and 2011 from $21.9k to $15.5k, a 29% decline. This debt decline holds for those with and without student debt histories.… Continue reading Policy Shop: The Youth Income Crisis