Category: The New Depression

Newt’s new-found concern

~ odd man out

Newt Gingrich is upset — downright indignant, it seems — because Mitt Romney is “not concerned about the very poor.” Even Jim DeMint is upset with Mittens.

Right. If you believe this, I know some hot new housing developments in Florida you’ll want to invest in.

From ThinkProgress:

…Despite all their new-found concern for the middle class and the poor, all three Republicans — Romney, Gingrich, and DeMint — support policies that would substantially undermine safety net programs and result in massive giveaways to upper-income earners and investors, while doing almost nothing for middle- and low-income Americans.

Dirtballs face off in Florida

~ odd man out

Newt accused Mitt of having mutual funds invested in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, mortgage lenders backed by (gasp!) big government. Mitt counterattacked with the same charge when he learned Newt also had invested in Freddie and Fannie. In debating circles, this is known as the “you’re as big a dirtball as I am” argument. More here.

Austerity debacle

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

The Times has Krugman on the disaster that is economic policy:

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

O.K., about those caveats: On one side, British unemployment was much higher in the 1930s than it is now, because the British economy was depressed — mainly thanks to an ill-advised return to the gold standard — even before the Depression struck. On the other side, Britain had a notably mild Depression compared with the United States.

Even so, surpassing the track record of the 1930s shouldn’t be a tough challenge. Haven’t we learned a lot about economic management over the last 80 years? Yes, we have — but in Britain and elsewhere, the policy elite decided to throw that hard-won knowledge out the window, and rely on ideologically convenient wishful thinking instead.

Hull House closed

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

They’d announced last week that they would close in the spring, but instead shut down Friday. Of course, I’m sure Mayor Rahm would have done something to help if he’d known! (Not.) The settlement house model was a successful one, but a lot of people are invested in the idea that spending money on poor people is a waste:

CHICAGO (AP) — Hull House, the Chicago social services organization founded more than 120 years ago by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams, closed Friday after running out of money.
The agency said the poor economy resulted in more demand for its services but also made it harder to raise money to cover its costs. Hull House has been providing child care, job training, housing assistance and other services for 60,000 people a year in the Chicago area.

The agency had announced plans to close in the spring, but Friday’s shutdown was unexpected, striking some 300 employees with a devastating and unexpected blow. They received layoff notices and final paychecks and then spent the day packing their belongings and saying tearful good-byes. Many said they were startled to learn their insurance ended almost two weeks ago.

“It’s been my life,” said Dianne Turner, who spent 25 years teaching families in Chicago housing projects how to break the cycle of poverty. “It wasn’t about the pay. It was about seeing a family go from feeling hopeless to being hopeful and feeling like they can do things.”

Turner said she knows what it’s like to live in the projects and dream of something better. She got her first job as a teenager through Hull House and said the organization helped teach her the value of education, how to save money and how to be a leader.

Founded in 1889, Hull House was the best known of the 400 settlement houses in the United States in the early 1900s. The settlements were designed to provide services to immigrants and the poor while uplifting them through culture, education and recreation. At its peak, Hull House served more than 9,000 people a week, offering medical help, an art gallery, citizenship classes, a gardening club and a gym with sports programs.

Home births

~ susie

Although all the reasons they list in this story are factors, they’re missing the biggest one: Namely, that a lot of families no longer have health insurance. I was a lay midwife in the ’80s, and believe me, cost was a big reason for many, many pregnant women during Reagan’s recession.

Why is that so hard to understand? I mean, what are their other options?

Jessica Wilcox thinks her in-laws still view her ideas about childbirth as kind of out there, but it’s hard to argue with success: In the last five years or so, Wilcox has given birth to two boys and two girls — each weighing more than 10 pounds — at her northern Virginia home. And she hopes to do it again one or two more times.

Wilcox is part of a small but growing trend. While home births are still rare in the United States, they’ve posted a surprising climb in recent years, according to a government report out Thursday.

Jessica Wilcox has given birth to her two sons and two daughters at their northern Virginia home.
After declining from 1990 to 2004, the percentage of U.S. births that occurred at home jumped 29 percent from 2004 to 2009, when it hit the highest level since researchers began collecting data 20 years earlier.
Non-Hispanic white women were most likely to give birth at home in 2009, with one in every 90 births, or about 1.1 percent, in that group taking place at home. That represents an increase of 36 percent over 2004.

Still, Wilcox’s children represent only a tiny minority. In 2009, 29,650 U.S. births, or .72 percent of total births, occurred at home. Compare that to, say, 1940, when 40 percent of births took place at home.
Home births today tend to be more common among women 35 and older and among women with several previous children, according to the new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. They’re most common in states with renegade reputations, such as Montana, which had the highest percentage of home births, nearly 2.6 percent, followed by Oregon and Vermont, with nearly 2 percent each.