Inflation for the Poor, Stagnant Prices for the Rich

Beneath the mortgage crisis brought about by the deliberate systematic scamming of the poor by greedy lendersis the story of the disparity between the kinds of goods with steep mark-ups. The sector that has suffered the greatest inflation, it turns out, is the sector where low and middle class consumers spend most of their money. At the same time, wages have barely risen for the people hit hardest by inflation while luxury sectors have stabilized and incomes risen dramatically.

We all knew that but a new study of govt data by WaPo reporters (doing some actual investigative journalism for a change) proves it.

Inflation is walloping Americans with low and moderate incomes as the prices of staples have soared far faster than those of luxuries.

The goods and services Americans consumed in February were 4 percent more expensive than they were a year earlier. But there is a big divide in how much prices are climbing between the basic items people need to live and get to work, and those on which they can easily cut back when times are tight.

An analysis of government data by The Washington Post found that prices have risen 9.2 percent since 2006 for the groceries, gasoline, health care and other basics that a middle-income American family has little choice but to consume. That would cost such a family, which made $45,000 on average in 2006, an extra $972 per year, assuming it did not buy less of such items because of higher prices. For a broad range of goods on which it is easier to scrimp — such as restaurant meals, alcoholic beverages, new cars, furniture, and clothing — prices have risen 2.4 percent.

Wages for typical workers, meanwhile, have been rising slowly. In that same time span, average earnings for a non-managerial worker rose about 5 percent. This contradiction — high inflation for staples, low inflation for luxuries and in wages — helps explain why American workers felt squeezed even before the recent economic distress began.

(emphasis added)

So, once again, if you’re rich, the expensive trinkets you buy cost little more than they did a few years ago. If you’re poor, a much bigger part of your budget goes for basics like food, transportation, and heat. The reporters – Neil Irwin and Alejandro Lazo – claim that the culprit is foreign market pressure.

Inflation is not occurring because labor markets are tight or because the U.S. economy has been overstimulated; if that were the case, wages would be driving inflation up, leaving ordinary households in decent shape and doing more damage to those who lent money at fixed interest rates.

Instead, this inflation is driven by global commodity markets. China, India and other developing countries’ thirst for oil has been growing faster than producers can quench it, sending the price of oil up about 60 percent since 2006. Prices for oil and other commodities fell yesterday though they remain very expensive by any historical standard.

Expensive crude oil has translated into higher costs to heat a house or drive to work. The average middle-income household must spend $378 more per year on gasoline than it did in 2006 if it consumes the same amount, and an extra $38 on fuel oil.

Apparently the pro-war WaPo decided to skip over the pressure on oil prices caused by the second Gulf War and the obscene profits netted by oil companies the last few years. “It’s all China’s fault.” But at least they didn’t gloss over the difficulties caused by a Two Americas economy.

The rise in the basic cost of living means that inflation disproportionately affects those with modest incomes. For example, in 2006, the top 20 percent of households by income spent about twice as much on staples as households in the lower-middle bracket. But the top-earning families had almost six times as much income.

***

The pinch of inflation from energy, food and health care is a significant factor in softening consumer spending, which in turn is the reason economic growth is slowing sharply this year. It is not the only reason consumers are pulling back, however. Lower home prices, less credit availability and dropping stock market values are other likely factors.

Those different sources of weakness are affecting different groups of consumers. Poor and middle-income people are suffering the worst from inflation, middle- to upper-middle-income families are bearing the brunt of the softer real estate market, and the affluent are pinched the most by problems in financial markets.

Poor babies. But don’t worry. The Fed just promised them another $$$30BIL$$$ to help stabilize the market and it worked. For a couple of days.

Of course, that’s the fourth time $$$20-30Bil$$$ has been thrown at the investor class in an attempt to chivvy them into some semblance of sanity (the Bush Admin tossed them almost $$$200BIL$$$ just a couple of months ago) and each injection of cash calmed nervous investors for, like, a week before the next batch of bad economic news sent them into a tizzy of fret and foreboding, and Wall Street took another nose dive. It isn’t news that the effect of this latest give-away had just as temporary an effect.

Meanwhile, absolutely NO ONE is suggesting that maybe wages should be raised past the level of inflation or that maybe prices on staples should be frozen for a while, and the price of oil fixed. Or all three. None of those would chill weak investor nerves or put money in their pockets. So, even though such moves would be far more likely to stimulate a recessed economy than pouring more money down the financial sector rat hole, they won’t be coming our way any time soon.

The people who caused this disaster with their greed and unscrupulous, predatory practices are focused on saving their own asses at our expense.

And as usual, the Bush Administration is happy to oblige.

The Plutocrat Philosopher

Speed Bump by Dave Coverly

Army Corps of Engineers Rigs Bid in Favor of Company with Ties to Bush

It seems that in the Age of Bush, the military-industrial complex just can’t seem to be bothered to make a decent product as long as it can rely on political connections and influence to keep those contracts coming. In Iraq, the “free market zone” neoconservatives dreamed of:

• KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root), a subsidiary of Halliburton, tripled the cost of the gas it was supplying the US military and then failed to deliver what it billed for.
• Halliburton itself routinely overcharges for every service it contracts for and doesn’t deliver on half of them. When it does deliver, its service is defective or diseased. For instance, it obtained a $$$billion$$$ contract to provide food and water to the troops in Iraq, then delivered food that was spoiled and water that was contaminated with sewage.
• Custer Battles, a security company with ties to the RNC, received a $$100Mil$$ contract to provide security for the Baghdad airport, already guarded by Army troops, then another $$50M$$ to supply forklifts. It simply painted the forklifts that were already there with its logo and sent in its bill.
• Blackwater, another security company, contracted for more than $$320M$$ to provide escorts for supply convoys and diplomats, and then double-billed for its services, effectively kicking the contract’s worth to almost half a $$$Billion$$$.
• Parsons Corp, one of the largest construction outfits in Iraq, is under investigation by the Army Inspector General for “building only a small fraction of the health clinics planned to be built in Iraq and for building a police academy so flawed that human waste rained from the ceilings.”

Of course, that’s all war-profiteering and has nothing to do with what happens here at home, right?

Wrong.

The Associated Press is reporting that the Army Corps of Engineers may have conspired to pass the contract for the drainage pumps it used in the New Orleans levees to a company that used to employ Jeb Bush.

Foreign Aid Money for Katrina Relief Rejected or Unused

On Sunday, the Washington Post reported that $$$hundreds of millions of $$$ in hurricane relief after Katrina has gone unused.

Allies offered $854 million in cash and in oil that was to be sold for cash. But only $40 million has been used so far for disaster victims or reconstruction, according to U.S. officials and contractors. Most of the aid went uncollected, including $400 million worth of oil. Some offers were withdrawn or redirected to private groups such as the Red Cross. The rest has been delayed by red tape and bureaucratic limits on how it can be spent.

In addition, valuable supplies and services — such as cellphone systems, medicine and cruise ships — were delayed or declined because the government could not handle them. In some cases, supplies were wasted.

“Could not handle them” my ass. As we’ve shown time and again, the Bush Administration had no desire to “handle them”, no desire in fact to do anything that would help the refugees or bring them home. Tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Katrina refugees still languish in FEMA trailer parks from Louisiana to Texas to Arkansas, reconstruction of the poorer neighborhoods is all but at a standstill while HUD refuses to either spend appropriated money or release it to be spent by Gulf state govts and Bush refuses to sign the waiver that would let those state govts do it themselves, and now we find out that not only did the Bushies turn down help offered by Europe, but the help they deigned to accept has been rotting away in banks and warehouses while the Administration claims it “can’t afford” any more aid.

We have proved over and over again that this inaction on the part of the Bush Admin is deliberate. It can’t be an accident, an oversight, a mistake, or incompetence. It has to be policy. There is no other rational explanation.

Response to Mr Blair 3

I haven’t read Assets and the Poor, though I’ll give serious consideration to ordering it the next time I get a spare 25 bucks, but there is an excerpt – the first 5 pages – at Amazon which at least gave me a flavor for what Sherraden’s after and where he’s coming from. First response? Not good.

Unfortunately, Amazon won’t let me copy any of the excerpt and as rotten a typist as I am, I’m not going to copy large chunks by hand – it’s only 5 pages and you can read it for yourself in under 5 mins. The main thrust of his thesis seems to be that anti-poverty strategies have been based on income tansfers and income transfers don’t work. (Reminder: this book was written in 1991 and is therefore 16 years old and outdated by at least 10.)

There is widespread discontent with the failure of income transfers, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).

Who, may I ask is discontented with it? And why? He doesn’t say though this is the opening and obviously the place to summarize that discontent. If he’s going to argue unhappiness, it would be nice to know where that unhappiness comes from and what its basis is. Especially since later on he admits income transfers have had a positive impact.

[I]ncome transfer has maintained…a minimum level of subsistence in the United States….In addition, welfare policy has buffered the severity of economic cycles by providing strong countercyclical fiscal stimuli.

IOW, it has done as much as conservative means-testing has allowed it to do and provided the minimum safety net which is all conservatives could stomach. Their intention was to hold welfare to the subsistence level and they succeeded in doing that. How, therefore, do we justify calling it a failure?

After decades of federal programs, it cannot be demonstrated that means-tested welfare policies permanently change people’s lives for the better.

Well, duh. Of course not. The policy was built to actively prevent “changing people’s lives for the better”. Conservatives, as I have demonstrated, wouldn’t stand for it. They didn’t even want the minimum subsistence aid, as they showed quite clearly when they came to power in ’94 and immediately began gutting as much of it as they could.

So already, right at the beginning, we’ve got problems.

Response to Mr Blair 2

What you – and a lot of other people; you’re not alone – don’t seem to realize is that poverty is not a state of mind. It’s an economic condition that’s often forced on people.

[T]here are a lot of people…who think poverty is the result of stupidity or laziness, people who simply can’t believe that in America talent and intelligence could go unrewarded. Well…they do. Every day.

One of the smartest people I know is a cook at a nursing home. He had two years at a technical college where he learned how to be a tool-and-die maker because he liked to work with his hands. That craft has been taken over by computers, so now he cooks. He’s good at it, proud of what he can do and how people feel when they eat what he makes. He can do wonders with a budget slim as a Chihuahua hair. He makes $9/hr. His family wants to know why he doesn’t do more with his life. In a weak moment (when we’d been drinking), he told me that, and then he told me what he didn’t dare tell them–that he kept the job because he was happy doing it, and that money really wasn’t very important to him as long as his family had a roof over their heads and enough to eat.

He was lying, like a lot of us do, by telling himself that what he could get was all he wanted. I challenged him, and he admitted he’d really like to learn gourmet cooking and work in a legitimate restaurant where he didn’t have to make superior food out of inferior product. I asked him if he’d considered going back to school, get a degree in Culinary Arts. Sheepishly, he told me he’d applied but his income ($9/hr!) was over the guidelines and there was no financial aid available since the Feds had cut their grant programs to the bone.

The most brilliant guy I know is a Hungarian émigré. He was trained as a surgeon in Eastern Europe, has a raft of degrees on the wall of his tiny apartment, and speaks 4 languages, 3 of them reasonably well (English, he tells me, is tough). But the degrees aren’t recognized in America, he’s over 50, and his accent is so thick, his English so rudimentary, that a lot of prospective employers thought he was retarded. He works as a janitor. He makes $7/hr after three years; he started at $5. It was all he could get. His shame is so great that he won’t tell his family where he is or what he’s doing now.

If intelligence and talent were what counted in America, that janitor would be running a huge hospital and Bill Gates–who stole everything MicroSoft is from smarter people–would be sweeping the floors of the wards. But they aren’t.

It’s a rigged game, Mr Blair. Leaf through the categories Poverty and/or The Class War and/or War on the Poor on this blog and you will find dozens of posts written over the last few years documenting the tricks, lies, and outright cruelty practiced on the poor by conservatives, first because they believe poverty is the result of laziness, and second because it’s what their corporate supporters want.

Minimum Wage Deal Cut in Senate

The Senate has just passed the minimum wage bill which will go to the president as part of the supplemental package funding the war in Iraq. The bill, worked out in Conference Committee mainly by the Democratic majority, will cut the $$$12Bil$$$ in corporate tax breaks originally demanded by Senate Republicans under a threat of filibuster to a still-extortionate $$$4.8Bil$$$.

An improvement of sorts, I suppose.

Though the Senate initially approved tax cuts worth about $12 billion over five years, House negotiators wanted less than $2 billion. The final figure, $4.84 billion, includes several provisions, including giving expanded tax breaks to restaurants and other small businesses that hire disabled veterans and residents of poor neighborhoods as well as allowing small businesses to write off a greater portion of their investments for tax purposes.

Welfare and Medicaid Cuts Raise Infant Mortality Rate

Conservatives kill babies.

Not with their own hands, of course. They don’t strangle them in their cribs. They let their anti-life policies do it for them.

For decades but especially for the last 12 years, the very same conservatives who scream that the removal of an unformed scut of cells in a womb is murder have been systematically depriving real life pregnant women who will be carrying to term of luxuries like food and adequate medical care because they’re “too expensive”.

At the Federal level, Medicaid and welfare have been consistently cut every year conservatives have ruled the roost in order to trim taxes to the nub for the rich, hand over $$$billions$$$ in corporate welfare to their masters campaign contributors, and prosecute a war nobody wanted on behalf of neoconservative imperialists too dumb to know enough to come in out of the rain. In primarily liberal Democratic states, some of that safety net has been replaced but in the predominantly-conservative Southern states, it hasn’t and the results are coming in. They’re not pretty, but then nothing much in conservative-run America is these days.

The policies of so-called “pro-life” conservatives are raising infant mortality rates in the South to the such a point that Third World countries have lower rates than parts of the US. Are we proud yet?

Environmental Change: Unless the Corporatocracy Does It, It Don’t Mean Much

From Mark Morford:

 Just look around. It feels as though your heart is being eaten by angry capitalist cockroaches. Like your id is being munched by deranged zombie architects. And your eyes, oh God your eyes, they can’t help but be burned like charcoal as they take in mile after mile, town after town, dreary suburban dystopia after dreary suburban dystopia of massive gluttonous eco-mauling overdevelopment, more Wal-Marts and SUV dealers and scabby strip malls and so many generic prison compounds that are apparently actually tract-home complexes it makes you want to rip out your soul with a pickax and feed it to the few remaining wild coyotes in Joshua Tree before someone shoots them all to make way for a new Home Depot.

This, then, is the conundrum: On the one hand, we are ever trying to convince ourselves that we can make a difference on a humble individual basis, in our daily lives, little by little and one recycled Evian bottle at a time, and yet the destructive proof to the contrary is so vast and omnivorous it seems like a nice rerun of “Bambi Meets Godzilla.” It can feel as though your little eco-home, your little ethically raised wool rug mean about as much in the overall scheme of earthly health as a speck of organic lint in a nuclear waste dump.

***

McDonald’s eventually dumped the Styrofoam. But here’s the story’s big kicker: Just that one simple shift, that one tiny change in corporate behavior affected an enormous industry all the way down the line, so much so that they figured it was the environmental equivalent of something like 50 million people deciding to recycle plastic bottles. It was at once staggering and humbling.

In other words, sure you can do your part at home, sure your drop in the environmental bucket helps get the plastic wet, but real, serious change can’t even begin until the corporate and political leviathans decide it’s good business to pretend they have a soul.

State Farm Tries to Change Engineering Reports to Avoid Paying Katrina Claims

E-mails are all over the news these days. First, there are the missing RNC emails (funny how evidence of criminal activity by Pubs goes missing, ain’t it?), and then there are the ones that aren’t.

Attorneys for homeowners suing State Farm Insurance Cos. after Hurricane Katrina have long accused the insurer of pressuring engineers to alter reports on storm-damaged homes so that policyholders’ claims could be denied.Now, some of these lawyers claim they have evidence to prove their allegation — internal e-mails from an engineering firm that helped State Farm adjust claims after the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane destroyed thousands of homes on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

State Farm denies pressuring engineers to change their conclusions, but the e-mails, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, indicate the company was threatening to dismiss Raleigh, N.C.-based Forensic Analysis & Engineering Corp. less than two months after Katrina.