Census: No Sign of Economic Rebound for many

English: US Census map of poverty across US (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Depending on education, race, income and even marriage, not all segments of the population are seeing an economic turnaround.

Poverty is on the rise in single-mother families. More people are falling into the lowest-income group. And after earlier signs of increased mobility, fewer people are moving as homeownership declined for a fifth straight year.

"We're in a selective recovery," said William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who analyzed the numbers.

Nearly 2.2 million children were poor in California last year, the most of any state, but the child poverty rate was highest in Mississippi, where more than 1 in 3 children was poor. Nationwide, child poverty stood at 21.8 percent, unchanged from the previous year.

"Stubbornly high child poverty rates in the wake of the Great Recession suggest we have not yet turned the corner three years after its official end," said Marybeth Mattingly, director of research on vulnerable families at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute.

The numbers also reflect widening economic inequality, an issue President Barack Obama has pledged would be a top priority of his administration to address. Upward mobility in the U.S. has been hurt by a tight job market and the longer-term disappearance of midskill jobs due to globalization and automation.

The new census data shows that lower-income households are a steadily increasing share of the population, while middle- to higher-income groups shrank or were flat. Read more >>

Detroit’s Bankruptcy Reveals Dysfunction Common in Cities

No city was hit as hard by the recession as Detroit, America’s one-time industrial capital whose decades-long decline cut its population in half and left $18 billion in debt it can’t afford to pay.
Even so, the pressures that pushed Detroit into the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history are playing out on a smaller scale around the nation. Diminished tax revenue and rising labor costs have left four cities insolvent since 2007. Service cuts were made by others such as Detroit, where street lights are dark and police are scarce.

“None of the other cities are as far along, but there are dozens, if not hundreds of cities that have similar issues,” said Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public-policy research organization in Washington. “Every other industrial city has problems that could send them down the same path.”

U.S. municipalities have recovered slowly from the 18-month recession that ended four years ago, depressing property-tax revenue and leading to investment losses for pensions that many cities haven’t fully funded for years. Projected pension and health-care obligations for the 61 biggest cities will top assets by about $217 billion, according to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a Philadelphia-based research and public-policy group. Read more >>

The Middle Class Is Worse Off Than You Think

The decline of the middle class has emerged as a key issue in the presidential campaign with both candidates promising policies to restore the economic stability of the middle class.

The conventional view has wages for the middle class, particularly men, stagnating over the past 40 years. But Michael Greenstone, economics professor at MIT and director of The Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, says the situation is much worse than that.

Greenstone tells The Daily Ticker that after studying the data more carefully he found "that a lot of men are no longer in the workforce or are working part time."

"If you put them back in, the earnings of the guy in the middle have declined 20% over the last four decades," he says. "As a result, the median earnings of men are back to the levels that prevailed in the 1960s."

In the latest jobs report released Friday, the average hourly earnings for men and women rose a penny to $23.58 an hour. That caps a 1.6% gain over the past 12 months, which is not enough to keep up with 2% inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index. Read more >>

It will soon be feasible to record and store everything everyone says or does

Data Storage Could Expand Reach of Surveillance
SCOTT SHANE

John Villasenor, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied the plummeting cost of computer data storage and reached an astonishing conclusion: It will soon be technically feasible and affordable to record and store everything that can be recorded about what everyone in a country says or does.

And there is plenty of data to store. The average person today leaves an electronic trail unimaginable 20 years ago — visiting Web sites, sending e-mails and text messages, using credit cards, passing before a proliferating network of public and private video cameras and carrying a cellphone that reports a person’s location every minute of the day.

Mr. Villasenor, also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, estimates that to store the audio from telephone calls made by an average person in the course of a year would require about 3.3 gigabytes and cost just 17 cents to store, a price that is expected to fall to 2 cents by 2015. Tracking a person’s movements for a year, collected from their cellphone, would take so little space as to carry a trivial cost. Storing video takes far more space, but the price is dropping so steadily that storing millions of hours of material will not be a problem soon. Read more >>

US Officially Arming Extremists in Syria

Recently reported in “Brookings Announces Next Move in Syria: War,” it was stated that “by the US policy think-tank Brookings Institution’s own admission, the Kofi Annan six-point peace plan in Syria was merely a ploy to buy time to reorganize NATO’s ineffective terrorist proxies and provide them the pretext necessary for establishing NATO protected safe havens from which to carry out their terrorism from.”

It was also examined in detail, how in 2007, US, Saudi, and Israeli officials admitted they were creating a militant front of extremists for the sole purpose of causing the destabilization of Syria we see today, and ultimately overthrowing the Syrian government.

It was noted how these extremist militants had direct ties to Al Qaeda. Now it is fully admitted that weapons, cash, and logistical support is indeed being provided to terrorist forces in Syria by the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf States. This, despite a current UN ceasefire the West has continuously berated the Syrian government for violating, indicates that indeed reorganizing, rearming, and redeploying NATO’s terrorist proxies is complete, and another round of destructive violence has begun. More...

Poverty pervades the suburbs

Image via WikipediaGuess where most people in poverty live? Hint: It's not in the inner cities or rural America. It's in the idyllic suburbs.

A record 15.4 million suburban residents lived below the poverty line last year, up 11.5% from the year before, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of Census data released Thursday. That's one-third of the nation's poor.

And their ranks are swelling fast, as jobs disappear and incomes decline amid the continued weak economy.

Since 2000, the number of suburban poor has skyrocketed by 53%, battered by the two recessions that wiped out many manufacturing jobs early on, and low-wage construction and retail positions more recently.

America's cities, meanwhile, had 12.7 million people in poverty last year, up about 5% from the year before and 23% since 2000. The remaining 18 million poor folks in the U.S. are roughly split between smaller metro areas and rural communities.

"We think of poverty as a really urban or ultra-rural phenomenon, but it's not," said Elizabeth Kneebone, senior research associate at Brookings. "It's increasingly a suburban issue." More...

US polls show lowest approval for Obama, Congress

www.presstv.ir
New US polls show the lowest job approval rating for President Barack Obama as well as a declining endorsement of the already low-regarded Congress among the American public.

For the first time, according to the latest opinion polls, Obama appears to mirror his predecessor George W. Bush as his disapproval ratings exceed his approval figures.

Results of the latest Gallup poll on Obama's Job performance suggests a 61% disapproval score, while most polls place his disapproval figure at the 48% mark.

Some political analysts link Obama's disapproval rating to the persisting high jobless rate in the US.

"His approval rating track almost perfectly with the unemployment rate. So it turns out you would expect him whatever he had done, just given these economic conditions, you would expect an approval rating of below 50 percent," Thomas Mann of the political think-tank Brookings Institution told Press TV's Mike Kellerman.

Yet, there are others who think that the US president's efforts in polarizing the nation's political parties account for Obama's low approval numbers.

"I think one of the problem is he's polarized this government more than an other president [in American] history. He campaigned on being bipartisan and I think in the one year he has been in the office, he has really polarized the country and made that a lot worse in the political environment," an Obama supporter told the Press TV correspondent.

The US Congress, on the other hand, does much worse than Obama in the polls.

Nine out of 10 Americans maintain that Congress is doing a terrible job.

The new Harris poll finds that only 10 percent of Americans believe Congress is doing a good Job, down from 16 percent in January. That also constitutes an all-time low.