Poverty in N.J. reaches 52-year high

Poverty in New Jersey continued to grow even as the national recession lifted, reaching a 52-year high in 2011, according to a report released today.

The annual survey by Legal Services of New Jersey found 24.7 percent of the state’s population — 2.1 million residents — was considered poor in 2011. That’s a jump of more than 80,000 people — nearly 1 percent higher than the previous year and 3.8 percent more than pre-recession levels.

"This is not just a one-year or five-year or 10-year variation," said Melville D. Miller Jr., the president of LSNJ, which gives free legal help to low-income residents in civil cases. "This is the worst that it’s been since the 1960 Census."

And it may get worse: The report warned Census figures for 2012 to be released this month may be higher. Those numbers are expected to show some of the impact from Hurricane Sandy, which took a bite out of the state’s economy and destroyed a large amount of affordable housing.

The numbers for New Jersey — one of the wealthiest states in the nation — mirror a national trend. In 2011, the federal poverty rate was the largest it had been in 18 years, according to the Congressional Research Service. Read more >>

Almost 2,400 Millionaires Pocketed Unemployment Benefits

Almost 2,400 people who received unemployment insurance in 2009 lived in households with annual incomes of $1 million or more, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The report was released after about 1.1 million people exhausted their jobless benefits during the second quarter of 2012, when more than 4.6 million filed initial unemployment claims. Eliminating those payments to high earners is one idea being considered as U.S. lawmakers struggle to curb a projected $1.1 trillion deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, with the nationwide jobless rate at 8.1 percent.

“Sending millionaires unemployment checks is a case study in out-of-control spending,” U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, said in an e-mail. “Providing welfare to the wealthy undermines the program for those who need it most while burdening future generations with senseless debt.” Read more >>

Bank regulators ignored recommendations for banks to accept losses on A.I.G. deals

Image by Eifachfilm Vacirca via Flickr

Unknown outside of a few Wall Street legal departments, the A.I.G. waiver was released last month by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform amid 250,000 pages of largely undisclosed documents. The documents, reviewed by The New York Times, provide the most comprehensive public record of how the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Treasury Department orchestrated one of the biggest corporate bailouts in history.

The documents also indicate that regulators ignored recommendations from their own advisers to force the banks to accept losses on their A.I.G. deals and instead paid the banks in full for the contracts. That decision, say critics of the A.I.G. bailout, has cost taxpayers billions of extra dollars in payments to the banks. It also contrasts with the hard line the White House took in 2008 when it forced Chrysler’s lenders to take losses when the government bailed out the auto giant.

This month, the Congressional Oversight Panel, a body charged with reviewing the state of financial markets and the regulators that monitor them, published a 337-page report on the A.I.G. bailout. It concluded that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not give enough consideration to alternatives before sinking more and more taxpayer money into A.I.G. “It is hard to escape the conclusion that F.R.B.N.Y. was just ‘going through the motions,’ ” the report said.

About $46 billion of the taxpayer money in the A.I.G. bailout was used to pay to mortgage trading partners like Goldman and Société Générale, a French bank, to make good on their claims. The banks are not expected to return any of that money, leading the Congressional Research Service to say in March that much of the taxpayer money ultimately bailed out the banks, not A.I.G. More...

John Conyers Joins Acorn Investigation

This is what's called "Damage Control".

The Free Press reports House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers is weighing into the controversy involving Acorn:

Conyers and House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank of Massachusetts today asked the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service to provide an analysis on several aspects of ACORN, including any current or previous criminal investigations into the group; a breakdown of any funding received by the group and any violations of the terms of that funding; a report on alleged improprieties in collecting voter registration forms and “the extent ... that resulted in people being improperly placed on voting roles and actually attempting to vote,” and the group’s programs to provide housing opportunities.

It also asked for a report on private sting activities “in which individuals have reportedly visited ACORN offices, misrepresented their identities and proposed activities, surreptitiously videotaped resulting conversations with ACORN workers, and widely distributed them.”

The letter went onto say, “Conflicting allegations have been made about the propriety of these activities. Please research and report on the federal and state laws that could apply to such videotaping and distribution of conversations without the consent of all parties.”