Poverty News Round Up

To paraphrase Karl Barth, one should preach with a Bible in one hand, and a newspaper in the other. To make that easier, we’re continuing to bring you the top stories in poverty for the week, and we’ve added some brief commentary based on the Revised Common Lectionary for each week. As always, leave a comment if you think we missed a big story.

The Newspaper:

1. The Senate passed a Farm Bill. The House is expected to vote later in the month.

The bill “would cut $24 billion from farm spending over 10 years, including a $4 billion reduction to food stamps….The House is working on a rival, $940 billion farm bill that cuts spending by $39.7 billion over 10 years, with $20.5 billion of the cuts coming food stamps.”

2.  The Farm Bill  includes an amendment that would prevent felons from receiving nutrition assistance.

“If it becomes law, not only convicted criminals, but the children and other family members who depend on them will be affected — by one estimate, as many as 500,000 low-income households will have $90 less a month to spend on food.

It will make no difference if the crime was committed long ago; or if it was committed when the person was a child; or if the ex-offender has lived a law-abiding life ever since; or that he has already spent time behind bars and paid his debt to society.”

3. Brazil’s poverty rate has dropped from 22% to 7% and it’s Bolsa Familia program is the largest single anti-poverty program in the world. What can we learn from Brazil?

“Brazil still has millions of people living in poverty, and subsidising the basic needs of so many people is not cheap. But it all comes down to basics. Better-fed, healthy people contribute more to a country’s well-being. Malnutrition does the opposite, costing lives and resources. So what can the rest of the world learn from Brazil?”

4. The future of poverty may be in agriculture.

“California’s San Joaquin Valley is one of the richest agricultural regions in the world, with Fresno County farmers receiving a record $6.8 billion in revenues last year. But the region also consistently ranks among the nation’s most impoverished. Sometimes called “Appalachia of the West,” it’s where families, especially Hispanic immigrants and their children, live year after year in destitution.”

5. The safety net performed well during the recession. But it may not be able to continue.

“The U.S. safety net performed a lot better than you thought during the recent downturn, which was the deepest since the Depression. Thanks to expansions to the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and unemployment insurance—all beefed up by the $840 billion Recovery Act—the safety net almost wholly mitigated the rise in child poverty. Even middle-income households saw most of their income losses substantially offset by tax and transfer policies that sharply ramped up to help them.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that most of the Recovery Act’s outlays have now been spent, and pressure to reduce deficits leaves other spending on children and families under assault.”

The Bible:

In this Sunday’s first lesson (1 Kings 21:1-10) we hear the story of Naboth’s vineyard. Jezebel has Naboth killed for refusing to sell his land to King Ahab. Often overlooked is why Naboth refused to sell.

1 Kings 21:3 But Naboth said to Ahab, “The LORD forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance.”

Naboth is referring to Leviticus 25, which lays out the rules for property ownership. Property can be temporarily leased out, but is to be returned to its ancestral owners every 50 years as part of the Jubilee. This was one of the ways that Israel reduced inequality and made sure that families did not get trapped in cycles of poverty, as each new generation would be able to start with its ancestral land. I recommend Richard Horsley’s Covenant Economics as a good introduction to economics in the Bible.

SNAP Beneficiaries Probably Aren't Who You Think

Reblogged from Faith and Public Policy:

As Congress considers cutting up to 2 million people off of SNAP, it's worth taking a little bit of time to think about who these people are. Forty-five percent of them are children, and another 26 percent are adults who live with children. Many of the rest are the elderly or disabled. Most of the 'other section' is actually composed of elderly and disabled who do not live alone, but I was not able to display those categories in the pie chart since they overlap with "Adults with Children."

Read more… 241 more words

As Congress considers cutting SNAP, let's take a look at whose bodies and brains will be cut into by hunger.

Poverty News Round Up

Some interesting reading about poverty from the past week. Have a story we missed? Let us know in the comments.

1. Financial stress is going up for the poor, even while it’s going down for everyone else. From Investor’s Business Daily:

“Americans are less financially stressed — except for the poor. The IBD/TIPP Financial Related Stress Index fell 1.3 points in June to 57.1, the lowest going back to the recession’s start in December 2007. It peaked at 74 in October 2008, just after the Lehman Bros. collapse sent markets and the economy into a tailspin. But among those making less than $30,000, the stress reading jumped 3.3 points to 64.3, an eight-month high.”

2. Teacher’s are first responders to poverty. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

“Learning and laundry, in fact, get done in several area schools, where teachers and staff also buy food, prom clothes, toilet paper, eyeglasses, and countless other items for children from families with meager means.

This is on top of the hundreds, even thousands, of dollars that teachers spend each year on basic classroom supplies.

In the Philadelphia area, teachers see themselves as first responders in the ongoing emergency of poverty. Many say that if they falter, they fail the children.”

3. Cash is more effective than other types of aid, reports Bloomberg’s Businessweek:

“It is comfortable for richer people to think they are richer because of the moral failings of the poor. And that justifies a paternalistic approach to poverty relief using vouchers and in-kind support. But the big reason poor people are poor is because they don’t have enough money, and it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that giving them money is a great way to reduce that problem—considerably more cost-effectively than paternalism.”

4. Economic changes are affecting family structure. The pew report on breadwinner moms continues to be in the news:

“the evidence suggests that while men tend to applaud their spouses when they help to bring home the bacon, husbands aren’t always as enthusiastic when women start bringing home the filet mignon. And it’s especially troubling that these old-fashioned social norms about gender identity appear to be adversely affecting family formation and stability.”

5. World poverty was cut in half between 1990 and 2010. Can it be eliminated by 2030? The Economist investigates.

“If extreme poverty could be halved in the past two decades, why should the other half not be got rid of in the next two? If 21% was possible in 2010, why not 1% in 2030?”

Honor Our Fathers By Telling Their Stories

This Father’s Day, the National Council of Churches Poverty Initiative is joining with Equal Voice News in honoring fathers who are creating positive change and fighting poverty in their homes and communities.

Please send in your story to NCC Poverty Initiative Director Shantha Ready Alonso at info@nccendpoverty.org.  We’ll feature all the stories I receive on the NCC Poverty Initiative blog and post them to social media with prayer requests. All stories received by Wednesday, June 12 will be submitted to Equal Voice News for their consideration to feature on their online newspaper.

In your email to info@nccendpoverty.org, please include:

Your name:

Name of nominated father:

Home city:

Organization (if applicable):

What issue(s) is this dad involved with?

Why are you nominating him?

Please attach a photo of him.

With Father’s Day around the corner, let’s be faithful to our call to honor our fathers. Please take a moment to share a gift of recognition, prayer, and encouragement from a nation-wide community.

Poverty News Round Up

Here are some of the most notable stories about poverty that were in the news this week.

1. The Boston Globe reports on the devastating impact the sequester is having on public housing.

“Thousands of the state’s poorest residents are losing or being denied federal housing subsidies as a result of automatic, across-the-board spending cuts, forcing many to choose between food, rent, medicine — or the streets.

The cuts are pummeling the Section 8 voucher program, which offers assistance to poor individuals and families renting apartments in the open market.”

2. Suburban poverty brings several new challenges for anti-poverty efforts, including transportation. From the Council of State Governments:

“Being away from the bustle of the city was always the point of suburban living but this creates a unique transportation barrier as the poor are now  farther away from their jobs and traditional programs which serve them.”

3. As more women join the workforce and become the primary breadwinners for their families, pressure is beginning to mount for improved child care services.

“Demographers say the change is all but irreversible and is likely to bring added attention to child-care policies as well as government safety nets for vulnerable families. Still, the general public is not at all sure that having more working mothers is a good thing.

While roughly 79 percent of Americans reject the notion that women should return to their traditional roles, only 21 percent of those polled said the trend of more mothers of young children working outside the home is a good thing for society, according to the Pew survey.”

4. With all the attention to tax expenditures in the wake of the new CBO report, it’s worth pointing out that the majority of charitable contributions don’t actually go towards the poor, in fact, only around 30 percent of charitable giving is targeted at alleviating poverty.

From Wonkblog:

Clergy in North Carolina Invite ALL Clergy to Descend on Raleigh in Solidarity on June 10.

Rev. Jimmie Hawkins, one of the NCC’s Pastors Ending Poverty, is mobilizing clergy in North Carolina to speak out against actions by the North Carolina legislature to undermine the well-being of people living in poverty. Please see the message below about the mobilization he is planning. ~Shantha

I am sure that you are aware of the acts of civil disobedience which have occurred in Raleigh over the past month. It’s has been a sign of discontent on the part of many North Carolinians who disagree with the policies coming out of the state legislature.

While it has not been discussed in the media, clergy have played an important role. But there is a desperate need for our collective voices to be heard. For many are asking, where is the voice of the church? And many more have been asking, where is the voice of the clergy?

We, as NC members of the clergy, want to gather in Raleigh on June 10 at 5:00pm on Bicentennial Mall. We are not planning on anyone getting arrested. We do not plan on entering the legislative building. But we are planning on lifting our voices to be heard as men and women of God to say that “We Are For the Poor”. That we stand in opposition to any policies, any person who would produce actions which injure the most vulnerable around us. And as men and women of faith, we gather for prayer and for a public proclamation of faith in a God who is a God of salvation and justice.

Download and distribute this flyer for more information.

In Christ,
Rev. Jimmie R. Hawkins

Poverty News Round Up

Here are five of  the important poverty related stories from the past two weeks. Let us know in comments if we missed something.

1. The NY Times reports on the lifelong health and wellness impacts of growing up in poverty.

“Poverty damages children’s dispositions and blunts their brains. We’ve seen articles about the language deficit in poorer homes and the gaps in school achievement. These remind us that — more so than in my mother’s generation — poverty in this country is now likely to define many children’s life trajectories in the harshest terms: poor academic achievement, high dropout rates, and health problems from obesity anddiabetes to heart disease, substance abuse and mental illness.

Recently, there has been a lot of focus on the idea of toxic stress, in which a young child’s body and brain may be damaged by too much exposure to so-called stress hormones, like cortisol and norepinephrine. When this level of stress is experienced at an early age, and without sufficient protection, it may actually reset the neurological and hormonal systems, permanently affecting children’s brains and even, we are learning, their genes.”

2. Poverty and Policy reports on the cuts to food stamps that are making their way through congress.

“Last week, the Senate Agriculture Committee finished a bill that cuts the program by $4.1 billion over the next 10 years. This is slightly less than last year’s proposed cut, but only because the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate has changed.

The House Agriculture Committee boosted its food stamp cuts to approximately $21 billion* over the same 10-year period. This $4.5 billion increase over last year reflects substantive changes in the proposed legislation.”

3. Poverty is shifting to the suburbs. There are now more total suburban poor than urban poor, although poverty rates remain higher in urban areas.

“In 2011, the suburban poor outnumbered the urban poor by three million; from 2000 to 2011, the number of poor people soared by 64 percent in the suburbs, compared with 29 percent in cities. Today nearly one-third of all Americans are poor or nearly poor. One in three poor Americans live in the suburbs. If you’re poor in the Seattle, Atlanta or Chicago regions, you’re more likely than not living outside the city limits.”

4. Much of the gap in education results between high and low income children is driven not by public schooling inequality, but by how prepared they are to enter kindergarten.

“…schools don’t seem to produce much of the disparity in test scores between high- and low-income students. We know this because children from rich and poor families score very differently on school readiness tests when they enter kindergarten, and this gap grows by less than 10 percent between kindergarten and high school. There is some evidence that achievement gaps between high- and low-income students actually narrow during the nine-month school year, but they widen again in the summer months.”

5. Community Colleges are failing to live up to their potential, which is particularly troubling given the socioeconomic and racial divide between community colleges and other colleges.

“Of community college entrants, 81.4 percent say they plan on getting a bachelor’s degree. Only 11.6 percent end up doing so.”