They’ve saddled the government with obligations that leave it without “the cash or flexibility to address emerging non-elderly needs.”

He’s not the only one to pit the interests of seniors against those of the younger generation.

Stephen Marche, for example, styles spending on Social Security and Medicare as “The War Against Youth.” The baby boomers, he says, are “eating the young at the dinner table.”

Congressman Paul Ryan warns that younger Americans are “on the hook for trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities,” e.g., the commitments inherent in our Social Security and Medicare programs.

And they’re already “in a tough position” because those government “transfer programs” are building the “wealth gap between the elderly and the young.”

More and more of our limited resources are going to higher-income households that don’t need assistance. All those well-off baby boomers sucking up funds that could otherwise be spent on … well, it’s not altogether clear.

This, after all, is the Congressman whose budget plan would radically cut programs for the bottom fifth of households — those he’s purportedly concerned about.

Former Senator Alan Simpson takes the argument to a whole other level — up in heat and down in civility.

Back when he was co-chairing the President’s fiscal commission, he blasted individuals and organizations that had raised concerns about what the commission might do to Social Security — as well they should have, given what he and co-chairman Ernest Bowles came up with.

The advocates, Simpson said, “don’t care a whit about their grandchildren.” The people writing him were “old cats … who live in gated communities and drive their Lexus to the Perkins restaurant to get the AARP discount.”

He recently doubled down with a letter that calls a protesting organization “a group of wretched seniors” — “greedy geezers” who use young people as “a front for [their] nefarious bunch of crap.”

Set aside, if we can, the potty-mouthed language. Simpson too is framing the Social Security issue as a conflict of interests between the old and the young,” with the old winning out because the organizations that represent them “make money pretty good by juicing up the troops.”

I suppose I’m a tad sensitive to allegations that seniors care only about themselves — not to mention the notion that we advocate only because we’re juiced up by some rabble-rousing profiteers.

What got me going here, however, are two other things.

One is an egregious distortion of Social Security and Medicare benefits.

While it’s true that well-off seniors as well as others receive them, they’re already, to some extent, adjusted according to means.

High-income seniors receive lower Social Security benefits relative to the payroll taxes they contributed during their working years. They pay higher premiums for the portion of Medicare that covers non-hospital costs as well.

More importantly, relatively few seniors enjoy such wealth as to make Social Security benefits merely a source of discretionary income for fancy cars and the like.

More than half rely on their benefits for at least 50% of their cash income. Without those benefits, 13.8 million more seniors would have fallen below the Census Bureau’s very low poverty thresholds in 2010.

Second, this portion of the entitlements dialogue exemplifies a framing I’m seeing elsewhere.

We’re being given to understand that our federal budget is — and must be — a shrinking pie. A slice for one group necessarily deprives another. Or a slice for one need necessarily leaves another unmet.

No one, I think, would argue that every single program we have should be kept intact and amply funded.

But we’ve got more than enough wealth in this country to ensure that everyone has enough to live in reasonable comfort and opportunities, in Ryan’s words, to “make the most of their talents and dreams.”

We effectively deny this when we pit one group’s legitimate interests against another’s. We deny the common interests and mutual obligations we have as a community.

And we most surely, whether intentionally or not, foster the divide and conquer strategies of those who want to send us back to the radical individualism of the late 19th century, when social doctrine celebrated survival of the strong and death, by deliberate neglect, of the weak.

Original photo by Worcester Academy.

The annual survey reports by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies are the best source of data on affordability I’ve found.

So I pulled figures from the latest report — most of them for 2009. Then did some calculations of my own — or more precisely, told Excel to do them.

Here’s a summary of key results, plus some Google gleanings about impacts.

Single Mothers Earning the Median

Single-mother families have average incomes significantly lower than families with two parents present. So I began my number crunching with them.

Lots of figures to enter. So I stuck with the costs of center-based care. It’s generally more expensive than care in a home setting, but also more frequently used.

NACCRA gives us breakouts for the median income of single-mother families in each state and the District of Columbia. Also the cost of care for infants and for four year olds as a percent of the median income .

Say a single mother needed child care for one of each. In 20 states and the District, she’d have had to pay more than two-thirds of her income if she earned the median.

Even in the lowest-cost states, nearly half her income would have had to go for child care.

In 30 states and the District, child care for only an infant would have consumed at least a third of her income.

Minimum Wage Workers

Things get worse, of course, for minimum wage workers — even if they work full time, year round, as many don’t.

But say we’ve got a minimum wage worker who does. In 26 states and the District, his/her entire pretax income would have been less than the costs of child care for the infant and four year old.*

Costs of care for the infant alone would have consumed more than half the full-time, year round minimum wage in 33 states and the District — and more than two-thirds in 14 states, plus the District.

Child care was unaffordable even for families with two full-time, year round minimum wage workers. For the two kids, they would have had to pay more than half their gross income in 27 states and the District.

In only one state — Mississippi — would they have had as much as two-thirds of their income for everything else a family needs.

So What’s a Poor Parent to Do?

According to the latest (not very recent) figures from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, roughly 39% of poor children eligible for federally-funded child care subsidies received them in 2006.

Eligibility here means that they were under 13, unless they had special needs. And their parents were either working or participating in education or training activities.

An additional 23% of eligible children in families with incomes between 101% and 150% of the federal poverty line also received child care subsidies.

Which leaves us with some 38% of poor and near-poor children whose parents worked — or were working toward work — without subsidized care.

As the National Women’s Law Center observes, some parents can rely on their parents or other relatives for child care. Somewhat more low-income parents than others do. But for a variety of reasons, many can’t.

And, as I hope I’ve demonstrated, many can’t afford child care at market rates. So what do they do?

Some, mostly moms, choose not to work. Better financially to have one parent out there earning and the other at home with the kids.

Others work part-time or in shifts, barely seeing each other awake for days on end.

And single mothers?

Some of them also decide they can’t go on working. They turn — or return — unwillingly to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. It’s a stopgap solution because TANF is time-limited. But it solves the child care problem for awhile.

One homeless mother says she worked nights while her kids slept in the car parked where she could keep an eye on them.

Surely we could do better for children, their parents and our economy. To say this would involve some reordering of priorities in Congress is an understatement.

* The federal minimum wage increased by 50 cents an hour in July 2009. This produced minimum wage increases in most states and the District. For my calculations, I used the post-increase rate.

Photo of PATH Gramercy by Ken Scott Photo.

He said he was afraid the children would be taken away from them. I asked him if anyone had told him that. Not exactly, but he was worried.

“We’re not bad parents,” he said. “We’re just down on our luck.”

He said it twice during our conversation. And I could see it was true from the way he was cuddling the baby.

I think of him now because the Family Resources Center has started reporting all homeless families with no place to stay to the Child and Family Services Agency, the District’s child welfare program.

This means that the parents can be charged with child neglect — and their children put into foster care — just because the District won’t provide them with shelter or other housing.

As the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless notes, they shouldn’t be. District law specifically states that “deprivation due to the lack of financial means … is not considered neglect.”

But that doesn’t mean homeless children won’t be taken from their parents.

As Professor Matthew Fraidin has written, we simply don’t know what goes on in the courtroom when parents are charged with neglect.

Judges are free to ignore the legal exemption for lack of financial means. And they may when they understand that the children have no safe place to stay — or decide that’s due to parental irresponsibility.

What we do know, from a recent report by the Citizens Review Panel, is that CFSA has taken many children from their parents without getting a court order first. And, in more than half the cases, the precipitous removals were not justified.

Also know, from CFSA’s own report, that “inadequate housing” was the primary reason it placed 35 children in foster care in 2010.

Are we to understand that parents with sufficient financial means deliberately chose unsafe housing — or no housing at all?

Rhetorical question. What the placements tell us is that homeless parents have good reason to fear that the powers-that-be will take their children away.

They certainly don’t have adequate housing, and CFSA has no resources of its own to provide it.

At the very least, families the Center reports are likely to be subject to intimidating investigations. Children may be interrogated. Imagine how frightening — even if nothing comes of it.

More likely, however, parents won’t ask for shelter when they’ve no place to stay if they’re told, as they are, that the Center will report their situation to the child welfare authorities.

This is already happening. Many Legal Clinic clients with nowhere to stay have left the Center for fear they’d lose their children, according to testimony by staff attorney Amber Harding.

Another client tells us that she stopped asking for shelter after Center staff repeatedly warned her that they’d have her kids removed if she couldn’t provide them with a safe place to sleep. “I won’t be calling again,” she says.

What the [expletive deleted] is the Department of Human Services doing?

Director David Berns, I’m told, claims that the department is just trying to do a better job of ensuring compliance with mandatory reporting requirements.

I don’t altogether buy this. Under District law, poverty and its immediate consequences, e.g. homelessness, don’t constitute abuse or neglect. So what’s to report?

“Safety risks,” Berns says. But there’s no mandate for reporting these unless they’re risks posed by abuse or neglect.

So we’ve got either an excess of zeal or a covert strategy for controlling the waiting list of homeless families the department can’t help — 308 of them, at last count.

I’d like to believe the former. But what I believe doesn’t matter.

What matters is that DHS doesn’t have the funds to protect all the families who’ve got no safe place to stay and instead is exposing children to all the risks that foster care entails.

Photo by Jackal of all trades.

The Ways and Means Committee also had to find more savings — $53 billion over the next 10 years. And it too met its target by shifting costs to low-income people. But they’re not the only ones who’ll be harmed by what it’s come up with — far from it.

Here’s what the committee passed — and what the full Republican majority in the House almost surely will pass before week’s end.

Child Tax Credit Restriction

Ways and Means dusted off a proposal that earlier surfaced a way to offset some of the costs of extending the employee payroll tax cut andwhat remains of long-term unemployment insurance benefits.

Under the proposal, only parents with Social Security numbers could claim the Child Tax Credit. Immigrants who pay their income taxes using a number issued by the Internal Revenue Services would have to pay more because they’d lose the credit.

And those toward the bottom of the income scale would lose the partial reimbursement the tax credit provides.

First Focus reports that 5.5 million children would no longer benefit from the extra money their families have to spend on basic needs.

Elimination of Social Services Block Grant

Ways and Means would wipe out the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) altogether. This also is a rerun, already revived in the current House budget plan.

SSBG is a relatively small program that provides states and the District of Columbia with funds they can use to meet a wide range of needs.

It’s commonly used for subsidized day care, services to protect both children and vulnerable adults from abuse and neglect, foster care and services that help seniors and people with disabilities live independently, e.g., Meals on Wheels, transportation.

Many states and the District also use SSBG funds for casework services that link people to programs that can help them.

The House Budget Committee calls the services “duplicative” because other pots of federal money fund them too.

This is misleading for two reasons. First, some states use the block grant for services that aren’t covered under other programs, e.g.protective services for elderly victims of abuse and neglect.

Second and more importantly, services aren’t duplicative just because states can draw on more than one program to fund them. Low-income parents who get child care subsidies funded by SSBG, for example, don’t also get subsidies funded by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

In other words, SSBG enables states to extend services they consider essential to more people who need them — over 22.6 million, according to the latest official figures.

Unlimited Health Care Subsidy Repayments

This is a bit technical, but it’s a big deal. So bear with me here.

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), people who aren’t poor enough to qualify for Medicaid can get subsidies to purchase health insurance through the exchanges, i.e., the upcoming state-level insurance markets, if they meet two conditions.

Their incomes must be at or below 400% of the federal poverty line. And they can’t get adequate, affordable health insurance through their employers.

The initial size of the subsidy is based — as it must be — on their income at the time they purchase or renew their health insurance. The lower their income, the bigger the subsidy.

What if their income rises substantially during the year? They’re unemployed at the beginning, but get a job, for example.

Under current law, they have to repay the excess they received, but only up to a fixed amount. Congress established a limit so that people wouldn’t choose to forgo health insurance because they might get stuck with a big repayment.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, Congress has twice raised the repayment cap to offset the costs of other health care legislation.

House Ways and Means would eliminate the cap altogether. The repayment some people could face would be more than five times the amount of the penalty they’d have to pay for not having health insurance.

An estimated 350,000 people — mostly the healthiest — would chose the penalty over the potential shock to their budgets later. Some, of course, would then be devastated by unexpected health care costs.

Meanwhile, people still in the insurance pool would, on average, have higher health care costs. So premiums would rise and, with them, the costs of subsidies.

The added stress on the exchanges would undermine the basic structure of the ACA — not an unintended consequence for the Republican majority. Nor is the outrage some people would feel when hit with a big repayment bill.

More support for the ACA repeal Republicans promise, if the Supreme Court doesn’t kill the law first.

Well, the House Ways and Means proposals, in their current form, won’t even get a vote in the Senate. But what we see here is that bad ideas don’t die just because they’re not enacted right away.

We should expect to see these and others resurface when House and Senate negotiators sit down to work out a way to avert the across-the-board cuts due to begin next January.

Lots of pressure. Lots of horse-trading then.

Photo credit: Images of Money

Under Mayor Gray’s proposed budget, more than 6,100 families in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program will lose a fifth of their meager cash benefits come October — this on top of the same sized-cut imposed last April.

The figure I led off with is what a family of three would be left with. Additional benefits cuts would follow until the family got nothing at all.

More than 11,000 children under thirteen would be plunged into even deeper poverty. Some of them, as the Children’s Law Center warns, would be put into foster care simply because their parents couldn’t afford adequate housing.

The families who’ll suffer are those who’ve spent 60 months or more in the program — not necessarily consecutive.

In many cases, the affected parents haven’t gotten the services they need to overcome severe work barriers, e.g., mental and physical health problems, domestic violence trauma, minimal or no marketable job skills.

Some were expected to engage in what passed for work preparation activities — sessions on workplace behavior, writing a resume, interviewing, etc.

Then, as one participant said, “[t]hey have you on the computer all day,” searching the online listings and pressured to take the first job offered.

Many have cycled back into the program because they didn’t have the skills for the jobs they’d found — or hadn’t gotten the help they needed to overcome other barriers. Others, I suppose, returned when they lost their jobs due to the recession.

Not all the parents whose benefits will be cut were required to engage in work activities for their whole term in the program. Some were excused for awhile because their barriers made work activities wholly unrealistic. But the time off is being counted toward their 60-month maximum anyway.

What’s happening here is that part of the Department of Human Services’ TANF redesign is barreling ahead — the part that gives parents a stronger incentive to engage in required work preparation and work search activities.

Nothing like facing a penniless future to get one moving — unless, of course, one’s too ill, disabled or occupied with other responsibilities,e.g., caring for a severely disabled child, to move on the work front, even knowing the hardships awaiting.

The administration could exempt up to 20% of such “hardship cases” from the 60-month limit and still use federal funds for a share of their cash benefits. But it’s chosen not to.

The other part of the TANF reform — in-depth individual assessments to identify their individual strengths and needs — is lagging behind. Thus also appropriate agreements on what they should do to fulfill their responsibilities for striving toward self-sufficiency.

As of late February, DHS had completed only 12% of the assessments needed for families at immediate risk of cash benefit loss.

At the reported rate of 150 assessments a week, it won’t get through them all until months after the next 20% cut kicks in.

It might if the rate applied only to parents subject to the phase-out rather than to all parents who show up when they’re told to. Some at immediate risk haven’t heard, don’t understand or perhaps figure it’s futile because they’re going to lose their benefit anyway.

Councilmembers Jim Graham and Michael Brown have introduced a billthat would temporarily stave off the benefits cuts and mandate reasonable time-limit exemptions, such as many states provide.

Advocates have suggested ways the bill could be strengthened, including a longer reprieve period. But it’s a whole lot better than what’s coming down the pike.

Why didn’t Mayor Gray fold a version into his proposed budget? Surely he knows that TANF families will lose benefits because the program failed them.

For the same reason he put the benefits phase-out into last year’s proposed budget. Savings to help close the budget gap. This year he expects to save more than $5.6 million.

Well, the DC Council could do what the Mayor wouldn’t. The Human Services Committee took a step in this direction last week with a vote (4-1) in favor of the Graham-Brown bill

Now comes the need to find funds to substitute for the Mayor’s proposed savings — and to get at least three more Councilmembers on board.

Maybe we should launch a TANF Challenge along the lines of the popular Food Stamp Challenges.

Who knows what might happen if our elected representatives had to try living on $275 for a month?

Photo credit: US Department of Agriculture

The guns at issue here are funds for defense. Sequestration, i.e., the annual across-the-board cuts required by the Budget Control Act, would reduce them by $54.7 billion a year.

Nobody in a position of power wants those cuts, including the President.

His proposed Fiscal Year 2013 budget would hit the total deficit reduction targets in the BCA by a mix of spending cuts and revenue increases. It would also, as the BCA does, protect certain key programs for low-income people, including food stamps.

House Republicans will have none of this. Their budget plan, among other things, charged six committees to come up with more non-defense savings — enough to hit the deficit reduction targets, but without touching defense.

The House Agriculture Committee had to save $33.2 billion over the next 10 years, beginning with $8.2 billion in the upcoming fiscal year.

It could have gone after the costly subsidies our government pays to farmers — actually, for the most part, large farming operations.

Some of these provide special benefits for producing certain crops, e.g., yearly payments (even if the farmer grows nothing), compensation to make up for lower market prices. Another subsidizes insurance against crop losses. Yet farmers also get compensated when droughts, frosts,etc. ruin their crops.

All told, these subsidies cost some $25 billion a year. Nice safety net, huh?

The House budget plan itself identifies some of these subsidies for “reforms.” But they’re for another day.

So the Agriculture Committee, heeding “assumptions” made by the Budget Committee found its mandated savings — all of them and more— in the food stamp program.

First, it would shave months off the expiring boost in benefits that was part of the Recovery Act. They’re now scheduled to end in November 2013 — thanks to earlier cutbacks Congress made to offset the costs of other measures.

Under the House Agriculture plan, the boost would end two months from now. For a family of four, this would mean $57 less per month, according to a new brief from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The bulk of the savings, however, would come from two changes in the food stamp law itself.

One of them would, in effect, require households to be poorer to qualify for food stamps.

Under current law, a household can generally have no more than $2,000 in assets — or $3,250 if any of its members is a senior or a person with a disability. Total household income must be no greater than 130% of the applicable federal poverty line.

But most states — and the District of Columbia — have used an option in the law to eliminate the asset test. They’ve expanded their definition of “categorical eligibility,” i.e., types of low-income households that automatically qualify for food stamps.

This not only allows low-income families to conserve what they can for unexpected expenses. It also lets states raise the income eligiibilty threshold up to 200% of the federal poverty line — the level that many analysts use for classifying the low-income population.

The House Agriculture Committee would put a stop to this. Only households in which all members receive cash assistance could be deemed categorically eligible.

No more categorical eligibility for those that receive other types of publicly-funded support for low-income people, e.g., child care subsidies, job training.

Nor for households where only the children receive cash benefits through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program or asSupplemental Security Income.

At least two million people — perhaps as many as three million –would be forced out of the program. More than 280,000 children would lose not only food stamp benefits, but free school meals.

The other change in existing law would permanently reduce the benefits some households receive — again by severely limiting an option a growing number of states now use.

Briefly, the complicated formula states must ordinarily use to calculate food stamp eligibility and benefits levels includes an income allowance for utility costs, based on those applicants actually have to pay for.

But if the family receives benefits from the Low Income Energy Assistance Program, it automatically qualifies for the maximum allowance.

Fourteen states — and the District — have given families in the food stamp program a small LIHEAP benefit. Some of the families get higher food stamp benefits as a result. No big windfall here, however.

The House Agriculture Committee would virtually eliminate the so-called “heat and eat” option — or so I infer, since it expects to save $14 billion.

All this would be in addition to, not instead of the $133.5 billion House Republicans intend to save by converting the food stamp program to a block grant.

Moral of this story: Some people’s safety nets are worthier than others.

Photo credit: Bread for the World

They had no place to stay and no money for food. And the Family Resources Center — the District’s central intake for homeless families — couldn’t help them.

The mother told me that they’d been advised to find some place to stay — as if they’d have asked for shelter if they had one.

They’d returned to the Center in hopes of a gift card so they could buy some food, but it had run out of cards. I was told the cards were donated by corporations like Safeway and Giant, and the chains hadn’t come through of late.

The family could, however, get a Metro fare card. I asked the father what they’d do with it. He said he guessed they’d go back to their former neighborhood and see if someone would take them in. Not likely, he seemed to think.

So here’s a family that’s destitute. A little kid and an unborn child at high risk of long-term health and developmental damages due to hunger.

Perhaps for the toddler also psychological damage if he understands what it means that they’re spending nights in bus stations or hospital waiting rooms — even, as seems likely, if he picks up on the fear and stress his parents are feeling.

Who knows how many more stories like this there are — and how many more there’ll be in months to come?

All because the District government couldn’t find enough money to fund its homeless program in light of projected needs.

A 46% increase in family homelessness since 2008. A report indicating extraordinary vulnerability to increased homelessness.

And a budget for this fiscal year that provides not a penny more for homeless services — actually $3 million less than what the Department of Human Services was spending.

So DHS has again stopped providing shelter for newly homeless families. Official end of the winter season means they’ll be on their own — perhaps till the next freezing-cold day.

And now Mayor Gray has proposed a budget that would effectively cut homeless services by $7 million. These are “lost,” i.e., spent, federal funds that he could have replaced with local dollars.

No doubt the budget must address many priorities. But I fail to see how letting homeless families fend for themselves squares with budget development principles that include “protect the District’s most vulnerable residents.”

Also fail to see why all tax and fee increases must be off the table if the alternative is cuts that undermine other principles.

The Mayor tells us that to “seize our future,” we must “improve the quality of life for all.”

My quality of life wouldn’t be impaired by paying, say, a sales tax on services that aren’t covered now — or for that matter, income taxes at a higher rate.

It is impaired by helpless worrying about the literally help-less family I met. Their quality of life goes without saying.

Photo credit: Foomandoonian

That’s what we’re seeing now as organizations dedicated to improving services for homeless people take opposite sides on a bill pending in the House of Representatives.

The bill at issue — the Homeless Children and Youth Act (H.R. 32) — would expand the definition of “homeless” in the HEARTH Act, i.e., the latest version of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act.

Why Worry About a Word?

The HEARTH Act definition of “homeless” sets the parameters for local programs supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s homeless assistance grants.

It determines both the populations the grant funds may serve and those that get counted and reported to HUD. The figures reported to HUD are reported to Congress — and ultimately to us, through press reports, blog posts and the like.

The definition thus not only reflects, but helps shape public policy.

First Round of the Definition Debate

H.R. 32 reopens an issue that split organizations at the time Congressional committees were developing the HEARTH Act.

The McKinney Vento Act defined homeless people as those who are in shelters, transitional housing or “places not meant for human habitation.”

People living in cheap motels or some friend’s spare bedroom weren’t officially homeless — and thus not eligible for HUD-funded services.

Their children, however, were officially homeless under Title VII of the McKinney-Vento Act — the part that covers requirements and funding for the education of homeless children and youth.

A number of national organizations urged Congress to broaden the general definition to include families whose children were already homeless under Title VII.

That would have extended eligibility for shelter and more stable housing to families living with friends or relatives or in motels, hotels, trailer parks or camping grounds because they couldn’t afford “alternative adequate accommodations.”

Other organizations, including the National Alliance to End Homelessness, resisted, foreseeing a large expansion in the eligibility pool with no commensurate increases in funding or fundable initiatives.

Congress ultimately tried to split the difference.

HEARTH Act Compromise

As things stand now, the HEARTH Act definition includes individuals and families if they’re about to be evicted and have no immediate prospects for an alternative residence.

Those living doubled up are part of this group, as are those living in motels — but, as with evictions, but only if they’ll have no place to stay in two weeks.

The new definition also recognizes families and unaccompanied youth who are already homeless under other federal laws, but only if they’ve been without permanent housing for a long time, moved frequently and can be expected to remain unstably housed for one or more of specified reasons, e.g., a chronic disability, a history of domestic violence or childhood abuse, “multiple barriers to employment.”

In short, an expansion, but hedged with conditions.

Round Two

No one, I suppose, found the compromise altogether satisfying. Advocates for the Title VII-type definition surely didn’t.

So they found a friendly House member — Congresswoman Judy Biggert (R-IL) — to introduce a bill that would make the HEARTH Act definition the way they always wanted it.

A leading proponent — the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth — says the legislation is urgently needed because “many homeless children and youth are suffering out of public sight.”

We don’t see the hardships they’re enduring because they’re living in motels or doubled up. But they’re actually more in danger of abuse, untreated health problems, hunger and “educational deficits” than those in shelters, NAEHCY says.

HUD’s regulations make it “virtually impossible” for these at-risk children and youth to qualify for the assistance the agency funds. Even those who might meet the HEARTH Act definition could be barred by the formidable documentation and verification requirements.

NAEHCY argues that local service providers are best qualified to know which homeless families and children are most in need of housing and services.

And there’d be no red tape because children and youth already verified as homeless by any one of four federally-funded programs, e.g., a local school district, a Head Start program, would be automatically eligible. Their families as well.

To top it off, the Biggert bill wouldn’t cost anything. That’s again where the conflict lies.

NAEH warns that the expanded definition would divert already inadequate resources from “children who literally have no roof over their heads.”

There’s no indication, it says, that additional funds will be provided to accommodate the increase in the number of families eligible for the assistance HUD funds through its Continuum of Care grants.

I think it’s hard to argue otherwise. If the expanded definition came with a bigger piece of federal budget pie, we wouldn’t have organizations fighting over who should get the crumbs.

Yet, as NAEHCY says, “policy should be based on reality, not fantasy.” Under the current definition, at least 762,000 or so children and youth that most of us would consider homeless aren’t counted as such. Not even an estimate apparently for the number of uncounted homeless families.

Getting a fix on the scope of the problem won’t solve it. But Congress surely won’t act if the numbers it gets minimize the crisis.

Photo credit: Quinn Dombrowski

Turns out that the income gap between the richest and poorest 20% of households is the third largest among U.S. cities — this based on data from the 2010 American Community Survey.

The average income for the richest fifth was 29 times greater than for the poorest fifth. Look only at the top 5% and the mutiple rises to 52.2% — $473,343, as compared to $9,062.

I know that conservatives generally don’t view income inequality as a problem. What matters, they say, is income mobility, i.e., the opportunity to move up the income scale.

But, to my mind, such enormous gaps should concern us — and for various reasons.

Some research indicates that severe income inequality is, in and of itself, bad for society.

Researchers at the University of York, for example, have found that people in countries with high income inequality — the U.S. among them — fare worse on a host of indicators, e.g., physical and mental health, violence and drug abuse, mutual trust and community cohesion.

The findings are controversial. Other explanations have been offered for what are, after all, only statistical correlations. Yet we surely see something like them at the local level.

The two cities Mayor Gray is rightly concerned about depress many measures of community well-being. And they’re fraught with cross-class hostilities — some more overt than others.

We also know — or surely should — that wealthy people have disproportionate political clout and, of course, use it to protect their own interests. The bigger the income gap, the more these interests are likely to diverge from those of people at the bottom of the income scale.

We need only look at the fate of some very reasonable tax reform proposals to see how this plays out — and to the detriment of residents who depend on our safety net programs.

But the biggest deal here is the very low average income for the bottom fifth of D.C. households — under 50% of the federal poverty line for a family of three. About $4,800 less than the yearly rent on a modest efficiency unit.

The rising tide that’s supposed to lift all boats hasn’t done much for these households. Since 1979, their inflation-adjusted wages have grown just 14%, while those for the high earners have grown 44%.

This reflects a nationwide trend. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the inflation-adjusted income for the top fifth of families grew 49% during about the same period as DCFPI carved out. For the bottom fifth, income actually shrank by 7.9%.

The problem, many analysts say, is that the top fifth — and even more the notorious top 1% — have been gaining ground at the expense of everyone else.

Explanations abound. Solutions also. President Obama is again campaigning on some. We’ll soon see a related, bigger bundle in Senator Tom Harkin’s Rebuild America Act.

DCFPI instead focuses on a handful of local policies and programs that could lift the incomes of our bottom fifth. With two limited exceptions, they’re already on the books. What’s not is sufficient funding.

Given the resources, the initiatives would:

• Help residents prepare for living-wage jobs.
• Address housing concerns, i.e., remedy the budget cuts to the District’s main affordable housing programs.
• Make work pay better for a subset of current and future D.C. workers.

I’ll return to these in a separate post. Will say here only that DCFPI’s recommendations are — I assume deliberately — very modest.

But they could make a big difference for many of those very poor residents in the bottom fifth. A big difference for our divided community too.

Photo credit: Alex Barth

This was during a recession. And as time went on — and hopes dwindled — I got to thinking about what would happen if I never found work again.

I realized that I couldn’t rely on any of the major public benefits programs because I was a relatively young, able-bodied adult with no children (ABAWD).

If I’d sunk into poverty earlier, I could have gotten food stamps — though hardly at a level that would have enabled me to eat three squares a day.

But Congress had decided that people like me had to earn their food stamps by demonstrating personal responsibility — this as part of the same law that created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

As with the TANF, “personal responsibility” means, among other things, working or preparing for work.

So under ordinary circumstances, most of us able-bodied adults without dependents can get food stamps for only three months in any three-year period unless we’re working at least 20 hours a week or engaged, for the same amount of time, in a job training or workfareprogram, i.e., unpaid public service.

The Recovery Act suspended this time limit through September 2010. President Obama’s proposed Fiscal Year 2012 budget would have reinstated the suspension.

But the proposal went nowhere. Hardly surprising when House Republicans had decided that the food stamp program was growing out of all compass and should be converted to a block grant like TANF.

For the most part, however, ABAWDs have been okay because the law allows states to get a waiver from the time limit for those who live in areas where the unemployment rate is over 10% or there are “insufficient jobs.”

I’ve tried to figure out whether this long-standing policy will provide a reasonable substitute for a reinstatement of the Recovery Act suspension. Very difficult because most of the available data are for states as a whole, not areas within states.

This much seems clear. Very few, if any agencies will be able to claim a statewide waiver in Fiscal Year 2013.

As of December, unemployment rates were higher than 10% in only four states and the District of Columbia. Seems likely that fewer states will qualify on this basis when the new fiscal year begins.

Which leaves the “insufficient jobs” option. Memos from the federal Food Nutrition Service indicate that it’s been using the trigger criteriafor the Extended Benefits portion of unemployment insurance to decide whether states qualify for a year-long statewide waiver.

As I wrote awhile ago, states “trigger off” EB when their average unemployment rate for the current three-month period is no longer at least 6.5% higher than during the comparable period in a recent prior year.

So more states will fall off the trigger list as time goes on, even though their unemployment rates are well above normal.

This doesn’t mean states won’t be able to claim waivers. But it seems they’ll have to revert to the much more restrictive Department of Labor “surplus area” lists — generally local jurisdictions where the unemployment rate is 20% higher than the national rate.

Perhaps in ordinary times it makes sense to say that able-bodied adults who need food stamp benefits should work or prepare for work if they can. Whether they should be coerced into working for no pay is a separate issue.

But these aren’t ordinary times.

There are still nearly four times as many people looking for work as jobs available.

Job re-training programs are reportedly stressed to the max. And it seems reasonable to suppose that a fair number of the longer-term jobless ABAWDs have already completed one anyway. Doubtful they could get into another that would carry them through till they found work.

So the end of the current ABAWD waivers will almost surely mean that more low-income people go hungry. Seems unfair to punish them because jobs are scarce and they’ve no one but themselves to support.

The President’s Fiscal Year 2013 budget again proposes a time-limit suspension. I’d like to think it will pass this time, but that’s more hope for change than I can muster.

Photo credit: Curt Fleenor