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PATH PartnersKathryn Baer
Kathryn Baer is a consultant in policy research, analysis and communications. She has provided expert support for the legislative and regulatory interests of nonprofits, government agencies, a Member of Congress and several large global corporations. In addition to for fee services, she contributes her time and skills to organizations that advocate on behalf of low-income people in the U.S. As part of this work, she maintains her own blog, povertyandpolicy.wordpress.com.
Posts by Kathryn Baer
Let’s Recall Poverty Before the Safety Net
Huffington Post blogger Dan Morgan looks back nearly 50 years to tell us what poverty was like in his early reporting days.
This is an important, timely post because it reminds us of how poor people lived — and died — before the creation of today’s safety net.
Here in the District of Columbia, Morgan found “people living in basement apartments with dirt floors. Many were hungry, cold and short of coal for stoves. Some children were staying home because they had no shoes.”
Long-Term Unemployment Benefits Need More Than Extension
Huffington Post blogger Arthur Delaney has been hammering on an important fact about the just-passed temporary extension of long-term unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. It won’t fully extend benefits for everyone who’s getting them now.
By the time the temporary extension expires, workers in 11 states will have lost their benefits, he writes, even though they won’t have reached the maximum they’d have been entitled to in early December.
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Safety Net Keeps Fraying
Safety nets are supposed to catch people when they fall so they don’t crash to the ground. So too with what we call safety net programs. We have created them so that people don’t land in desperate poverty. We’d thus expect safety net programs to catch more people when the economy tanks, as it did [...]
Survey Yields Insights on Washington DC Homeless Youth
Back in February, DC Councilmembers Jim Graham and Michael Brown introduced a bill that would, among other things, give us a better fix on who is homeless in the District and what services are — and ought to be — available for them.
Nothing’s happened with the bill, so far as I can tell, since the hearing in June.
But something has happened to address the main focus of the hearing — unaccompanied homeless youth.
More than Half a Million Jobs Lost if Federal Unemployment Benefits Expire
I’m not acutely distressed by the fact that Super Committee members couldn’t cut a deal.
The Democrats had moved so far to the right that whatever deal got enough Republicans on board would probably have been worse than the automatic spending cuts the no-deal will trigger — assuming Congress lets them happen.
In one respect, however, the stalemate disappoints me.
Why Homeless People are not Working – or Working and Homeless Anyway
The unemployment rate is higher — stuck at about 9%. The number of jobless people actively looking has increased from 13.2 million to nearly 13.9 million.
And the economy has shed about 1.3 million more jobs. It would need to create more than 11 million to bring the unemployment rate back down to when the recession set in.
So one reason homeless people don’t get jobs is the same as the reason millions of housed people don’t. There just aren’t enough jobs out there.
House Bill Threatens Pell Grants for More than Half a Million Low-Income Students
Everything we know about the job market tells us that a college degree is a passport to employment that provides a decent wage, plus benefits like paid leave, health insurance and a retirement plan.
That doesn’t mean everyone with a college degree will get a well paying job. It does, however, mean that most without a college education won’t.
New Census Report Shows Higher Poverty Rate, Especially for Seniors
So how many poor people are there in the U.S.? We have a new answer from the Census Bureau, which has just released a report based on its supplemental poverty measure.
According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), 49.1 million people in America were poor in 2010 — 16% of the population. That’s about 2.9 million — 0.9% — more than the Bureau reported based on the official poverty measure.
