Margy Waller's Blog

Media Undermines Minimum Wage Increase

2009-01-02T17:50:09Z

Residents of nine states - Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, Vermont and Washington - will see a boost to their local economy from a state minimum wage increase taking effect in the new year.

Unfortunately, media coverage of the change varies across place and often undermines public support for this progressive step.

For example, an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer begins with the suggestion that the raise benefits only the workers getting the increase:

"Local minimum wage workers will have something to celebrate with the coming of a new year."

The reporters continue with this narrow frame by implying that certain employers and the state's 300,000 minimum wage workers will be the only ones to feel the impact of the change.

The online comments regarding the article illustrate the destructive debate that inevitably flows from this framing. When the reporter suggests the impact is only felt by a small group of employees and certain employers, the debate devolves to the worthiness of workers and an us-vs-them depiction of who benefits and who suffers.

For example, one commenter shares an out-of-date (but widely held) perspective on the ability of workers to climb the wage ladder.

"You're not supposed to survive on minimum wage as an adult, because it's supposed to be the starting point not what you make an hour when you have chosen to add more mouths to feed. Secondly, if you start at minimum wage, within a very short period of time you will get raises. now the conditions are: you have to show up on time, do a good job, and make yourself a valuable employee. Wow, big surprise, then you continue up the ladder."

Another commenter illustrates how the "charity" framing leads to the us-vs-them debate that undermines public support for improving jobs.

"all this does is hurt the middle class. Push up the wages off teenagers and young college students, which force up prices in stores for the average middle class america....stupid stupid stupid."

We could debate the assertions of these commenters. But that's not an argument we really want to have - or that we can win with "facts". Public understanding of this issue won't change just because we have good data.

Instead, it's our job to work for better media coverage.

Our own talking points should start with the fact that these increases strengthen the local economy by ensuring that there are better jobs in the community - a benefit that accrues to everyone.

New York Times Ed Board Misses on Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T06:24:43Z

A Thanksgiving Day editorial by the NYT focuses on the "safety net" for the poor - a typical holiday topic and framing of the issue made more topical than usual by the current economy.

And while nothing the editorial writer says is wrong exactly, this kind of exhortation of our federal government to improve the measurement of poverty won't accomplish much.

Yesterday's posting - Poverty - We Need a New Goal More Than a New Measure - turns out to be a sort of unconscious anticipation of the Times sympathetic but misguided commentary.

At The Mobility Agenda, we track media coverage of poverty proposals.

For example, this Manhattan Institute article, Getting Poverty Wrong, and the media followup is a good reminder that we will not achieve the policy results we seek (note the list of Obama proposals attacked in the article) with a conversation that makes people think in the usual way about poverty.

When we use this lens on the issue, we inevitably get a response from our opponents that goes straight to the place Bill Cunningham (a very popular radio talk show host) does in this interview:"...they're poor because they lack values, morals, and ethics."

At another spot in the interview he argues that "...unlike many countries in the world...we have fat poor people. We don't have skinny poor people. Ours are fat and flatulent."

A third interview lowlight:

"CUNNINGHAM: Steve Malanga -- the article is "Obama's counterproductive war on poverty." The war on poverty was declared in the 1960s. It was lost in the 1970s. The funding continued for poverty. You know, people are poor in America, Steve, not because they lack money; they're poor because they lack values, morals, and ethics. And if government can't teach and instill that, we're wasting our time simply giving poor people money."

Once you're in this discussion, there's no getting out of it in a good way. And there's no way to talk about poverty without ending up in this argument.

Plus, as noted yesterday, changing the measure, and even cutting poverty rates using an improved measure, is a very low bar to set for ourselves.

Instead, we need better goals addressing well-being and inclusion, leading to more and better jobs, creating stronger communities, and strengthening our democracy and economy.

Poverty - We Need a New Goal More Than a New Measure

2008-11-27T07:56:47Z

As a new set of federal policymakers gets ready to address the current economic crisis, academics and advocates are proposing changes to the official measure of poverty.

Unfortunately, as long as we keep talking about "poverty", this is much ado about almost nothing.

Earlier this year, a similar discussion ensued in Congress. At the national level, that new proposal would move the bar ever so slightly, so that being poor equals household income of less than $21,818 for two adults with two children, up from the current $20,444.

To be sure, a new measure would likely be a better reflection of the rate of material deprivation in our nation than the current one. And Brookings' Rebecca Blank proposes a very thoughtful approach.

Why is this even necessary?

Today's measure still uses a formula based on 1950s household expenditures - before housing and transportation costs went up and two-income households became the requirement, causing average child care expenses to soar. In contrast, the proposed new measure would allow for regional reflection of differences in the cost of living and would count some federally-funded employment benefits as income for the first time.

Yet, it's important to note that we aren't really accomplishing what we desire with this goal - even with a more accurate formula. This is especially true since this high-level reconsideration of the formula is occurring at a time when there are numerous calls for a national goal to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years.

What's wrong with expending a whole lot of energy on this discussion?

First, it's only a proposal to measure income and not the other resources that communities need for a strong economy and full participation in our democracy and civil society. The proposal isn't about quality education or clean air or reasonable housing costs or access to health care or reducing prejudice.... and so on. (Although, notably, Blank's long-term proposal goes much further.)

Second, a if we want a measure of income, a relative measure would be a much more useful test of how well our nation is doing at making sure all residents can contribute to a strong society. As higher income earners do better, low-wage workers must see increases in income relative to the higher earners - otherwise poverty increases. As one leading newspaper said of a new relative measure:

"Certainly, the relative poverty measure is hard to budge. Yet, when all the research shows that it is how one's income compares to the average that drives health, happiness and opportunity, the target must be the right one."

Third, while we do need a better standard for measuring progress as a nation on income deprivation, we're not likely to succeed in achieving the goal of better policy outcomes if we insist on maintaining a subsistence standard. Indeed, if the goal is based on any measure of "poverty" as it is currently understood in this country - material deprivation blamed on immoral or ill-considered personal choices - we should not expect much policy progress on efforts to strengthen our economy.

At The Mobility Agenda, we're engaged in a conversation about developing a goal that is more consistent with widely supported policy proposals - which tend to go way beyond income deprivation and include paid time off at work, worker voices at the table for establishing workplace policy, fair wages, and access to affordable health insurance.

When we put the poverty headline over these policy options, policymakers face real resistance created by the widely-held public beliefs about causes of poverty. We cannot change these beliefs by adopting a goal to end or reduce poverty - no matter which formula we use to define the term.

Of course, we should adopt a more current measure of income deprivation, but only as part of larger goals related to well-being and inclusion.

Unfortunately, we're not doing so well on the policy front as it is, and changing the poverty formula will not have much of an impact on this reality. Progress on policy requires a different goal and new measures for testing our progress toward that goal. Moreover, we'll need to have a different conversation altogether - one that isn't about "poverty".

Cross posted at The Mobility Agenda.

Dear Paul Krugman - The Welfare Debate Didn't Change Anything

2008-06-10T00:13:59Z

The Mobility Agenda challenges Krugman's evidence directly.

He implies that the world has changed in part because the debate over welfare reform in the mid-1990s deracialized government spending issues and made it OK for government to spend on assistance to low-wage workers, writing:

If Ronald Reagan and other politicians succeeded, for a time, in convincing voters that government spending was bad, it was by suggesting that bureaucrats were taking away workers’ hard-earned money and giving it to you-know-who: the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, the welfare queen driving her Cadillac. Take away the racial element, and Americans like government spending just fine.

But why has racial division become so much less important in American politics?

Part of the credit surely goes to Bill Clinton, who ended welfare as we knew it. I’m not saying that the end of Aid to Families With Dependent Children was an unalloyed good thing; it created a great deal of hardship. But the “bums on welfare” played a role in political discourse vastly disproportionate to the actual expense of A.F.D.C., and welfare reform took that issue off the table.

We find exactly the opposite in our review of academic literature on this question. The evidence directly contradicts Krugman’s assertion.

In a report The Mobility Agenda commissioned and released last fall to review public opinion on poverty, welfare, and low-wage work, Matthew Nisbet of American University writes:

While core values and psychological orientations play a significant role in structuring American views about poverty, the issue is by no means “race neutral.” In fact, based on analyses of multiple national surveys, the political scientist Martin Gilens…concludes that among whites, the belief that black people are lazy is the most important source of opposition to spending on welfare and to programs that provide direct assistance such as food stamps and unemployment benefits.

Also:

…news images encourage the belief that the prototypical poor person is black. Specifically, the dominant visuals in TV stories related to poverty were blacks in organized activities like marches, meetings, or church; and blacks milling around streets, frequently pictured with police officers. Moreover, beyond images of race… poverty itself was seldom the direct subject of a news story, with reports rarely focused on low income, hunger, homelessness, low housing quality, unemployment, or welfare dependence. Instead, the focus was symptoms associated with poverty, particularly racial discrimination and problems of health or health care.

And finally:

By making welfare more “morally demanding,” centrist Democrats hoped to re-instill confidence in the ability of the government to help the poor. Strategists, pundits, and several prominent scholars had predicted that welfare reform would set in motion a powerful policy feedback effect, removing the taint of racism, and opening up the public to support for policies that helped the poor.

Unfortunately, in a systematic analysis comparing multiple indicators of polling data gathered between 1998 and 2004 with data from the late 1980s, [Joe] Soss and [Sanford]Schramm find no evidence for this impact. The tendency for Americans to blame poverty on a lack of effort has held steady, feelings toward the poor have grown slightly cooler, willingness to aid the poor has stayed the same or diminished, and racial attitudes still color support for assistance to the poor.

Yet, pointing to more recent polling data, influential progressives remain optimistic that the public is finally ready to get behind a campaign against poverty. In particular, a widely talked about analysis by Pew (2007) indicates a roughly 10% shift between 1994 and 2007 in the public’s agreement that the government should take care of people who can’t take care of themselves, guarantee food and shelter for all, and help more needy people even if it means government debt.

However…any comparison to 1994 is misleading, since these polls were taken at the height of the welfare reform campaign. During this period, news attention to welfare soared, with this coverage overwhelmingly negative in its tone. By 1998, however, news attention and negativity had both sharply declined. In reality, absent very salient messages attacking welfare programs, what the 2007 polls reveal is a normalization of public attitudes about poverty to their pre-Clinton era levels, rather than any turning point in public sentiment.
Sadly, it seems the welfare debate of the mid-1990s reinforced public opinion rather than serving to shift it. By the way, we should expect the same of any debate over a goal to end poverty in the next administration.
For more perspective on the Krugman commentary, visit our site.

Maybe Obama Didn't "Blow" The Edwards Endorsement

2008-03-30T21:31:57Z

Bloggers today are taking note of a couple sentences in a NY Mag story

concluding that Obama “blew” his chance for an Edwards endorsement.

Speaking to Edwards on the day he exited the race, Obama came across as glib and aloof. His response to Edwards’s imprecations that he make poverty a central part of his agenda was shallow, perfunctory, pat…. Obama dug himself in deeper, getting into a fight with Elizabeth about health care, insisting that his plan is universal….

Of course, I don’t know what happened there that day. But, I suspect that it’s possible what’s really being described here are differences between Obama and the Edwards’ on strategy. I don’t think that Obama cares any less than the Edwards’, or the Clintons for that matter, about poverty and health care. But, observing his campaign, it’s pretty clear that he thinks it’s better to address these issues in other ways.

Edwards was able to persuade Clinton to adopt his plan to establish a goal to cut poverty. But, it’s not clear why either of them thinks it’s a good idea to adopt this approach to policymaking. Both of them have advisors who’ve likely told them that all of the evidence suggests it undermines the policy proposals to put them under the “poverty” banner.

Besides, setting a goal to end income poverty sets the bar too low. We want more for our nation than an end to material deprivation using a formula based on the world as it was in the 1950s. We want everyone to be a full participant in our economy, in our civil society, and in our democracy.

Plus, as I’ve written here before, we cannot create the political space for action on a poverty agenda because of barriers created by widespread perceptions about the causes of poverty.

As for whether health insurance mandates (adopted by both Edwards and Clinton) are necessary to make a plan universal – it’s open to debate. We already know that mandates for car insurance don’t ensure universal coverage, despite the hefty penalty for going without in most states.

So, I’m left thinking that what’s been described as aloofness or glibness may have just been polite policy disagreement. And in any case, I’m glad that Obama didn’t agree to make a damaging strategic shift to get the Edwards endorsement. It’s refreshing to have a candidate who sticks to his beliefs in the face of a challenge, a candidate who understands that the impact of compromising can sometimes have the effect of undermining long term goals for a short-term lift.

Senator Clinton's "Poor" Plan

2008-03-01T03:17:28Z

Senator Clinton announced a plan to cut poverty just a few days before the Ohio primary vote.

Why?

Seriously, why does her campaign staff think this will help her win? And how could she possibly think that - win or lose - her statement will help create public and political will for the policies she promotes: a higher minimum wage, pre-K, improving child support collection, etc?

Her plan incorporates lots of ideas we’ve identified and include on The Mobility Agenda list of new ideas for good jobs: democratic workplaces, health care, paid family leave, etc. She also has a laundry list of additional good ideas that support economic and social mobility: expanding green jobs, more strategies for worker advancement, etc.

It’s just so…. not cool…. that she put all these great ideas under the poverty headline!

Using the poverty banner means it is unlikely that announcing this plan will generate support.

While lots of people want to do something about poverty—it’s not a high priority for voters.

I’ve written about the problems with a poverty target before.

* The U.S. definition of poverty is out of date and flawed.

* Public understanding of the causes of and remedies for poverty hinders adoption of the policy solutions we seek to address it.

* Defining the issue as “poverty” opens the door to opposing arguments that see the issue through a lens that works against us. If we're forced into an argument about personal responsibility, we'll fail. We already lost that fight in battles over welfare. Why we would we want to engage in it again?

In fact, Clinton's announcement proves the last point. She gave the Heritage Foundation an opening:

Robert Rector, senior research fellow on welfare and family issues at the Heritage Foundation, says Clinton refuses to even acknowledge the two primary causes of child poverty -- out-of-wedlock births, and parents living on welfare instead of working. "What she wants to do is combat poverty by putting the responsibility on the U.S. taxpayer, who already spends about $450 billion a year fighting poverty," says Rector, "while [at the same time] specifically avoiding the issue of changing the behaviors that are the cause of poverty.”

See the problem?

Lessons on Insurance Mandates for the Candidates

2008-02-28T00:34:08Z

Senators Clinton and Obama are continuing the debate over how best to ensure that everyone has health insurance and access to care.

Some online analysts have raised questions about the effectiveness of mandates by reviewing car insurance mandates.

We have been spending some time looking at access to car insurance in our transportation research.

Car insurance is regulated by states. Only two states do not require owners to maintain insurance – New Hampshire and Wisconsin. Yet, a recent report finds that nearly 15 percent of all owners in the nation are uninsured.

What happens in the two states without a mandate?

Wisconsin ranks 20th with about 14 percent uninsured, while New Hampshire has one of the lowest rates of all states at 9 percent. Other state rates range from 26 percent (Mississippi) to 4 percent (Maine).

Some writers have noted that only California has a low-cost insurance option for low-wage workers. In that state, these writers point out, the uninsured rate is one of the highest at 25%.

We’ve interviewed some of the key actors implementing the California low-cost insurance option and find that there is a major problem with outreach and access. Most low-wage workers probably don’t even know about the option and the incentives don't seem to be structured in a way that encourages brokers to market the low-cost option.

A number of people are working on improving knowledge and use of the low-cost option in California, but we should not assume that low-wage drivers wouldn’t buy it—-if they knew about it.

So, what do we know? A mandate does not guarantee universal coverage in this case. And creating and implementing a lower-cost insurance option for low-wage workers will require creativity, careful implementation, and outreach.

Edwards' Endorsement and Cutting Poverty

2008-02-18T01:32:17Z

As John Edwards left the race to be our next President, he reported that both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had “…pledged to me and more importantly through me to America, that they will make ending poverty central to their campaign for the presidency.” Now, it appears he's met with both remaining candidates as expected before an endorsement.

Here’s hoping Clinton and Obama intend to do more than establish a limited and limiting goal of cutting poverty and that neither one makes a promise to adopt Edwards' flawed “cut poverty” goal in order to extract his endorsement.

It was never clear why Edwards made establishing a national goal to cut poverty a feature of his campaign.

After all, Edwards often talked about workers whose household incomes exceed the official definition of poverty. And he was definitely focused on promoting policy solutions to systemic problems in the labor market and our economy. This makes sense, if our goal is a stronger economy and inclusive democracy.

Unfortunately, Edwards got in the way of his own message by putting up the poverty banner.

There are two problems with the goal to end poverty. First – it’s very limited. Moving people above the poverty line won’t do much to strengthen our economy, communities, or families because it was designed to establish the income necessary to avoid material deprivation, nothing more. Moreover, the formula is seriously out of date because it was developed using 1950s household expenditure data. At that time, families spent more on food and much less on housing, transportation, and child care. Yet, the formula—based on the percentage then spent buying enough food to survive-- has never been updated.

Using the poverty measure to judge our success also opens the door to conservative critics who will promote marriage and “hard work” as the solutions to poverty – effectively ignoring systemic causes of income inequality like stagnant wages and declining employment benefits, and other societal shifts that are barriers to economic and social mobility.

Second, merely changing the definition of poverty to fit these policies won't work. It really doesn’t matter who or what the proposal serves. When we target assistance to "the poor", too many people think they know who that is: those people who made bad choices in life by dropping out of school, or getting pregnant at a young age without benefit of a supportive, stable partner. Even the so-called "working poor" are suspect, because Americans believe that if you work hard, you will do well. So, by that definition – people who are working hard won’t be poor. And it doesn’t seem to matter how many research reports we throw at the issue – we haven’t been able to build the necessary public support or political will for the policy solutions we want.

All of which suggests, we need a new way to talk about our goal. Poverty is too limited (by U.S. definition) and limiting (by U.S. public understanding) a notion and opens the door to opposing arguments in a big way.

Defining the problem as “poverty” sets up a losing scenario for policymaking. My crystal ball predicts competing proposals in any Congressional debate over the best way to cut poverty in half:

1) The Law to Halve Poverty Over Ten Years with good schools, universal pre-k, financial education, health coverage for all, expanded child care, increased minimum wage, unions; and
2) Making Poverty History Act with marriage and work.

Conservatives would demolish the first proposal because it goes far beyond the stated goal of raising income above the poverty line (about $20,000 for a family of 4. And the public won’t support such spending proposals because they believe people are poor due to personal failures -- not something they think government can, or should, address.

This debate would feel frustratingly familiar to anyone who followed the evolution of welfare legislation in the last decade. And the compromise would fall far short of the policy John Edwards supports -- if anything passed at all.

Progressives have lost the fight on the issues of poverty and “personal responsibility”.

It’s time to reset the goal as one of economic mobility and social inclusion. We shouldn’t blow this opportunity by sticking to an old – and failed – framework for this debate. The candidates will benefit greatly from developing an alternative lens on the issue, one designed to build broad support for better policy solutions.