The Benefits Cliff

"Ok, Screwnomics, here's a story of how the economy works against women. As a single mother, graduate student, I had more income from student loans, food stamps and fuel assistance than I do working full time as a mental health therapist. I fall into the gray area, the 'cliff' where people fall off - where you earn too much to qualify for assistance, and too little to pay the bills. So—am I being forced to share housing with a workingman, so that I can pay the bills? What if I prefer to be independent?"

Good question, Cliffhanger! We know some earnest souls believe the best welfare reform is marriage—your taxes even helped pay for programs, dangling this solution. But we’re with you. Even should you marry, you’re wise to want independence. Economic vulnerability is a gateway to other risks.

 One clue you mention is that word “mother.” There’s evidence that moms, especially single ones, are the worst paid of anyone, regardless of their field, regardless of education. Mom’s Rising names it The Motherhood Penalty. We looked up the starting pay for mental health therapists and found it was about $42,000 a year. Assuming a 40-hour workweek, that’s about $20 an hour, before taxes. Your contract could well be less.

Then we went to the MIT Livable Wage calculator that estimates basic costs for living, which varies in all 50 states. We looked at Vermont (where WE live) and saw an adult living with one child annually needs $13,511 for housing; $7593 for transportation; $8209 for childcare, and $6871 for medical insurance and copays. Your livable wage here would be: $45,660. Just losing your childcare alone costs an arm and a leg. Jana Kasperkevec at The Guardian suggests that minimum wage legislation needs always to be considered in tandem with the benefit “cliff” that too many learn about the hard way.

Are there ways to preserve benefits to help moms and young people bridge to better paying jobs? Are there some benefits, like food stamps or childcare, that should be more universally subsidized—and with living wages for child care providers? (They’re often on welfare, like fast food workers.) Could the government provide a universal cash allowance for the time and care families invest in readying the “next generation” of our nation? You can learn more about Eleanor Rathbone and England’s “Mother’s Allowance” and other solutions in Screwnomics.

Livable wages need to be more widely understood by state legislators and business organizations, the public and the private sector—and also by students who are taking out loans. Stagnant and shrinking wages have been the majority’s lot since 1970, and the recent tax cut for corporations? It should have been a tax cut for mental health therapists. If this keeps up, more Americans will need your help!

We believe EconoGirlfriend peer groups and problem solving can make a difference—thanks so much for sharing here.

Hey readers, can you relate? Do you have a story to share? Tell us here!

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Photo credit: Christie Hemm Klok/The Washington Post/Getty Images

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The Cost of Child Care Just Hit an All Time High
Yes, it's bad. Households are spending at least a quarter of their income on childcare. Childcare is ruling working family's lives. No wonder young couples aren't having children.

The Age That Women Have Babies: How a Gap Divides America
An informative article with interactive, illuminating graphics. A generation ago, the age of first time mothers used to peak. Now it plateaus. 

The Economy +

America’s Real Economy Isn’t Booming
Despite our rising economic and employment metrics, 45 million people are living in poverty in the US. It's not all that uncommon to employed AND homeless.

United States has a National Security Problem but it’s Not What You Think
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Y Combinator Learns Basic Income Is Not So Basic After All
Basic Universal Income. This article looks at some of the challenges researchers have come up against while studying it's potential impact in California.

Wake Up, Corporate Bodies!

The glass ceiling was a phrase first coined in an article in The Wall Street Journal, to describe what professional women confront—an invisible, unspoken rule that says, you can only go so far.  Men continue to dominate corporate management and corporate boards that direct a company’s mission, goals and bottom line, as well as its spirit and character.

Now a California state senator, Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) is the author of a bill intended “to blow up the glass ceiling,” she says, adding that company boards need “a woman’s perspective.” Ken Martin at FOXBusiness reports that a majority in the California Senate agrees with her. They just passed this game-changer, sending it halfway to the finish line. The bill would require at least one woman on company boards by the end of 2019, with a schedule for increasing numbers. By 2021, a six-member board would seat three women members.

OMG. Equal numbers? Opposed by many business groups, of course, amendments are expected. Some San Francisco corporations already have met the standard, according to this source, noting Airbnb just expanded its board to include one added woman, and the female Pixar CFO, Ann Mather, now serves on two boards. Wowee.

Is that progress? Only if you believe ambitious women will be Angels. Right now the selling point made by Catalyst, a women’s organization examining women’s status in business, is that boards with more women do better financially. That’s not a bad thing, but in itself would not necessarily make for change down where the majority of women still work. Kim Elsesser at Forbes cites a study that actually claims boards with women paid their CEOs 15 percent more—hardly the group most in need of pay raises.

Work policies need to change to include greater diversity and pay equity, more flexible work schedules, and ample family leave time for everyone. For that we’ll need reshaping of corporate structure and cultures from the bottom, as well as from the top, aMarjorie Kelly argues in Owning Our Future.  An economy now waged as competitive war, measured solely by dollars, can be changed into one that wages life. But a living economy needn’t “blow up” a thing—nor are richer CEOs and profits for a few its best yardstick.

Nevertheless, Jackson is shaking norms that need to be woke! You go, girl!

Another Woman Lifts the Curtain on Big Money Wizards

I just finished reading Democracy in Chains by historian Nancy MacLean, a book colored, she says, by a transformation of politics in North Carolina, where she teaches at Duke University. MacLean discovered an abandoned trove of documents on school vouchers, belonging to a little known economist named James McGill Buchanan. Promoting theories he misleadingly named “public choice,” Buchanan first rose to prominence at the Univ. of Virginia, while actually working for minority rule by the wealthy. He also eventually won the “almost-Nobel prize” in Economics that I expose in my book, Screwnomics.

I write about a similar mean-spirited change in my home state of Michigan, and critique prize-winner Milton Friedman’s damage—but had no knowledge of Friedman’s friend, until MacLean’s book. That’s how Buchanan wanted it. He and his colleagues, well funded by wealthy donors like Scaife, Volker, and the Koch brothers, provided economic arguments to oppose the civil rights movement, social security, public schools, Medicare and Medicaid. Eventually he and the Kochs set up influential centers at Virginia’s George Mason University, closer to Washington D.C.

All along the way, Buchanan’s autocratic moves trumped academic freedom. MacLean doesn’t note the hyper-masculinity of their true-believer culture, but it surely was male-dominated by male dominators. Backed by big male money, Buchanan’s rationales transformed law schools and state legislatures, favoring the corporate elite, not us less powerful plebes. In their new orthodoxy, only personal responsibility of the so-called “makers” counted—and income taxes or Medicare or Social Security taxes that sensibly redistributed wealth was robbery of the rich.

Interestingly, Buchanan and his tribe knew they needed to cloak their real intents, and did so, using code to avoid extremist and racist terms. They considered women a problem. Why? Women, who’d only won the vote in 1920, and who largely remain less wealthy, were more readily open to governmental “collective action,” they said, or democracy in action.

That’s to be celebrated. We can be glad that females can now go to school, a relatively new phenomenon, and still far from universal.  (The University of Virginia accepted its first black male student in 1955—but did not admit women until 1970.) Together with two other courageous women’s books, Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine and Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains pulls back the curtain on a fake money wizardry that has not only impoverished our US Treasury, but threatens to bankrupt our American ideals.

The Kochs and their billionaire network are not the first to aspire to a kingdom—but corruption like theirs never ends well. A sizeable number of American men have been so seduced by an ideology with chest-pounding Alpha baboon traits, that perhaps only American women can awaken a larger, more essential context of mutual exchanges—ones more productive, humane, and sustainable than constant male battles for dominance.

A Drop of Water Explains Our $ Universe

Water: no other element is as necessary for sustaining life. And no other necessity so brings into focus the overreach of private corporate wealth, picking our nation’s public pockets. How so? Guess which city in Michigan, the Great Lakes state surrounded by fresh water, still has schools with dangerous levels of lead in its water, PLUS the highest water bills of any of 500 in the nation?

Flint. Yes, that Flint. $910 annually for all the lead you can drink. (Although when I was at Totem Books in Flint, people there said, no! That was on the low side!)

Now guess which state just handed over 576,,000 gallons of water per day to Nestle Corporation for free, so they could pump the state’s groundwater Great Lakes Basin for private profit, despite overwhelming input from citizens protesting the piracy— 80,945 against, to 76 in favor?  Michigan!  

Flint's Michigan water first got national attention in 2014, thanks to Mona Hannah-Attisha, a young pediatrician who noticed the dangerous levels of lead in children’s blood. She undertook blood test surveys on her own, when the Michigan government failed to respond, instead covering up their crimes. Gov. Rick Snyder had earlier indulged sweeping powers given him by the Michigan legislature, to override the city’s elected representatives by means of a fiscal manager. Synder's appointee made the change in water source, despite the city council’s protests, that not only poisoned kids, but ruined Flint’s plumbing systems. 

In other words, the state's regime declared that bucks will trump democracy. Eventually 15 people were criminally charged, including for negligent homicide, but not so, the Governor, who only oversaw the whole fiasco.

The city’s deficit has made for the latest cruel decision—namely shutting off water to those 1000 residents who cannot pay their water bills. Food and Water Watch is calling for water bill forgiveness and new state funds to repair the damage done to the city’s water system.

Now here’s some good news: Maryland is poised to declare that water is an “inalienable right” for its citizens through a Water Taxpayer Protection Act. The city of Baltimore has been fighting the takeover of its public water system by private corporations, having studied the results from cities that took that private route. In every case, the cost of water for citizens went up.

Profits skimmed from the top apparently leaves a scummy ring around your water bill. Essentials like water need to be kept public. 

—Rickey Gard Diamond

NOTE: That a drop of water could explain the universe was something Lucy Larcom wrote, recalling her girlhood at the earliest textile factories. Dr. Mona also writes about water in her memoir, What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance and Hope in an American City.

Women & Economics: from "Redlined" to "Screwnomics," the Impact of Economic Policy on Gender and Race

(l.to r.) Rickey Gard Diamond, author of Screwnomics; Linda Gartz, author of Redlined, Elizabeth McCree, Benton Harbor, Michigan attorney, and Kim Jorgensen Gane, St. Joseph, Michigan realtor, discuss the real life results of economic policies with an audience at The Box Factory in St. Joseph, July 31, 2018. Ami Hendrickson (not pictured) co-hosted the event, and reported on it at MuseInks. 

On Tuesday, I had the honor of being the emcee for "Women & Economics: Impact of Economic Policy on Gender & Race" at the Box Factory for the Arts in St. Joseph, MI.

This event, organized and produced by my dear friend and #Write2TheEnd co-founder, Kim Jorgensen Gane, featured authors Rickey Gard Diamond and Linda Gartz. 

Close to a hundred women (and the men who love them) attended the event, asking questions, and sharing stories. Yes, the personal is economic.

Gartz is an Emmy award-winning video producer whose documentaries and TV productions have been featured on ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, and syndicated nationwide. She kicked off the evening with her new book Redlined. 

Gartz' family lived in Chicago West Side at a time when racist lending rules allowed banks to refuse loans or mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident.

Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's, Redlined tells the story of Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lil, who choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming prejudices even as their community sinks into increasing poverty and their own relationship decays. 

Diamond spoke next. She is a Berrien County native who lived in Benton Harbor, St. Joseph, and Coloma during her formative years. Now she hails from Vermont, where she was the founding editor of Vermont Woman and taught at Vermont College of Norwich University.

In 2014, she received a Hedgebrook fellowship to create a readable, relatable book on economics. And thus, Screwnomics was born.

Screwnomics introduces readers to EconoMan (not every man, thank heaven) and encourages those who have traditionally been encouraged to work for less -- or for nothing -- to think about their own economic memoir and confront our economic system’s hyper-masculine identity. Lest you fear it's full of man-bashing: it's not. However, some of its truths about the systematic erasure of women from economic discussion are rather uncomfortable. For instance, Diamond says:

"Around the world, women and their children remain the poorest of the poor, the most vulnerable, and the least noteworthy to most economists. For example, Thomas Piketty's recent and much celebrated 700-plus-page work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which so expertly describes growing inequality has exactly seven index listings for women or females."

Using humor, personal anecdotes, and history, Diamond's book is the most readable one on the subject of economics I have ever encountered.

After the author presentations, local attorney Elizabeth McCree joined us for a panel discussion on the realities of gender, race, poverty, and ways to combat the inequalities we see.

What can we do? Some suggestions from the evening:

1.) Educate yourself. Read. Familiarize yourself with the policies and practices that affect you.

2.) Recognize inequality when you see it. Even if you are not on the receiving end of the inequality, be prepared to identify it and -- most importantly -- to insist on equitable change.

3.) Vote. Seriously. Do this thing. Laws exist to serve the people and benefit society. Make your voice heard and make your vote count.

4.) Speak up. Many people told their personal stories on Tuesday evening. Our shared experiences pave the way toward greater empathy, in-depth dialogue, and a more informed community.

—Ami Hendrickson