The other planet

The poverty line, first drawn by Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration, remains in place today, adjusted for inflation, but otherwise scarcely altered. Two parents, bringing up two kids, are judged to be poor if they live on less than $18,660 a year (for an unencumbered individual under the age of 65, the threshold is $9,573). On Thursday August 26th, the Census Bureau revealed that 35.9m Americans, or 12.5% of the population, fell below this poverty line in 2003, 1.3m more than the year before.

Orshansky calculated the cost of meeting a family’s nutritional needs and then multiplied this figure by three, because families in that era spent about a third of their income on food. The Census Bureau simply adjusts Ms Orshansky’s figures for inflation. Thus today’s dollar thresholds do not tell us how much a family or individual needs to get by in today’s America; they simply restate the cost of feeding a family in the 1960s in today’s prices, and multiply it by three.

A more complete description would show that poor families now spend a far bigger share of their budget on housing (nearly 33%, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics) than on food (just 13.2%). Child care, done for free by the mothers and grandmothers of the 1950s and 1960s, is now a big expense. Deducting this expense from the measured income of families would add 1.9m to the official poverty figure, according to estimates by Isabel Sawhill and Adam Thomas of the Brookings Institution.

The current measure ignores non-monetary benefits, such as food stamps. Nor does it count the earned income-tax credit, a benefit paid via the tax code to the working poor.

But if the level of poverty is fairly arbitrary, changes in the level are quite telling. Poverty fell throughout the long economic expansion of the Clinton years, from 15.1% in 1993 to 11.3% in 2000. Particularly striking was the fall in poverty among single mothers and their families, from 35.6% (4.4m) in 1993 to 25.4% (3.3m) in 2000.

Welfare reform reduced the poverty rate among female high-school dropouts by about 5 percentage points.

But the latest census figures show a partial reversal of these gains. Poverty among the households of single mothers has increased from 25.4% in 2000 to 28% in 2003. Child poverty has also increased.

Firms are reluctant to hire, and even when they do, they are loth to offer health insurance. Employer-sponsored health plans covered 1.3m fewer Americans last year than the year before. State governments are strapped for cash; as a result, they are cutting back on child-care assistance. Many welfare recipients are now close to using up all the months of help they are entitled to. 

Benjamin Disraeli, a 19th century British prime minister, likened the rich and the poor to “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy, who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings, as if they were…inhabitants of different planets”. Unless the labour market tightens further this year, there will be many more Americans discovering the other planet for themselves.

From menelaus22

Dog gives birth to kitten

Date: August 30 2004

Back to school...a student's creed.

Fischer fears 'conviction, prison, torture and murder' in US
By David Barber
(Filed: 29/08/2004)

Bobby Fischer, the American former world chess champion, fears that he will be "tried convicted, sentenced, imprisoned, tortured and murdered" when Japan deports him to America.

Fischer said Japan, his home for the past three years, was guilty of a "vicious betrayal" after he lost his legal battle against deportation last week. He faces a 10-year prison sentence in the United States for violating international sanctions in 1992 by playing a chess game in the former Yugoslavia against his long-time Russian rival, Boris Spassky.

"They are preparing to deport me to the US to be murdered,' Fischer told Bombo Radyo in a rambling telephone interview. "They stabbed me in the back. I spent $350,000 here in Japan. I gave them my time, I gave them my money, spent a fortune going to Japanese mineral baths. But just one call from the US embassy and they are sending me to prison in the US to die."

http://yourgoingtohell.com/

From liverlady

Lack of sex has chimp huffing and puffing

Beijing - At the Zhengzhou Zoo, thirteen-year-old chimpanzee Feili has turned to smoking, begging cigarettes from visitors and spitting on them when they do not comply, the Xinhua news agency reported.

Her fierce behavior is in reaction to being paired with a male, 28 years her senior, who seems to lack either the interest or the capability to satisfy her sexual demands, the agency said.

-The New Yorker

Andrew Wiederhorn

Rogue of the Week COLUMN Andrew Wiederhorn BY WW EDITORIAL STAFF newsdesk at wweek.com

Back in the go-go '90s, Andrew Wiederhorn  got into the "distressed loan" business--buying up bad debts and convincing deadbeats to pay up. Through a series of questionable deals, Wiederhorn managed to parlay this unlikely source of revenue into a $140 million fortune under the umbrella of Wilshire Financial Services Group. Then, in 1999, Wilshire collapsed.

Last week, Wiederhorn pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to two felonies--bribing local money manager Jeff Grayson and lying to the IRS. He was sentenced to 18 months in jail and ordered to pay $2 million in restitution and a $25,000 fine.

Then the other shoe dropped. Turns out that Wiederhorn managed to engineer a deal in which his current company, Fog Cutter Capital Group, granted him a leave of absence, kept him on the company payroll at $350,000 a year--and handed him a bonus of $2 million.

In theory, the board of a publicly traded company is supposed to look after shareholders' interests. In fact, these six pinheads gave Wiederhorn a platinum parachute. It didn't hurt that one of the directors, Donald Berchtold, is Wiederhorn's father-in-law. Another, University of Southern California business school prof David Dale-Johnson, was recently given a job at Fog Cutter. A third, Ray Mathis, is an ex-FBI official and former head of the Citizens Crime Commission, a local nonprofit whose 2003 awards ceremony was underwritten by--you guessed it--Fog Cutter.

Drug lords develop high-yield coca plant

By Jeremy McDermott in Bogota

(Filed: 27/08/2004)

Colombian drug cartels have developed a new strain of coca plant that yields up to four times more cocaine.

It is estimated that the traffickers spent £60 million in research to develop the new plant, crossbreeding strains from Peru with potent Colombian varieties, and using genetic engineering. While traditional coca plants grow 5ft tall, the new strain grows to more than 10ft.

"It produces not only more drugs, but of a higher purity."

Catfish eats dog

From correspondents in Berlin

29aug04

A GIANT catfish is suspected of having eaten a dog in a German lake near the Polish border.

The estimated 1.5m catfish has been making waves in the small lake near Gueldendorf for several years, according to the Berliner Kurier newspaper.

Catfish are scavengers that feed on plants and animals on the beds of lakes and rivers. They can, on rare occasions, grow up to 4.5m and weigh as much as 300kg.

But the giant fish has developed other tastes and is emptying the lake of all the other fish. Now a small dachshund is believed to have been pulled underwater and eaten.