Insecure and Unequal: Poverty and Income Among Women and Families, 2000-2011 | National Women’s Law Center

The recovery from the worst recession in memory has hurt the vulnerable in ways that could set families back for a decade…

 

Download the report at:

http://www.nwlc.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/nwlc_2012_povertyreport.pdf

 

“This report provides a gender analysis of national Census data for 2011, released by the Census Bureau in September 2012. The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) supplies this analysis, as it has for several …”

via Insecure and Unequal: Poverty and Income Among Women and Families, 2000-2011 | National Women’s Law Center.

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International: The lottery of life methodology | The Economist

The Economist Magazine provides a world view on how countries are doing for their citizens …  The report speaks to quality of life and satisfaction providing an index that measures each country’s status, like a report card, on its population.

The USA used to be number 1 in this index as early as 1988.  Today it has fallen to 16th.

This precipitous fall during the last quarter century (1988 to 2012) is a result of the American obsession with taxes, healthcare and education… Not an obsession to fix these things but an incapacity to do so ..

Read the Economist report, it may be an important wakeup call to the 1% who seek more and more while the country cracks and crumbles…

 

“The life satisfaction scores for 2006 on scale of 1 to 10 for 130 countries from the Gallup Poll are related in a multivariate regression to various factors. As many as 11 indicators are statistically significant. Together these indicators explain some 85% of the inter-country variation in life satisfaction scores. The values of the life satisfaction scores that are predicted by our indicators represent a countrys quality of life index. The coefficients in the estimated equation weight automatically the importance of the various factors. We can utilise the estimated equation for 2006 to calculate index values for year in the past and future, allowing for comparison over time as well across …”

via International: The lottery of life methodology | The Economist.

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Kaiser’s Monthly Update on Health Disparities – Minority Men – Kaiser Family Foundation

Having an ongoing relationship with a doctor or health care provider increases the likelihood of receiving recommended preventive services and ongoing care to manage chronic health problems. However, affordability of health care is a problem for many men and often is a leading reason for postponing or forgoing health care. More than a quarter (28.0%) of men in the U.S. did not have a regular health care provider between 2006 and 2008. On average, 38.7% of minority men did not have a regular provider, ranging from a low of 19.3% in Hawaii to a high of 55.8% in Idaho. Compared to all other racial and ethnic groups, Hispanic (49%) and American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) (38%) men had the highest rates of no personal doctor.

These are some of the findings highlighted in a new report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, Putting Men’s Health Care Disparities On the Map. This report uses national data sources to generate state-level estimates on a range of indicators of the health status, access to care, and well-being of men of different racial and ethnic backgrounds (white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander, and American Indian and Alaska Native) in the United States.

Read more from the report, Putting Men’s Health Care Disparities On the Map.

via Kaiser’s Monthly Update on Health Disparities – Kaiser Family Foundation.

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A Widow’s Victory, and a Defeat for DOMA : The New Yorker

In a closely watched constitutional challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan struck down, on Thursday, the part of the law that prohibits the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages in states where they are legal, such as New York. The broad ruling is closely aligned with the arguments made by the Obama Justice Department, which early last year joined with gay-rights advocates and urged federal courts to strike …

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Up to 1.7 Million Unauthorized Immigrant Youth May Benefit from New Deportation Rules | Pew Hispanic Center

Up to 1.7 million of the 4.4 million unauthorized immigrants ages 30 and under could potentially qualify for a new Obama administration program that goes into effect tomorrow that would shield them from deportation and enable them to apply for temporary but renewable work permits, according to new estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

Announced on June 15, 2012, by U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano, the new program, known as “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” potentially provides relief from deportation for eligible unauthorized immigrants who are ages 30 and under and arrived in the U.S. before age 16.

The new Pew Hispanic Center estimate of 1.7 million potential beneficiaries is an increase over the estimated 1.4 million potentially eligible unauthorized immigrants reported by the Pew Hispanic Center (2012) in June, when DHS announced the new policy. Since then, DHS (2012) has provided more detail on program eligibility, publishing updated guidelines on August 3, 2012. As a result, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that as many as 320,000 more unauthorized immigrants may be eventually eligible for relief from deportation. These additional potential beneficiaries are unauthorized immigrants ages 16 to 30 who came to the U.S. as children, currently do not have a high school diploma and are not enrolled in school. According to the updated eligibility guidelines, if these young people enroll in school by the date of their application, they could become eligible for relief from deportation.1

via Up to 1.7 Million Unauthorized Immigrant Youth May Benefit from New Deportation Rules | Pew Hispanic Center.

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For Paternity Leave, Sweden Asks if Two Months Is Enough – WSJ.com

Jim Butcher’s decision to join Sweden’s army of “latte dads” last year didn’t win him any popularity contests with family and friends back home in …

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Extreme Poverty Down Globally, Up in U.S. | Connecting the Dots, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

Extreme Poverty Down Globally, Up in U.S.

March 7, 2012

by Lauren Feeney

First, the good news. A World Bank report released last week shows that extreme poverty is on the decline. The percentage of people living on less than $1.25 a day decreased in every region of the developing world between 2005 and 2008. The fall was so steep that the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty has been met before the 2015 deadline.

This is contrary to the World Bank’s own prediction that the global financial crisis would lead to “a substantial deterioration in conditions for the world’s most vulnerable.”

But, as The New York Times explains, market conditions actually favored developing countries during the recession.

Economists had theorized that the credit crunch and recession would cause a flight to the safety of developed nations. But shortly after the recession, with growth stagnating in countries like the United States and in western Europe, the world’s investors plowed money into emerging markets.

China was the biggest success story — the ranks of the dire poor there decreased by 700 million between 1981 and 2008.

The bad news hits closer to home. The World Bank study doesn’t even bother to measure poverty rates in developed countries such as the U.S., Western Europe and Japan. But a new study from The National Poverty Center shows that the number of U.S. households living in extreme poverty (defined here as less than $2 a day per person) more than doubled from 1996 to 2011. The number of extremely poor children also doubled during that time, from 1.4 million to 2.8 million.

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Helping the Super Rich at the Expense of the Super Poor – Economic Intelligence (usnews.com)

loomberg reporter Max Abelson created quite a stir in the blogosphere with his tales of woe from the top 1 percent. “People who don’t have money don’t understand the stress,” said a specialist in financial planning for the wealthy. Maybe he should talk to the heads of the estimated 1.5 million households, which include about 2.8 million children, that the National Poverty Center estimates live on $2 or less in income per day in any given month—one of the World Bank’s main indicators of …

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Childhood Poverty Among Hispanics Sets Record, Leads Nation | Pew Hispanic Center

The spread of poverty across the United States that began at the onset of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and accelerated last year hit one fast-growing demographic group especially hard: Latino children.

More Latino children are living in poverty—6.1 million in 2010—than children of any other racial or ethnic group. This marks the first time in U.S. history that the single largest group of poor children is not white. In 2010, 37.3% of poor children were Latino, 30.5% were white and 26.6% were black, according to an analysis of new data from the U.S. Census Bureau by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

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Obama Backs Student in Furor With Limbaugh on Birth Control – NYTimes.com

The election-year fight over the administration’s birth control policy escalated Friday, with two unlikely figures — a Georgetown University law student and the conservative radio host …

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Push to Avert Foreclosures Hits Court Logjam – NYTimes.com

New York has been among the most aggressive states in trying to protect homeowners from foreclosure, granting new legal protections and turning courts across the state into teeming negotiation centers working to keep people in …

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As Deportations Rise to Record Levels, Most Latinos Oppose Obama’s Policy | Pew Hispanic Center

I. OVERVIEW

By a ratio of more than two-to-one (59% versus 27%), Latinos disapprove of the way the Obama administration is handling deportations of unauthorized immigrants, according to a new national survey of Latino adults by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center.

Deportations have reached record levels under President Obama, rising to an annual average of nearly 400,0001 since 2009, about 30% higher than the annual average during the second term of the Bush administration and about double the annual average during George W. Bush’s first term.

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Obama’s Policy | Pew Hispanic Center.

 

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