Daily digest – Poverty? Meh
What you need to know to navigate today’s most critical debates.
Obama’s Plan To Help Homeowners and Boost the Economy (The Nation)
The president rolled out details of his plan to help underwater homeowners refinance their mortgages — unless they’re with the GSEs, which aren’t about to do what the government says just because it owns them.
After Three Years, Homeowners Still Being Treated as Political Pawns (MoJo)
Kevin Drum notes that despite his claims of urgency, President Obama has opted for the most agonizingly slow, self-defeating approach to implementing his mortgage relief plan; i.e., asking congressional Republicans to please consider passing it.
Romney’s ‘Let Them Eat Cake’ Moment (TNR)
Mitt Romney said he’s “not concerned about the very poor,” but as Jonathan Cohn points out, what he really meant was that they can rely on the social safety net he wants to cut, while the middle class are somehow poorer than poor, because stuff.
United States of Health Care (NYT)
Catherine Rampell flags a BLS study that projects the U.S. to add 5.6 million health care and social assistance jobs by 2020 as America shifts from its role as the world’s former unchallenged industrial superpower and becomes a caretaker for the infirm.
Europe is stuck on life support (FT)
Martin Wolf argues that despite widespread relief that the ECB has prevented a bank collapse, the situation in the eurozone won’t improve unless policymakers realize that if everyone is forced to be Germany, even Germany can’t keep being Germany.
How Social Security Really Began (Bloomberg)
Kristin Aguilera traces Social Security from Teddy Roosevelt’s 1912 speech to Ida May Fuller’s first check and notes that it was designed as a conservative compromise, which ensured that conservatives would never have a cross word to say about it.
The Numbers Are In: Find Out Just How Many Americans Have Ditched Their Banks (Business Insider)
A study finds that 5.6 million big bank customers have switched banks since November, some making a statement by supporting local credit unions, others driven away by the banks’ plan to extract every last dime from customers through fees.
Vast gender disparity in super PAC giving (Salon)
Justin Elliott reports that over 85 percent of donors to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s super PACs in 2011 were men, which reflects a growing gender gap that probably extends down to the issues candidates feel they’re paid to care about.
House GOP seeks to bar the use of welfare funds at strip clubs (The Hill)
House Republicans are pushing a proposal to keep TANF recipients from blowing all their aid on strippers and booze, a fear that doesn’t seem to be based on much other than their own detailed fantasies of what someone could do with that money.
Dodd-Frank in One Graph (Businessweek)
This helpful guide explains the effects of Dodd-Frank’s 400 new regulations and who’s responsible for creating them, but it’s more fun to ignore the words and create your own scenarios involving cigar-smoking diamonds and men made of corn.
Short URL: http://aworldofprogress.com/readingroom/?p=1817
Posted by New Deal 2.0
on Feb 2 2012. Filed under New Deal 2.0, the reading room.
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