Trump Administration War on Housing

 

From Don Moynihan's Substack, urging folks to submit official comments to the Federal Register on the proposed work requirements rule for federal housing rental assistance by midnight tonight if they want it to be counted, here (I'd advise reading Herd's and Moynihan's post, as I did, before preparing your own—it's full of valuable facts and links).  Don't think I've made such a formal move before, and I feel pretty good about it.  I'm failing to do much for today's May Day General Strike, though my shopping will be very limited, and I don't suppose this is "substantive" enough to get a return comment, but I'm happy to have added at least to the numbers. 

I'm writing to express concern about the HUD's proposed rule for imposing "work requirements" as they are called on beneficiaries of housing rental assistance, that their effect will be to make the ongoing housing crisis even worse than it already is. There seems to be a perception at HUD that there is a large segment of the population that needs rental assistance because they are too lazy to work, but nothing could be further from the truth: better than half are elderly and/or disabled adults, and most of the rest are adults with children who can only work if they have expensive and hard-to-find childcare. Most of these do in fact work, but have difficulty nevertheless, because the real problem is that their wages are too low and their rents are too high to allow them to find a place that won't cost them more than 30% of their monthly income (which is what the existing program asks them to pay, subsidizing the rest--it's not giving them apartments for free, it's making them affordable).

The requirements that already exist in filling out paperwork for the program--proving your age, your income, your ability or inability to work, the ability or inability to take care of your children, etc.--is already so burdensome that three out of four people qualified for the benefit don't get it. Moreover, the authorities are badly understaffed and the wait times for receiving benefits stretch out for years in many states, and many landlords refuse to accept the terms of the program, and the program thus fails a large majority of those citizens who need it most. Adding a "work requirement" will only make that failure worse, as so many of those have multiple  irregular or "gig economy" jobs that are unpredictable and sometimes very difficult to document.

This is exactly what happened when Arkansas adopted work requirements in its Medicaid program: 95 percent of those targeted by the program were already employed or should have been exempted due to disability, but the work requirements in the state reduced Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points and at the same time failed to increase labor force participation, and majorities of Arkansans who lost their Medicaid coverage ended up facing serious medical debt, delaying care, or skipping medications, because they couldn't afford healthcare. A rule like the proposed, expanded to all 50 states, will only increase homelessness and probably joblessness as well (it's a lot harder to hold a job when you're living on the street). Children, who have nothing to do with the problem, will suffer the most.

Joe Did What? Work as Punishment

Poster by Shephard Fairey, 2017.

 

One of the executive orders in that first extraordinary rush—is it three weeks ago now?—was to commission a review of the various Trump-era programs in various states for putting work requirements on Medicaid benefits, as if they thought not having a job in the cash economy was a kind of crime, and cutting off your access to a doctor was an appropriate punishment. Good thing! It was a terrible policy idea, not merely pointlessly cruel (these programs are meant to help out people who need help, not reward them for being virtuous) but also especially stupid, in that it's harmful to public health: one of the basic reasons for providing healthcare to those who can't afford it is to reduce the amount of disease to which everybody, rich and poor, is exposed.

The work requirements, a longstanding conservative goal, were a policy priority for Seema Verma, who ran the federal Medicaid program under President Trump. This was an about-face from the position of the Obama administration, which steadfastly opposed the idea of tethering public health benefits to work — something that had never happened in Medicaid’s nearly 60-year history. Obama administration officials repeatedly rejected states’ waiver requests, stating concerns that they “could undermine access” and that they did “not support the objectives of the Medicaid program.”

Dangerous Attitudes

Via SimplifiedSafety. Not suggesting any attitudes on the bosses' part—I guess that's why they call it "simplified".

Harrowing story in the Times by David W. Chen on the epidemic of fatal construction accidents in the ongoing construction boom in New York City, doubling over the usual average during the past fiscal year:

Seven workers have died on the job since July, including three in a nine-day stretch before Labor Day, according to records of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA.

The city’s Buildings Department keeps its own count of construction deaths, injuries and accidents, offering a broader look at safety year over year. There were 10 construction-related fatalities in the most recent fiscal year, from July 2014 to July 2015, according to city figures. In contrast, the annual average over the previous four years was 5.5.

Meanwhile, 324 workers were injured in the last fiscal year, a jump of 53 percent, and the Buildings Department recorded 314 accidents over all, an increase of 52 percent from the year before. The total was more than two and a half times what the city tallied in 2011. In comparison, permits for new construction projects grew by only 11 percent in the last fiscal year and permits for renovation and other work by 6 percent.

You have to read this story, which does a wonderful, horrifying job of getting to some of the individual humans behind these statistics. But the thing I want to focus on is who, in demographic terms, has been dying, namely the "illegal aliens" we keep hearing about:

Stating the obvious: Happy Labor Day

Working it. Via Fox News.

David Azerrad for the Heritage Foundation:

For all the talk these days of how to revive our supposedly moribund American Dream, it took a college dropout-turned-actor to state the obvious.

“I believe that opportunity looks a lot like work,” Ashton Kutcher recently said at the Teen Choice Awards. “I never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job. And every job I had was a stepping stone to my next job, and I never quit my job until I had my next job. And so opportunities look a lot like work.”

I feel your Bain

Everybody's piling on Marc Thiessen's piecelet in the Washington Post, but I just can't help myself:

Mitt Romney was not the cool candidate. He ran on competence. But having the data system your campaign is relying on to turn out the vote crash on Election Day is incompetent. Not testing that system before Election Day is inexcusable. And letting a community organizer run a more precise, data-driven, metrics-based campaign than a Bain Capital executive is incomprehensible.

No, as Booman says, incomprehensible is not exactly the word for it.  "Comprehensible" might be better, or "unsurprising", or, "exactly what you'd expect". Obama's work experience is just a lot more relevant than Romney's. There's a reason they call it community organizing: because it consists of organizing communities, which is exactly what a political campaign needs to do. Bain Capital executives may dazzle you with numbers, but they don't use them in that way.

Modern Mechanix, July 1929.

For instance, also from Booman,

There are still some votes to count but as of right now Mitt Romney has 58,777,012 votes. In 2008, John McCain received 59,934,814 votes. So, Rich Beeson is telling the National Review with a straight face that his team turned out the votes they needed to win according to their own models even though they turned out 1.2 million fewer voters than John McCain did four years ago. John McCain lost by 9.5 million votes, and Romney turned out 1.2 million less than that. Basically, John Beeson is saying that his model indicated that Romney could get approximately 11 million fewer votes than McCain needed to tie, despite population growth over the last four years, and that he would be in a perfect position to beat the president.

Rich Beeson's "model" isn't a campaign handicapper's model of how a candidate wins. It's "we did something right two years ago, so let's assume we're still doing it." I don't think they have a clue what works, except, ironically, that they recognize the value of "throwing money at the problem". Rove's famous math is just the same this year as it was when his candidates won. Terrorist irredentist Belgian imperialist Newt Gingrich still thinks he won the 1994 midterms with his "contract for America" even though hardly any voters had heard of it. Except for the money part, which really does do something (just as it does in improving schools, countering poverty, and what not), the business is basically a fraud.

I was also interested to learn that Ph.D. candidate and soccer mom Paula Broadwell, deciding to write a book instead of her dissertation, got literary by hiring a ghost writer, Vernon Loeb. That is, what she wanted specifically was to be not just a biographer, but a society biographer. It's not that she didn't work damn hard, flying around the world and interviewing everybody she could, it's just that she didn't work in a small and silent room. There had to be a minimum-wage peon to transcribe the interviews, and a handsomely paid Loeb to stitch the paragraphs together.

What I wanted to say was, it's not so much the case I tend to imagine, that bosses really don't know what work is; that's too simple. But their model of it, the image of work that lives with the word in their minds, isn't of making or maintaining or fixing or understanding things—it's advertising and marketing—it's making things look more valuable than they actually are. That's what the numbers do in private equity.

So Romney hired pollsters that would make him look like a winner, not even realizing that he might want to know to what extent he really was a winner or not at any given point in time. It would be sad if it wasn't so funny.

Cleveland model and fashion photographer—yellow. By Pazza Photography.