Ministers from Super Committee Congressional Districts Speak Out On Shared Sacrifice

Ministers from the Super Committee's congressional districts Tuesday urged senators and representatives who have pledged not to raise any taxes, even on the wealthy and corporations, to reconsider.

Among the clergy was the Rev. Dan Scheid, rector of St. Augustine's Episcopal Church in Benton Township. In a teleconference call organized by Faith in Public Life, he was one of four pastors asking reconsideration by committee members who have signed anti-tax activist Grover Norquist's pledge to never raise taxes.

The bipartisan Super Committee, which arose out of the debt ceiling crisis, has 12 senators and representatives charged with coming up with a plan by Thanksgiving to reduce the debt by at least $1.2 trillion over the next decade.

The ministers' statements were intended for Rep. Fred Upton, R-St. Joseph, Rep. Dave Camp, R-Midland, (and others).

Scheid in the teleconference call said he's in "a city and a state that's lived with the devastating effects of a sour economy that sadly predates the recession the rest of our country is climbing out of now."

Scheid said his parishioners have operated a food pantry for four years, and volunteer at the Benton Harbor Soup Kitchen.

"We see firsthand, week after week and month after month, men and women and children who are hungry and need some help," he said.

Many in desperate need of help are the "working poor," and the least able to absorb any additional burdens or cuts in services, he said.

One such parishioner is a "cook at the community hospital," Scheid said. "She works hard, but she still has to wait for over an hour, twice a month, for a couple bags of groceries from our church basement to help her make it from paycheck to paycheck.

"Is this the type of person we as Americans want to saddle with more responsibility than she can already bear as the Super Committee finds $1.2 trillion for deficit reduction? How about my working-class and middle-class and retired parishioners who staff our food pantry? Is it up to them as well to suffer cuts in services to come up with this $1.2 trillion package?

"Or should we ask for shared sacrifice in finding this money by asking fellow Americans who have been abundantly blessed with high incomes to contribute more of a fair share through an increase in their taxes?"

www.heraldpalladium.com/articles/2011/09/21/local_news/6594244.txt

P.S. The above picture is from the food pantry at St. Augustine Episcopal in Benton Township.

Michigan Changing Food Stamp Eligibility Rules

An undetermined number of Michigan's nearly 2 million food assistance recipients will lose the help under new eligibility requirements the state will begin using in October.

Michigan has determined food assistance eligibility based only on income for roughly a decade. A new policy will include a review of certain financial assets starting Oct 1. The requirements will affect new applicants right away and existing recipients when their cases come up for review, which typically happens once every six months.

Those with assets of more than $5,000 in bank accounts or some types of property would no longer be eligible for food assistance. Other assets that would count against the cap include vehicles with market values of more than $15,000 and second homes, depending on how much is owed on the properties.

Some assets, such as primary residences and 401k accounts, would not be considered for determining food assistance eligibility.

The Michigan League for Human Services says the policies will make it harder for those who are out of work or underemployed to qualify for the assistance. The organization says need is increasing as the state's unemployment rate rose to 11.2 percent in August, the third-highest rate in the nation and up from 10.2 percent in April.

moneywatch.bnet.com/economic-news/news/michigan-changing-food-stamp-eligibility-rules/6301165/#ixzz1YX1713Em

Two Views on School Reform

The following is an article in the Washington Post which discussed school reform and the issues faced by schools in high areas of concentrated poverty. Julie Mack from the Kalamazoo Gazette also discussed a similar issue in the following post. Thus, two views on school reform: one from a national reporter, the other from a local Southwest Michigan reporter.

Here's the view from the Washington Post reporter:

The numbers are nauseating. According to the just released new Census Bureau data, based on 2010 data:

*22 percent of American children live in poverty

*39 percent of black children live in poverty

*35 percent of Hispanic children live in poverty

The federal government set the poverty level in 2010 for a family of four living with an income of no more than $22,314 or a single person with an income of no more than $11,139. And, according to this Washington Post story, the total number of Americans living below the line is at the highest level in the last 52 years. That’s 46.2 million Americans, or 15.1 percent of all Americans.

And if you consider that, according to the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University, a family of four needs an income of about twice the poverty threshold to cover basic expenses, more than 42 percent of American children live in low-income families.

So what does this have to do with school reform?

Almost everything.

www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/public-educations-biggest-problem-gets-worse/2011/09/13/gIQAWGz2RK_blog.html

Is it fair to expect teachers in high-poverty schools to be miracle workers?

Think about three different scenarios:

• A doctor who specializes in hard-to-treat patients.

• A farmer struggling with drought.

• A cop assigned to a high-crime neighborhood.

Would you expect these three to experience outcomes — such as number of patient deaths, size of crop yields or number of cases solved — similar to those of their counterparts who face fewer challenges?

Sure, we expect the same professional standards regardless of work environment; being in a tough spot is no excuse for incompetence.

But an expectation of results is typically adjusted based on circumstances.

It only makes sense.

Yet, when it comes to schools, this kind of logic goes out the window.

www.mlive.com/opinion/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2011/09/is_it_fair_to_expect_teachers.html

Behind the poverty numbers: real lives, real pain

At a food pantry in a Chicago suburb, a 38-year-old mother of two breaks into tears.

She and her husband have been out of work for nearly two years. Their house and car are gone. So is their foothold in the middle class and, at times, their self-esteem.

"It's like there is no way out," says Kris Fallon.

She is trapped like so many others, destitute in the midst of America's abundance. Last week, the Census Bureau released new figures showing that nearly one in six Americans lives in poverty — a record 46.2 million people. The poverty rate, pegged at 15.1 percent, is the highest of any major industrialized nation, and many experts believe it could get worse before it abates.

The numbers are daunting — but they also can seem abstract and numbing without names and faces.

Associated Press reporters around the country went looking for the people behind the numbers. They were not hard to find.

There's Tim Cordova, laid off from his job as a manager at a McDonald's in New Mexico, and now living with his wife at a homeless shelter after a stretch where they slept in their Ford Focus.

news.yahoo.com/behind-poverty-numbers-real-lives-real-pain-151738270.html

Brookings Study: Detroit's low education = high unemployment

The unemployment bottom line boils down to education, according to a study of who's unemployed and who's not by Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

According to Brookings, in the Detroit, Warren, Livonia Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), workers with bachelor's degrees had only a moderately high unemployment rate in 2009 of 6.8 percent, while 21.5 percent of those with a high school diploma or less were unemployed in 2009.

In the last decade, an increasing number of jobs in the Detroit area demand a diploma and not enough workers have them. The study calculates that only 16 percent of adults in Detroit, ages 25 and older have a college degree even though 18 percent of occupations in the region require this level of education.

www.mlive.com/jobs/index.ssf/2011/09/detroits_low_education_high_unemployment.html#incart_mce

Bread for the World: Hunger and Poverty Facts

14.6% of U.S. households struggle to put enough food on the table. More than 49 million Americans—including 16.7 million children—live in these households.

Bread for the World has a compilation of additional statistics, facts, and links to reports on hunger and poverty at:

www.bread.org/hunger/us/facts.html

September 11, A Personal Poem

To my friends at Poverty Reduction Initiative:

There will be a short hiatus of my postings to this blog. My apologies for that. My daughter passed away on Labor Day. It was a week shy of her 25th birthday on 9/11.

With that in mind, please allow me to share a poem that I wrote for her on her birthday in 2008:

September 11

Some days are sacred
and filled with memories
for Christians it is
Christmas or Easter,
I suppose.
But for me the day I first held you child
is most blessed.

A father's bond started
on this day, your whole life ago,
only for me not so long.
It seems an instant
since the precious time
I first stroked your hair
and the tears rolled down my cheeks
as you entered my heart
right there, right then.

Mothers carry within their wombs
and love for months before dads.
The kicks of little hands and legs
and beats of tiny hearts are foreign to us
something to feel from the outside
not within.
So it is on day one
that our devotion begins.

Such it is.
A father's love
starts then, my precious daughter,
and for this dad
it never dies
as my heart was yours
that very day
and will always be
for this there is no end.

- Rob B.

God's Kitchen Opening Delayed in Battle Creek

God's Kitchen-Battle Creek, a new soup kitchen that was scheduled to open Labor Day, now will not open until Oct. 3, according to a press release Friday evening from the nonprofit's board of directors.

Pastor William Stein, chairman of the soup kitchen's board of directors, cited an "unsuccessful fundraising campaign" for the delay.

The kitchen was supposed to open inside the Springfield Farmers Market in Begg Park and serve meals from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday to low-income children, seniors and families. It also hopes to promote health and fitness through various health screenings and activities at the park. Stein had hoped to raise $10,000 by Monday's opening.

"We may have moved too quickly," Stein said in the release. "Our soup kitchen must be operational by Oct. 3 in order to provide assistance to the hundreds of individuals and families that are about to be kicked off of welfare."

www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20110903/NEWS01/109030305/God-s-Kitchen-opening-delayed

Black Unemployment Highest Since 1984

The August jobs report was dismal for plenty of reasons, but perhaps most striking was the picture it painted of racial inequality in the job market.

Black unemployment surged to 16.7% in August, its highest level since 1984, while the unemployment rate for whites fell slightly to 8%, the Labor Department reported.

"This month's numbers continue to bear out that longstanding pattern that minorities have a much more challenging time getting jobs," said Bill Rodgers, chief economist with the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

Black unemployment has been roughly double that of whites since the government started tracking the figures in 1972.

Economists blame a variety of factors. The black workforce is younger than the white workforce, lower numbers of blacks get a college degree and many live in areas of the country that were harder hit by the recession -- all things that could lead to a higher unemployment rate.

But even excluding those factors, blacks still are hit with higher joblessness.

money.cnn.com/2011/09/02/news/economy/black_unemployment_rate/index.htm?iid=HP_Highlight