Jeff Sessions Seems to Want to Bring Back the War on Drugs

[herman]

Gotta keep those profits flowing to the private prisons corporations....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/how-jeff-sessions-wants-to-bring-back-the-war-on-drugs/2017/04/08/414ce6be-132b-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html?utm_term=.f6c99fce30fd

When the Obama administration launched a sweeping policy to reduce harsh prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, rave reviews came from across the political spectrum. Civil rights groups and the Koch brothers praised Obama for his efforts, saying he was making the criminal justice system more humane.

But there was one person who watched these developments with some horror. Steven H. Cook, a former street cop who became a federal prosecutor based in Knoxville, Tenn., saw nothing wrong with how the system worked — not the life sentences for drug charges, not the huge growth of the prison population. And he went everywhere — Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, congressional hearings, public panels — to spread a different gospel.

“The federal criminal justice system simply is not broken. In fact, it’s working exactly as designed,” Cook said at a criminal justice panel at The Washington Post last year.

The Obama administration largely ignored Cook, who was then president of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys. But he won’t be overlooked anymore.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has brought Cook into his inner circle at the Justice Department, appointing him to be one of his top lieutenants to help undo the criminal justice policies of Obama and former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. As Sessions has traveled to different cities to preach his tough-on-crime philosophy, Cook has been at his side.

Sessions has yet to announce specific policy changes, but Cook’s new perch speaks volumes about where the Justice Department is headed.

Law enforcement officials say that Sessions and Cook are preparing a plan to prosecute more drug and gun cases and pursue mandatory minimum sentences. The two men are eager to bring back the national crime strategy of the 1980s and ’90s from the peak of the drug war, an approach that had fallen out of favor in recent years as minority communities grappled with the effects of mass incarceration.

Crime is near historic lows in the United States, but Sessions says that the spike in homicides in several cities, including Chicago, is a harbinger of a “dangerous new trend” in America that requires a tough response.

“Our nation needs to say clearly once again that using drugs is bad,” Sessions said to law enforcement officials in a speech in Richmond last month. “It will destroy your life.”

Advocates of criminal justice reform argue that Sessions and Cook are going in the wrong direction — back to a strategy that tore apart families and sent low-level drug offenders, disproportionately minority citizens, to prison for long sentences.

“They are throwing decades of improved techniques and technologies out the window in favor of a failed approach,” said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM).

But Cook, whose views are supported by other federal prosecutors, sees himself as a dedicated assistant U.S. attorney who for years has tried to protect neighborhoods ravaged by crime. He has called FAMM and organizations like it “anti-law enforcement groups.”

The records of Cook and Sessions show that while others have grown eager in recent years to rework the criminal justice system, they have repeatedly fought to keep its toughest edges, including winning a battle in Congress last year to defeat a reform bill.

“If hard-line means that my focus is on protecting communities from violent felons and drug traffickers, then I’m guilty,” Cook said in a recent interview with The Post. “I don’t think that’s hard-line. I think that’s exactly what the American people expect of their Department of Justice.”

When asked for a case that he was proud to work on during his three-decade career as a prosecutor, Cook points to when his office went after a crack ring operating in Chattanooga housing projects between 1989 and 1991.

This was during the height of the crack epidemic and the drug war. After the cocaine overdose of black basketball star Len Bias in 1986, Congress began passing “tough on crime” laws, including mandatory minimum sentences on certain drug and gun offenses. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed one of the toughest-ever crime bills, which included a “three strikes” provision that gave mandatory life sentences for repeat offenders.

Federal prosecutors such as Cook applauded their “new tools” to get criminals off the street.

Cook said last year: “What we did, beginning in 1985, is put these laws to work. We started filling federal prisons with the worst of the worst. And what happened next is exactly what Congress said they wanted to happen — and that is violent crime began in 1991 to turn around. By 2014, we had cut it in half.”

To bring down the Chattanooga drug ring’s leader, Victor Novene, undercover federal agents purchased crack from Novene’s underlings. Prosecutors then threatened them with long prison sentences to “flip” them to give up information about their superiors.

Cook said in March: “We made buys from individuals who were lower in the organization. We used the mandatory minimums to pressure them to cooperate.”

Cook’s office also added gun charges to make sentences even longer, another popular tool among prosecutors seeking the longest possible punishments.

With the mandatory minimum sentences and firearms “enhancements,” Novene received six life sentences. Many of his lieutenants were sentenced to between 16 and 33 years in federal prison.

But sentencing reform advocates say the tough crime policies went too far. The nation began incarcerating people at a higher rate than any other country — jailing 25 percent of the world’s prisoners at a cost of $80 billion a year. The nation’s prison and jail population more than quadrupled from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million in 2015, filled with mostly black men strapped with lengthy prison sentences — 10 or 20 years, sometimes life without parole for a first drug offense.

Obama, the first sitting president to visit a federal prison, launched an ambitious clemency initiative to release certain drug offenders from prison early. And Holder told his prosecutors, in an effort to make punishments more fairly fit the crime, to stop charging low-level nonviolent drug offenders with offenses that imposed severe mandatory sentences. He called his strategy, outlined in an August 2013 report, “Smart on Crime.”

Cook has called it “Soft on Crime” and said the Chattanooga case would have been much more difficult to make, “if possible at all,” in recent years.

“We were discouraged from using mandatory minimums,” Cook said about Holder’s 2013 charging and sentencing memo to prosecutors. “The charging memo handcuffed prosecutors. And it limited when enhancements can be used to increase penalties, an important leverage when you’re dealing with a career offender in getting them to cooperate.”

Cook has also dismissed the idea that there is such a thing as a nonviolent drug offender.

“Drug trafficking is inherently violent. Drug traffickers are dealing in a heavy cash business,” he said on the “O’Reilly Factor” last year. “They can’t resolve disputes in court. They resolve the disputes on the street, and they resolve them through violence.”

Cook and Sessions have also fought the winds of change on Capitol Hill, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers recently tried but failed to pass the first significant bill on criminal justice reform in decades.

The legislation, which had 37 sponsors in the Senate, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and 79 members of the House, would have reduced some of the long mandatory minimum sentences for gun and drug crimes. It also would have given judges more flexibility in drug sentencing and made retroactive the law that reduced the large disparity between sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine.

The bill, introduced in 2015, had support from outside groups as diverse as the Koch brothers and the NAACP. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) supported it, as well.

But then people such as Sessions and Cook spoke up. The longtime Republican senator from Alabama became a leading opponent, citing the spike in crime in several cities.

“Violent crime and murders have increased across the country at almost alarming rates in some areas. Drug use and overdoses are occurring and dramatically increasing,” said Sessions, one of five members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who voted against the legislation. “It is against this backdrop that we are considering a bill . . . to cut prison sentences for drug traffickers and even other violent criminals, including those currently in federal prison.”

Cook testified that it was the “wrong time to weaken the last tools available to federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents.”

After GOP lawmakers became nervous about passing legislation that might seem soft on crime, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

“Sessions was the main reason that bill didn’t pass,” said Inimai M. Chettiar, the director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “He came in at the last minute and really torpedoed the bipartisan effort.”

Now that he is attorney general, Sessions has signaled a new direction. As his first step, Sessions told his prosecutors in a memo last month to begin using “every tool we have” — language that evoked the strategy from the drug war of loading up charges to lengthen sentences.

And he quickly appointed Cook to be a senior official on the attorney general’s task force on crime reduction and public safety, which was created following a Trump executive order to address what the president has called “American carnage.”

“If there was a flickering candle of hope that remained for sentencing reform, Cook’s appointment was a fire hose,” said Ring, of FAMM. “There simply aren’t enough backhoes to build all the prisons it would take to realize Steve Cook’s vision for America.”

Sessions is also expected to take a harder line on the punishment for using and distributing marijuana, a drug he has long abhorred. His crime task force will review existing marijuana policy, according to a memo he wrote prosecutors this week. Using or distributing marijuana is illegal under federal law, which classifies it as a Schedule 1 drug, the same category as heroin, and considered more dangerous than cocaine and methamphetamine.

In his effort to resurrect the practices of the drug war, it is still unclear what Sessions will do about the wave of states that have legalized marijuana in recent years. Eight states and the District of Columbia now permit the recreational use of marijuana, and 28 states and the District have legalized the use of medical marijuana.

But his rhetoric against weed seems to get stronger with each speech. In Richmond, he cast doubt on the use of medical marijuana and said it “has been hyped, maybe too much.”

Sessions’s aides stress that the attorney general does not want to completely upend every aspect of criminal justice policy.

“We are not just sweeping away everything that has come before us.” said Robyn Thiemann, the deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Policy, who is working with Cook and has been at the Justice Department for nearly 20 years. “The attorney general recognizes that there is good work out there.”

Still, Sessions’s remarks on the road reveal his continued fascination with an earlier era of crime fighting.

In the speech in Richmond, he said, “Psychologically, politically, morally, we need to say — as Nancy Reagan said — ‘Just say no.’ ”

[Lobo]

<<Gotta keep those profits flowing to the private prisons corporations....>>

Don't forget Big Pharma, which is raking in billions pushing legal smack, primarily on poor white comminities that have been hit hard economically by Republican policies. That industry will get them hooked, and then hand them over to the tender mercies of the private prison, parole and probation industries.

(But just in case they have any ideas about getting off the stuff, Trump and the GOP are gutting what funding there is for drug treatment

Can't have THAT).

<<“If there was a flickering candle of hope that remained for sentencing reform, Cook’s appointment was a fire hose,” said Ring, of FAMM. “There simply aren’t enough backhoes to build all the prisons it would take to realize Steve Cook’s vision for America.”>>

But that won't stop them from trying. If we put half of the US population behind bars and hire the other half to be prison guards, at least we would have solved unemployment.

Besides, the important thing is to put freelancers out of business and make the pharmaceutical and alcohol industries our nation's official drug pushers.

BTW: He's also making Bridgegate criminal Chris Christie the "Drug Czar" -- a compulsive food-addict who has long sworn to put every marijuana smoker he can get his grubby fat hands on behind prison for life

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Ragnar]

Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. 

—Cindy Chang, The Times-Picayune, May 13, 2012

Introduction

The state of Louisiana is often called out for having the highest incarceration rate in the world. But in the global context, how far behind are the other 49 states, really? This report finds that the disturbing answer is “Not very far.”

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/

[Ragnar]

"Around the globe, governments respond to illegal activity and social unrest in many ways. Here in the United States, policymakers in the 1970s made the decision to start incarcerating Americans at globally unprecedented rates. The decades that followed have revealed that the growth in the U.S. prison population can be more closely attributed to ideological policy choices than actual crime rates. The record also shows that our country’s experiment with mass incarceation has not managed to significantly enhance public safety, but instead has consistently and disproportionately stunted the social and economic wellbeing of poor communities and communities of color for generations.

In the above graphic, we charted the comparative incarceration rates of every U.S. state alongside the world’s nations. While there are certainly important differences between how U.S. states handle incarceration, placing each state in a global context reveals that incarceration policy in every region of this country is out of step with the rest of the world.

 

The Data

The U.S. incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 residents, more than any other country. In fact, our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most of the countries in the world. Although our level of crime is comparable to those of other stable, internally secure, industrialized nations, the United States has an incarceration rate far higher than any other country.

Nearly all of the countries with relatively high incarceration rates share the experience of recent large-scale internal conflict. But the United States, which has enjoyed a long history of political stability and hasn’t had a civil war in nearly a century and a half, tops the list.

If we compare the incarceration rates of individual U.S. states and territories with that of other nations, for example, we see that 36 states and the District of Columbia have incarceration rates higher than that of Cuba, which is the nation with the second highest incarceration rate in the world.

New Jersey and New York follow just after Cuba. Although New York has been actively working on reducing its prison population, it’s still tied with Rwanda, which has the third highest national incarceration rate. Rwanda incarcerates so many people (492 per 100,000) because thousands are sentenced or awaiting trial in connection with the 1994 genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people.

Next comes the state of Washington, which claims the same incarceration rate as the Russian Federation. (In the wake of collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia used to rival the United States for the highest incarceration rate in the world. An epidemic of tuberculosis in the overcrowded prisons, however, encouraged the Russian government to launch a major amnesty in 1999 that significantly lowered that country’s incarceration rate.)

Utah, Nebraska and Iowa all lock up a greater portion of their populations than El Salvador, a country with a recent civil war and one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Five of the U.S. states with the lowest incarceration rates — Minnesota, Massachusetts, North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island — have higher incarceration rates than countries that have experienced major 20th century social traumas, including several former Soviet republics and South Africa.

The two U.S. states that incarcerate the least are Maine and Vermont, but even those two states incarcerate far more than the United State’s closest allies. The other NATO nations, for example, are concentrated in the lower half of this list. These nations incarcerate their own citizens at a rate five to ten times lower than the United States does:  

Conclusion

These data reveal that even the U.S. states that incarcerate the smallest portion of their own citizens are out of step with the larger community of nations. As U.S. states continue to reevaluate their own hefty reliance on incarceration, we recommend that they look to the broader global context for evidence that incarceration need not be the default response to larger social problems."

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/global/

[Minister Rebel]

Fire the doctors first, and save the population.

[Irie]

That was almost as effective as our "war on poverty".

[Ragnar]

We can thank pathetic kochsuckers for poverty increases and destruction of the US middle class....asshole 

[I-think4me]

Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world.

---------------
Predictable outcome when you allow the sheriff's to operate the prisons as for profit businesses. Filling beds becomes a priority and there is an endless supply of involuntary "customers".

[Irie]

Don't worry squirt, we understand the topic is way too complicated for your 54 point IQ.

[Ragnar]

Alabama is 13 on the list....all above with the exception of AZ and NM are southern states .....the joy of living in rwing idiot land 

[I-think4me]

That was almost as effective as our "war on poverty".

-------------
Without Social Security benefits, 40.5 percent of elderly Americans would have incomes below the official poverty line, all else being equal; with Social Security benefits, only 8.8 percent do. (See Figure 1.) These benefits lift 15.1 million elderly Americans above the poverty line.

The war on poverty can at least claim some successes on poverty. The war on drugs not only can't claim success on drug abuse, incarceration rates have contributed dramatically to single parent families and increased child poverty.

[Irie]

The War on Poverty Wasn't A Failure -- It Was A Catastrophe

Louis Woodhill ,  

 CONTRIBUTOR

I apply unconventional logic to economic issues.  

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Has the War on Poverty been a failure?  Well, of course it has.  If you devote 50 years and $21.5 trillion (in 4Q2013 dollars) to anything, and people are arguing about whether it was a success or a failure, then you can be sure that it was a failure.

Have you noticed that, 50+ years from its inception, no one is suggesting that the Apollo program was a failure?  The Apollo program was an unchallenged success because it accomplished its stated goal: “…to land a man on the moon, and to return him safely to the earth.”

The stated goal of the War on Poverty, as enunciated by Lyndon Johnson on January 8, 1964, was, “…not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”  Measured against this objective, the War on Poverty has not just been a failure, it has been a catastrophe.  It was supposed to help America’s poor become self-sufficient, and it has made them dependent and dysfunctional.

This is fact is illustrated most vividly by the “Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure Before Taxes and Transfers*” (ASPMBTAT).  This metric was devised to assess the ability of people to earn enough, not counting taxes and subsidies, to keep themselves and their dependent children out of poverty.  The income required to do this varies by family size and composition, but, for a family comprising two adults and two children, it is $25,500/year (in 4Q2013 dollars).

The ASPMBTAT is the ultimate quantitative test of the success (or failure) of the War on Poverty, at least in terms of its stated objective.  Shortly after the War on Poverty got rolling (1967), about 27% of Americans lived in poverty.  In 2012, the last year for which data is available, the number was about 29%.

This result would be shocking, even if we had not spent $21.5 trillion “fighting poverty” over the past 50 years.  Here’s why.

Between 1967 and 2012, U.S. real GDP (RGDP) per capita (in 4Q2013 dollars) increased by 127.3%, from $23,706 to $52,809.  In other words, to stay out of poverty in 1967, the two adults in a typical family of four had to capture 26.9% of their family’s proportionate share of RGDP (i.e., average RGDP per capita, times four).  To accomplish the same thing in 2012, they only had to pull in 12.1% of their family’s share of RGDP.  And yet, fewer people were able to manage this in 2012 than in 1967.

What turned the War on Poverty into a social and human catastrophe was that the enhanced welfare state created a perverse system of incentives, and people adapted to their new environment.

That people would adapt to a changed social/economic environment should have surprised no one.  After all, everyone living today is here because 50,000+ generations of their ancestors managed to adapt to whatever circumstances they found themselves in, at least well enough to produce and raise offspring.

The adaptation of the working-age poor to the War on Poverty’s expanded welfare state was immediately evident in the growth of various social pathologies, especially unwed childbearing.  The adaptation of the middle class to the new system took longer to manifest, but it was no less significant.

Even people with incomes far above the thresholds for welfare state programs were forced to adapt to the welfare state.  As crime rates (driven by rising numbers of fatherless boys) rose in the cities, and urban schools systems became dangerous and dysfunctional, the middle class (of all races) was forced to flee to the suburbs.

Because many middle-class mothers had to go to work to permit their families to bid for houses in good school districts (as well as pay the higher taxes that the expanded welfare state required), self-supporting families had fewer children.

Before we look at how the poor adapted to the War on Poverty’s enhanced means-tested welfare programs, let’s look at how America adapted to Medicare and enhanced Social Security benefits.

Desperate to spin the disastrous War on Poverty as a success, progressives have tried to divert our attention from America’s growing underclass by pointing to the large decline in the Official Poverty Measure (OPM, which includes cash transfer payments) for senior citizens.  The OPM for Americans age 65 and above fell from about 30% in 1967 to about 9% in 2012.

Not so fast, progressives.  It is not clear that the OPM for seniors would be higher today if the War on Poverty had never been mounted.

Because the War on Poverty made Social Security benefits more generous, and also created Medicare, it produced an instantaneous reduction in the OPM for senior citizens.  And, obviously, if Social Security and Medicare were terminated tomorrow, the OPM for senior citizens would rise.  However, because both Medicare and enhanced Social Security have now been in place for the entire working lifetimes of the people retiring today, these calculations prove nothing.

Progressives want us to believe that the people that started working after 1965 would have managed their lives and their finances exactly the same way if the welfare state had not been expanded during the mid-1960s.  This is not likely.

As Social Security and Medicare benefits were made more generous, people reduced their savings.  The Personal Savings Rate (which is calculated as a percent of disposable income) has fallen by more than half since 1967 (from 12.2% to 5.6%).  In other words, when people found that they didn’t need to save as much to avoid being poor in old age, they didn’t save as much.  Also, because of higher payroll taxes, workers had less money to save.

This was particularly problematic because GDP is driven by capital investment.  America’s lower savings rate translated into slower economic growth.  Because, as Albert Einstein once said, compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe, our economy is considerably smaller today than it would have been if people had been required to save more for retirement.  And, there are far fewer good-paying jobs than there would have been with more investment and higher GDP.

Among other things, a smaller GDP means that supporting our non-working senior citizens imposes a larger burden upon today’s working people than it would have if savings and investment had been higher over the past 50 years.

So, it is not clear at all that the War-on-Poverty-enhanced welfare state for senior citizens produced any long-term benefit, even for seniors.  However, at least we can afford it.

With correct economic policies, the U.S. can sustain RGDP growth rates of 3.5% or higher, and this level of growth would make Social Security and Medicare affordable, with no tax increases and no benefit cuts.

What America cannot afford is a welfare state that makes government dependency a feasible career option for its young people.  The War on Poverty made welfare (broadly defined) into a viable entry-level job, and poor people signed up for it in droves.

The pathologies that resulted from the War on Poverty were not the fault of the poor themselves.  They simply adapted, in a logical and predictable way, to a welfare state designed and promoted by our progressive elites.

It is amazing that progressives, who treat the theory of evolution as religious dogma, also seem to believe that there is no such thing as “human nature.”  They also seem to believe that “nurture” (which presumably includes exhortation from government bureaucrats) trumps “nature.”

Unfortunately for progressive programs like those making up the War on Poverty, there is an essential human nature that we all share, and humans respond predictably to the incentives present in the environment around them.

Children are programmed by evolution to rebel against their parents’ control, and to seek to be independent.  Prior to the welfare state, the only way for girls to escape the authority of their parents was to become economically self-sufficient, by getting a job and/or getting married.

The progressive welfare state, especially after it was expanded by the War on Poverty, provided a third option for teenage girls seeking to get away from their parents’ control: have a baby.  As soon as a young, unmarried girl had a baby, she officially became a “poor family,” and the government would force taxpayers to support her and her baby.

Girls of all races responded predictably to shifts in welfare state policy, as shown below in a chart excerpted from a Heritage report.

The poorer a demographic group is in terms of its ability to earn market income, the more members of that group will find the welfare state attractive.  However, individuals in all demographic groups responded to the changed incentives.

BTW, the response to welfare reform occurred when it became a serious possibility.  People didn’t wait for it to be enacted.  They aren’t stupid.

Unfortunately, the damage to poor communities was done long before the half-hearted welfare reforms of 1996.  Once the number of responsible fathers in a community falls below a certain level, the adults lose control of the adolescent males.  Gangs take over the streets, and gang values (mainly, getting “respect,” by violence if necessary) become established among the young males.

Urban crime rates rose rapidly from the 1960s through the early 1990s, at which point the public got angry, rebelled against soft-on-crime progressives, and cracked down hard on criminals.  The result was an exploding prison population, with the majority of those incarcerated being young, fatherless males.  This impacted the “sex ratios” in poor communities, as we will discuss later.

Evolution has shaped human males differently than human females.  However, the consequences of adapting to the expanded welfare state has been no less devastating for poor young men than it has been for poor young women.

Of paramount concern to young men is, “What do I have to do to get laid?”

In 1950, the answer to this question was, “Get a job, make money, get married, and support a family.”  The War on Poverty changed this to, “Just show up.  Don’t worry, you won’t have to support the children that you might father—the government will force taxpayers to do that.  In fact, you might even be able to live off the women and children that are living off the welfare state.”

We are the descendents of the early humans that had the most surviving children.  Given human nature, a male’s ideal reproductive strategy is to have sex with as many women as he can, and sire as many children as he can, while (somehow) getting other people to support his children, so that they will survive to reproduce.

Because an attempt by one male to implement this ideal reproductive strategy conflicts with the interests of the mothers of his children (who want him to stick around and help raise them), and with the interests of the other males (who could get stuck having to support children that are not their own), society evolved strong defenses against this strategy.  As late as the 1960s, “shotgun weddings” were common in America.

The War on Poverty changed this.  The expanded welfare state transferred the burden of supporting the offspring of irresponsible males from family members and/or the local community to a diffuse group of taxpayers.  This benefited irresponsible males in an evolutionary biological sense, but there were huge costs to society.

As the dependent underclass expanded, struggling middle class families were increasingly forced to delay having their own children, and to have fewer of them.  This was because the middle class not only had to pay the taxes required to support the welfare state, but also found itself forced to pay for private schools, or to bid for expensive housing in school districts where their children would not be exposed to the children of the increasingly chaotic underclass.

None of this had anything to do with race.  The black middle class fled Detroit for exactly the same reasons as the white middle class.  President Obama, who presumably is not a racist, lives in the heart of Washington, DC, but sends his kids to a private school.  And, as Charles Murray has documented in his book, Coming Apart, underclass social pathologies are taking hold among poor whites.

Compounding the damage done by the welfare state is the long-term shift in “sex ratio,” which is the number of adult males per 100 adult females.

Western civilization as we know it evolved during a time when women were in relatively short supply, due mainly to death in childbirth.  From 1790 to 1910, the sex ratio in the U.S. hovered around 104.

Around 1910, medical science began to get a handle on death in childbirth, and the sex ratio began falling.  It hit 100 in 1945 and bottomed out at about 95 in 1970.

The decline in the sex ratio broke the “female sex cartel,” which had permitted women to demand marriage and fidelity as the price of dependable sex.  Today, only men that want to get married for reasons other than sex get married.  Lots of college-educated men seem to want to be married, but it appears that a much lower percentage of high school dropout males are looking to wed.  This may be because those men feel that they have little to offer to a family, or because today’s welfare state strongly discourages low-income people from marrying each other.

The impact of the shift in the national sex ratio has been amplified in poor communities by mass incarceration.  This has produced extremely low sex ratios in areas of concentrated poverty.  It does little good to promote marriage as a solution to poverty, if there are no marriageable men.  Also, conservatives need to understand that poor women are getting married.  They are marrying the welfare state, in many cases “until death do us part.”

So, the War on Poverty has been a catastrophe.  Why wasn’t anything done about this before now?  And, what should be done about it now?  And, why are progressives falling all over themselves calling Congressman Paul Ryan a racist?  We’ll discuss these topics in future installments of’ “Unconventional Logic.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiswoodhill/2014/03/19/the-war-on-poverty-wasnt-a-failure-it-was-a-catastrophe/#8cbfd296f49d

[Ragnar]

woodhill is another liberwackatarian dip shit living up ayn rand's ass .....there has never been any economic proof that this Horatio Alger crap works....they will keep puking it though 

[Ragnar]

11%11.5%12%12.5%13%13.5%14%14.5%15%15.5%

Complete Source Details

ABOUT THIS STATISTIC

This graph shows the poverty rate in the United States among all people from 1990 to 2015. 11.3 percent of the population were living below the poverty line in 2000. In 2015, the poverty rate was 13.5 percent in the U.S.

Poverty in the United States

As shown in the statistic above, the poverty rate among all people living in the Unites States has shifted within the last 15 years. 

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) defines poverty as follows: “Absolute poverty measures poverty in relation to the amount of money necessary to meet basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. The concept of absolute poverty is not concerned with broader quality of life issues or with the overall level of inequality in society.”

The poverty rate in the United States varies widely across different ethnic groups. Black Americans are the ethnic group with the most people living in poverty in 2015, with an amount of 24.1 percent of the Black population with an income below the poverty line. In comparison to that, only 9.1 percent of the White (non-Hispanic) population, were living below the poverty line in 2012. 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/200463/us-poverty-rate-since-1990/

The lowest rates were at the end of BC's two terms.....now certainly the dot com bubble had influence.....of course the rate immediately went up when the kochsuckers took over in 2000

[Irie]

can't refute the facts, so you attack the author.....fuckin' retard.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`

[Ragnar]

Eat it wee wee, woodhill has theory refuted by the facts....just more wishes and dreams from white kochsuckers 

"Before the mid-1970s, economic growth in the United States was associated with falling poverty rates. If that relationship had held, poverty would have been eradicated in the 1980s. The decoupling of rising growth and falling poverty, however, means that Americans are working longer and harder but becoming poorer and less economically secure.

Quick facts

• $22,314
  In 2010, the poverty threshold was $22,314 for a family of four.
• 15.1%
  15.1 percent— just over 46 million Americans— were officially in poverty in 2010. This is an increase from 12.5 percent in 2007.
• 27.4%
  Among racial and ethnic groups, African Americans had the highest poverty rate, 27.4 percent, followed by Hispanics at 26.6 percent and whites at 9.9 percent.
• 45.8%
  45.8 percent of young black children (under age 6) live in poverty, compared to 14.5 percent of white children.
• 28.0%
  In 2011, 28.0 percent of workers earned poverty-level wages ($11.06 or less an hour).
• 18-25
  Workers earning poverty-level wages are disproportionately female, black, Hispanic, or between the ages of 18 and 25.
• 1.8x
  The United States spends less on social programs (16.2 percent of GDP) than similarly developed countries (21.3 percent of GDP), has a relative poverty rate (the share of the population living on less than half of median household income) 1.8 times higher than those peer nations, and has a child poverty rate more than twice as high.

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/fact-sheets/poverty/

• 
  

[Lobo]

<<The War on Poverty Wasn't A Failure -- It Was A Catastrophe>>

<$21.5 trillion>>

Your author is counting middle class support programs like Social Security (around since 1935) and Medicare as "War On Poverty"?

They've certainly had a huge effect on keeping poverty down, but the money isn't spent on alleviating or raising up those already in poverty.

The "War On Poverty" ceased to exist decades ago. While it lasted, and for some time after, the 1964-1973 "War On Poverty" was anything but a failure. During that decade, poverty in the US plummeted from 17.3% to 11.1%, and would have continued to fall if Nixon hadn't begun dismantling it. The rate more or less stayed there until Republicans (and sadly, Bill Clinton) defunded much of it, and began to rise precipitously in the 2000s under Bush.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty

<<Between 1967 and 2012, U.S. real GDP (RGDP) per capita (in 4Q2013 dollars) increased by 127.3%, from $23,706 to $52,809.  In other words, to stay out of poverty in 1967, the two adults in a typical family of four had to capture 26.9% of their family’s proportionate share of RGDP (i.e., average RGDP per capita, times four).  To accomplish the same thing in 2012, they only had to pull in 12.1% of their family’s share of RGDP.  And yet, fewer people were able to manage this in 2012 than in 1967.>>

GDP and productivity have certainly risen, but since the 1980s the rewards of that productivity, and the lion's share of GDP, have increasingly gone to the top and the tip-top of the top, not to the middle class or poor. Thanks to decades of policies aimed at enriching the rich and large corporations while gutting domestic spending (especially spending on poverty), and to the wholesale exchange of well-paying, well-benefitted manufacturing jobs for low-wage/no benefits service jobs, the vast majority of Americans have seen their incomes stagnate and fall in real terms.

<<As Social Security and Medicare benefits were made more generous, people reduced their savings.  The Personal Savings Rate (which is calculated as a percent of disposable income) has fallen by more than half since 1967 (from 12.2% to 5.6%).  In other words, when people found that they didn’t need to save as much to avoid being poor in old age, they didn’t save as much.  Also, because of higher payroll taxes, workers had less money to save.>>

Gimme a break... Contrary to right-wing ideology and mythology, people aren't saving less because they're irresponsible and shiftless, but because they have much less (if anything at all) to save after paying for essentials. And they don't have enough not because of the FICA tax (which makes it possible to have a basic income and basic health care in old age), but because of the decline in wages and government services.

<<This was particularly problematic because GDP is driven by capital investment.  America’s lower savings rate translated into slower economic growth.  Because, as Albert Einstein once said, compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe, our economy is considerably smaller today than it would have been if people had been required to save more for retirement.  And, there are far fewer good-paying jobs than there would have been with more investment and higher GDP.>>

Wrong. GDP isn't driven by either savings or capital investment. It's the other way around: capital investment is driven by consumer spending, and people spend much less when they have much less to spend because of shitty wages. Even the hated welfare, which has been gutted since the 1980s, puts money into the hands of people who will necessarily spend it, thereby creating jobs and putting upward pressure on wages.

[Lobo]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/study-us-poverty-rate-decreased-over-past-half-century-thanks-to-safety-net-programs/2013/12/09/9322c834-60f3-11e3-94ad-004fefa61ee6_story.html?utm_term=.c0fc2e794456

Study: U.S. poverty rate decreased over past half-century thanks to safety-net programs

Rhode Island town relies on food stamps

View Photos

New research has found that with the help of food stamps and unemployment insurance, the percentage of Americans who are poor has decreased since the 1960s. Above is a scene from Woonsocket, R.I., where a third of the residents receive nutritional assistance.

By Zachary A. Goldfarb December 9, 2013 

Government programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance have made significant progress in easing the plight of the poor in the half-century since the launch of the war on poverty, according to a major new study.

But the nation’s economy has made far less progress lifting people out of poverty without the need for government services.

The findings by a group of academic researchers at Columbia University paint a mixed picture of the United States nearly 50 years after Lyndon B. Johnson announced in his January 1964 State of the Union address that he would wage a war on poverty. They also contradict the official poverty rate, which suggests there has been no decline in the percentage of Americans experiencing poverty since then.

According to the new research, the safety net helped reduce the percentage of Americans in poverty from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012. The results were especially striking during the most recent economic downturn, when the poverty rate barely budged despite a massive increase in unemployment.

While the government has helped keep poverty at bay, the economy by itself has failed to improve the lives of the very poor over the past 50 years. Without taking into account the role of government policy, more Americans — 29 percent — would be in poverty today, compared with 27 percent in 1967.

Too much and too little

View Photos

Hidalgo County, Tex., on the border with Mexico, has among the highest obesity rates and the highest poverty rates in the United States. Residents can afford only the cheapest foods, and now those foods are wreaking havoc on their health.

The research has already resonated in Washington, where there are sharp debates in Congress about whether to trim the safety net.

For the White House, where President Obama and top advisers have been briefed on the study, the research suggests that Congress must preserve the safety net as a critical tool to help the poor — at the same time that additional steps are taken to make sure that lower-income Americans earn high-enough wages to escape poverty.

“It gives you a deep appreciation for what public programs do today and how much more they do today than in the past,” said Jason Furman, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “But it also gives you a sense of how little progress we’ve made on incomes and raising incomes in the past several decades and the importance of doing that going forward in order to continue to make progress on poverty.”

Other analysts note that the dramatic expansion of the safety net comes with unintended consequences, including increased dependency for the poor.

Scott Winship, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, said the safety net plays an important and helpful role “during downturns, but then when the economy turns around, the expanded safety net has acted as a poverty trap, in essence lulling people and preventing them from pursuing work.”

The study was led by Christopher Wimer and Liana Fox, researchers at the Columbia Population Research Center, and joined by professors Irwin Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal and Jane Waldfogel. They made use of a change in how the U.S. government began measuring poverty in 2010.

Until then, the U.S. Census evaluated poverty based only on a limited measure of the income and expenses of Americans. From 1967 through 2012, the official measure showed poverty increasing from 14 percent of the population to 15 percent, often falling during periods of economic strength and rising during weakness.

But starting three years ago, the government began publishing an alternative measure that took into account the full range of expenses the poor face and the government benefits they receive. The Columbia researchers went further, using that standard and tracing it back in time to evaluate the evolution of poverty since the Johnson era.

Among the researchers’ discoveries was that deep poverty — incomes below 50 percent of the poverty line — has been stable at 5 percent of the population for about 40 years and that the safety net has grown especially powerful in protecting children from poverty.

“That means the safety net is working effectively for the most vulnerable families and kids,” Waldfogel said.

One of the most striking findings for the researchers was how poverty stayed stable during the financial crisis and Great Recession thanks to a dramatic expansion of the safety net, including enhanced unemployment benefits, more-generous food stamps and tax credits for the poor.

In previous and shallower recessions, poverty increased more than it did during the 2007-to-2009 downturn. For example, as the economy slowed and fell into recession in 1990, the poverty rate, including the impact of the safety net, rose 1.5 percentage points to 20.7 percent.

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By contrast, in the far worse recent recession, with a much higher level of unemployment, the poverty rate rose only 0.8 percentage points.

“It’s sort of remarkable,” Wimer said. Without the safety net, “poverty would have risen by five or six percentage points from 2007 through 2012.”

More recently, in the slow-going economic recovery, this alternative poverty rate has climbed a bit more, to 16 percent — a reflection, researchers say, of the fact that Americans are losing benefits as they return to work, a positive outcome that still involves costs such as transportation.

Armed with this type of evidence, White House officials say they will work aggressively to try to protect existing safety-net programs at the same time they seek to lift the wages of people in need, for example by fighting for an increase in the minimum wage.

“We have to defend nutritional assistance and unemployment insurance that made that progress on reducing poverty possible, but we also have to address the reasons that poverty hasn’t improved in market incomes,” Furman said. “When you cut the wages for low-income people, adjusted for inflation, you’re not going to make as much progress on reducing poverty for low-income Americans.”

[Keith In Tampa]

Wow!

Lobo, championing conservative causes!   

(I gotta take a screen shot!  <Grin>!)

You Go Lobo!

[Lobo]

?

It isn't necessary to resort to personal slurs, Keith.

What conceivable conservative policy are you imagining that I've championed?

[Irie]

Your stats don't prove a thing about an improved poverty level, dipshit.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Ragnar]

When you only have a dysfunctional butt hole for "facts"....not a surprise 

[Irie]

Idiot....offering a stat like unmemployment is 5%, or the average wage is the same as it was in 1977 offers nothing to the discussion.  

[Ragnar]

you spouting creepy white vomit is not a "discussion" wee wee

[Irie]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

$22 trillion in adjusted 2012 $$$ lowered the poverty level by what, 4 %?

and you guys call that success?

[Ragnar]

The U.S. middle class had $17,867 less income in 2007 because of the growth of inequality since 1979Household income of the broad middle class, actual and projected assuming no growth in inequality, 1979–2011

Note: Data show average income of households in the middle three-fifths.

Source: EPI analysis of Congressional Budget Office data

http://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

[Irie]

Who the hell brought up middle-class income?  The discussion was $ spent to lift people out of POVERTY.  

fidiot.

[herman]

Post the url for this chart.

[Lobo]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/01/12/no-we-dont-spend-1-trillion-on-welfare-each-year/?utm_term=.4d23a9409796

Wonkblog

No, we don’t spend $1 trillion on welfare each year

By Mike Konczal January 12, 2014

If you’ve read any conservative commentary on the war on poverty in the past week, you’ve likely seen this talking point: “We spend $1 trillion each year on welfare and there’s been no reduction in poverty.” That’s crazy! Then, a sentence later, you’ll probably see a line like this: “It’s true. According to a recent report, we spend a trillion dollars on means-test programs each year, yet the official census numbers show no reduction in poverty.”

A farmers market in Roseville, Calif. advertises its acceptance of EBT (electronic benefit transfer) cards, which are used for food stamps. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)

If you are reading that second line quickly, you probably think it bolsters the credibility of the first line. It’s an “official” number, and the census and the report probably quote accurate numbers too, night? They do, but the second sentence is actually used as an escape hatch to say something that isn’t true. We don’t spend anywhere near a trillion dollars on welfare unless you mangle the term “welfare” to be meaningless, and we do reduce poverty.

First, Dylan Matthews has already dissected the claim that poverty hasn’t declined. It has. It’s just that the “official” poverty rate doesn’t factor in the earned-income tax credit or food stamps in its calculations. Given that these are two of the most direct ways that the government tries to lift people out of poverty, that’s a major problem. These programs do, in fact, lift people out of poverty--it just doesn’t show up in the official rate, because that’s how the rate is constructed.

The claim about $1 trillion on “welfare” is more interesting and complicated. It shows up in this recent report from the Cato Institute, which argues that the federal government spends $668 billion dollars per year on 126 different welfare programs (spending by the state and local governments push that figure up to $1 trillion per year).

Welfare has traditionally meant some form of “outdoor relief,” or cash, or cash-like compensation, that is given to the poor without them having to enter an institution. As the historian Michael Katz has documented, the battle over outdoor relief, has been a long one throughout our country’s history.

However, this claims says any money mostly spent on the poor is “welfare.” To give you a better sense here, the federal spending breaks down into a couple of broad categories. Only about one-third of it is actually what we think of as “welfare”:

1) Cash and cash-like programs: As Michael Linden of Center for American Progress told me, there are five big programs in the Cato list that are most analogous to what people think of as “welfare”: The refundable part of the Earned Income Tax Credit ($55 billion), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ($21 billion), Supplemental Security Income ($43.7 billion), food stamps ($75 billion), and housing vouchers ($18 billion) and the Child Tax Credit. All together, that’s around $212 billion dollars."

2) Health care: This is actually the biggest item on Cato’s list. Medicaid spends $228 billion on the non-elderly population, and children’s health insurance plan takes up another $13.5 billion. This is also roughly a third as well.

3) Opportunity-related programs: These are programs that are broadly related to opportunities, mostly in education or job-training. So you have things like Title 1 grants ($14 billion) and Head Start ($7.1 billion) in this category. But as Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Donna Pavetti notes, these programs don’t all go to poor people. For instance, Title I benefits school districts with a large share of poor children, however that money will help non-poor students attending those schools.

4) Targeted and community programs: What remains are programs designed to provide certain services to poor communities, which make up the bulk of the number of programs. Adoption assistance ($2.5 billion) and low income taxpayer clinics ($9.9 million) are two examples here.

So what should we take away from this?

--The federal government spends just $212 billion per year on what we could reasonably call “welfare.” (Even then, the poor have to enter the institution of waged labor to get the earned income tax credit.) And there have been numerous studies showing that these programs, especially things like food stamps, are both very efficient and effective at reducing poverty. They just don’t show up in the official poverty statistics, because that’s how the poverty statistics are designed.

-- Publicly funded services have never been thought of as welfare. I drive on publicly funded roads, but nobody analytically thinks of roads as belonging to category of “welfare.” If the poor take advantage of, say, a low-income taxpayer clinic, how is that welfare? Do taxpayer clinics encourage illegitimacy, dependency and idleness and other things conservatives worry about when it comes to welfare? This confuses more than it illuminates, which I imagine is the point.

Medicaid makes this very obvious. If a poor person gets access to decent health care, that’s not free money they get to spend on whatever they want. They aren’t “on the dole.”

-- The fact that Social Security and Medicare, major victories of the War on Poverty, aren’t here makes it clear something is wrong in the definition. Even though these are anti-poverty programs associated with the War on Poverty, nobody thinks of them as welfare, though they should fit this definition as well.

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--It’s interesting to see conservatives consider opportunity programs to be “welfare,” because those programs broadly involve things they say they are for. Perhaps you think these programs are good investments or perhaps you don’t, but they are a whole other conceptual category than welfare, or just giving poor people money when they need it.

It’s also interesting to see conservatives lament the sheer number of anti-poverty programs. One reason this set-up exists is because so many programs are run through nonprofit groups (a set-up that makes us unique among developed countries). But conservatives have long tended to favor this arrangement, since nonprofit groups are supposed to boost civil society and provide an antidote to the nameless, faceless Big Government bureaucrats.

Read that again: conservatives complain that we should have less welfare and more opportunity and civil society, only to turn around and also call those things “welfare” too when the time comes.

-- Perhaps some of these programs should be discontinued, or expanded, or turned into straight cash. (How about cash instead of food stamps?) But we can’t have a productive conversation unless we make it clear what the government is, and is not, doing. And it is spending a lot less on welfare than conservatives claim, and getting fantastic results for what it does spend.

Mike Konczal is a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where he focuses on financial regulation, inequality and unemployment. He writes a weekly column for Wonkblog. Follow him on Twitter here.

[Ragnar]

What the hell is "means tested welfare" ?......you can invent all the silly kochsucker arguments you want.....if an 85 year old gets Medicaid or meals on wheels, personally I am not going to measure that by an ROI factor or that the person wasn't going to find magical boot straps if they never had Medicaid. 

We could cut per capita HC spending by almost half if we chose...not with the Die Quickly nonsense kochsuckers in charge...too busy feeding gazillionaire parasites 

"A 2016 NBER paper found that Medicaid has substantial positive long-term effects on the health of recipients: "Early childhood Medicaid eligibility reduces mortality and disability and, for whites, increases extensive margin labor supply, and reduces receipt of disability transfer programs and public health insurance up to 50 years later. Total income does not change because earnings replace disability benefits."^[80] The government recoups its investment in Medicaid through savings on benefit payments later in life and greater payment of taxes because recipients of Medicaid are healthier: "The government earns a discounted annual return of between 2 and 7 percent on the original cost of childhood coverage for these cohorts, most of which comes from lower cash transfer payments."^[80]

Oregon Medicaid health experiment[edit]

Main article: Oregon Medicaid health experiment

"The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment: Evidence from the First Year," a 2011 paper by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard School of Public Health, used Oregon's 2008 decision to hold a randomized lottery for the provision of Medicaid insurance in order to measure the impact of health insurance on an individual's health and well-being. The study examined the outcomes of the 10,000 lower-income people eligible for Medicaid who were chosen by this randomized system, which helped eliminate potential bias in the data produced. The study's authors caution that the survey sample is relatively small and "estimates are therefore difficult to extrapolate to the likely effects of much larger health insurance expansions, in which there may well be supply side responses from the health care sector." Nevertheless, the study finds evidence that:^[81]

1. Hospital use increased by 30% for those with insurance, with the length of hospital stays increasing by 30% and the number of procedures increasing by 45% for the population with insurance;
2. Medicaid recipients proved more likely to seek preventive care. Women were 60% more likely to have mammograms, and recipients overall were 20% more likely to have their cholesterol checked;
3. In terms of self-reported health outcomes, having insurance was associated with an increased probability of reporting one's health as "good," "very good," or "excellent"—overall, about 25% higher than the average;
4. Those with insurance were about 10% less likely to report a diagnosis of depression.

In 2013, the same research team reported that Medicaid did not significantly improve physical health outcomes in the first two years after the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment (aka OHIE) began, but that it did "increase use of health care services, raise rates of diabetes detection and management, lower rates of depression, and reduce financial strain."^[82]"

^{https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid}

[herman]

Great catches, Lobo and Ragnar.

[PirateLT]

Agreed!

[Ragnar]

Agree what?....that weary is full of shit? There has been no "war on poverty" for a very long time....war on facts, science, the middle class, women, brown people, representative democracy...yup

[PirateLT]

I disagree.  We have spent trillions since the 60's on the 'war'  Food stamps, housing and other programs are still there. 

[Pittalum]

Yes, we have spent trillions - although I wouldn't use the term spent, redistribution is probably better.

But the 'war on poverty' isn't like cleaning up graffiti on the bridges. You aren't going to put some money into in and eliminate poverty.

The war on poverty is more like the war on weeds in your back yard. It's an ongoing maintenance program more than a fixer upper.

[PirateLT]

There is a great deal of aid for the poor to the point where it is in some case cheaper to be unemployed than get a job.

[Pittalum]

Well, there may or may not be a 'great deal of aid' available for the poor. From my perspective, who am I to say so one way or the other.

I know a number of people I'd say are poor, and I'm not so sure I'd agree that they get a great deal of help...

And I am somewhat familiar with that threshold of where it becomes better to not work than to have a job. But I think just about any means based measure becomes a little fuzzy as you near that threshold. I think that is more the nature of those types of situations, rather than a problem of them to be solved. What are you gonna do - lower the threshold? That problem would still exist, except at the lower threshold now...

[PirateLT]

There is plenty of aid for the poor.  The issue is there is little or no aid for the middle class.  Take college for example, it is the middle class families that go into debt because they make too much for aid and too little to afford college.

[Pittalum]

Is this 'cost of college' thing primarily an American phenomenon, you think, or is it the same all over the world?

[PirateLT]

Cost of college has gotten quite stupid.  I am lucky that my kid got a scholarship and I can afford to send her to the college of his choosing. It will still cost me 100K

[Pittalum]

To answer my own question, it isn't a uniquely American problem, but we certainly are not in the rather large percentage of civilized countries that do not have the problem. So, obviously there is a solution, except for the stubborn ideological roadblocks we have (also known as slicing off your nose to spite your neighbor's face)...

"Though the United States isn’t alone in its struggle with student loan debt, the level of debt incurred by student borrowers in the U.S. is unmatched by their foreign contemporaries, to the point that the growth rate in student loan debt over the past decade outpaces all other types of consumer debt. Granted, the last few years have shown a slight decrease in the rate of college tuition inflation, but that’s not enough to halt the ever increasing gap of college accessibility plaguing the U.S."

http://www.valuecolleges.com/collegecosts/

[Ragnar]

First of all it is not "trillions" , and I don't see any kochsuckers whining about trillions in corporate welfare support, second home write offs, various accelerated depreciation schemes, investment schemes in the billions etc. 

The reality is the US economy is run for the kochsuckers by the kochsuckers....1% owns 40% of the entire US wealth...and still concentrating even further. 

Rwingers are just bunch of fucking whiners with the sickness of insatiable greed. 

[I-think4me]

To answer my own question, it isn't a uniquely American problem, but we certainly are not in the rather large percentage of civilized countries that do not have the problem. So, obviously there is a solution, except for the stubborn ideological roadblocks we have (also known as slicing off your nose to spite your neighbor's face)...

------------------
The sad thing is that the very ppl putting up those ideological roadblocks benefited from a higher education system that was heavily funded at the state level.

State appropriations for public higher education have just faced another tough year. And yet, public institutions have faced many such years over the past three decades. Despite steadily growing student demand for higher education since the mid-1970s, state fiscal investment in higher education has been in retreat in the states since about 1980.

In fact, it is headed for zero.
Based on the trends since 1980, average state fiscal support for higher education will reach zero by 2059, although it could happen much sooner in some states and later in others. Public higher education is gradually being privatized.

http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/state-funding-a-race-to-the-bottom.aspx

[Ragnar]

In other words, Baby Boomer parents supported reasonable cost college education....the selfish boomers returned the favor by fucking over their own children and grandchildren...way to go sickos. 

[herman]

<<< There is plenty of aid for the poor. >>>

You don't know that as a fact, pirate.

<<< The issue is there is little or no aid for the middle class. >>>

Possibly.  The larger and more long-term issue is WHY the middle class needs assistance now.

<<< Take college for example, it is the middle class families that go into debt because they make too much for aid and too little to afford college. >>>

New York State currently has legislation meant to address this issue - at least in part - tuition-free college for students whose parents make under $125,000. ($100,000 for the first year or two, then it's upped to $125,000.)

[PirateLT]

I suggest you research all the programs for the poor.  Start with HUD>

[herman]

I suggest you back up your claim.

I don't do others' homework/substantiation.

And be honest, Pirate:  There's no way you're an expert - much the less the definitive expert - on programs for all of "the poor".  When you make a generalization such as "There is plenty of aid for the poor", you open yourself to the logical reply:  "You don't know that for a fact."

So, let's stop quibbling about this.  Why don't you address these points I've made:

<<< The issue is there is little or no aid for the middle class. >>>

Possibly.  The larger and more long-term issue is why the middle class needs assistance NOW.

<<< Take college for example, it is the middle class families that go into debt because they make too much for aid and too little to afford college. >>>

New York State currently has legislation meant to address this issue - at least in part - tuition-free college for students whose parents make under $125,000. ($100,000 for the first year or two, then it's upped to $125,000.)

[Ragnar]

Apparently matey is confused on the concept that the middle class only increases if the impoverished class decreases 

[I-think4me]

In other words, Baby Boomer parents supported reasonable cost college education....the selfish boomers returned the favor by fucking over their own children and grandchildren...way to go sickos.

------------
The baby boomer generation brag about pulling themselves up by their boot straps, while their boot straps were provided by taxpayers, and those "snowflakes" they love to demean will be funding their retirement and medical for decades.

[Ragnar]

Boomers were the beneficiaries of the greatest prosperity for the greatest number of people ever, courtesy of the New Deal, the protection of unionism, and a tax structure that benefited the majority of Americans.....higher education was inexpensive and jobs plentiful. weasel anus ryan was the beneficiary of SS benefits because his father passed away while he was young......(technically not a boomer, but you get the idea) 

The white yahoos thought they did that, but it was really the pain of the 30s that brought about those policies. ...just brats that had great advantages, not a clue why they had such easy lives,  and now they have ushered in fascism. ....the Greatest Generation followed by the worst

[PirateLT]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/356317/welfare-better-deal-work-michael-tanner

[PirateLT]

Baby Boomers are  the Locust Generation

[Ragnar]

Very good Pirate 

[PirateLT]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/baby-boomers-ruined-america-according-to-this-generation-x-author-2017-03-10?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo