Episode 28: The Good News Poverty Report Trump’s Budget Would Erase

39 min readSep 16, 2017

Good news from the Census Bureau — and how Trump’s budget could undo it, a look at the “second disaster” that follows disasters like hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and the latest zombie GOP effort to repeal the ACA. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

This week the Census Bureau released its annual snapshot of poverty, health insurance, and income in the United States, and poverty is finally back to pre-recession levels. But this good news comes amid a political climate where any progress could quickly be erased. Jared Bernstein, a fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the former Chief Economist for Vice President Joe Biden, joins the show to unpack the new Census data — and how much is at stake under the Trump agenda. Next up, Tracey Ross, an expert on disaster recovery at PolicyLink’s All-In Cities Initiative, explains why low-income communities and communities of color are hardest hit by natural disasters. And lastly, Rebecca is joined by Andy Slavitt, former senior healthcare official in the Obama administration, for the odds on the GOP’s latest Hail Mary attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

This week’s guests:

Jared Bernstein, fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the former Chief Economist for Vice President Joe Biden
Tracey Ross, Associate Director of PolicyLink’s All-In Cities Initiative
Andy Slavitt, senior advisor at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former administrator of the Centers on Medicare and Medicaid Services

For more on this week’s topics:

Read Jared’s and Rebecca’s articles on the Census Bureau’s snapshot of poverty, health insurance, and income in the US
And the press release from the Census Bureau
Tracey Ross’ op-ed on the “second disaster” facing hurricane victims
for live updates on ACA repeal follow Andy Slavitt!
Check out Sarah Kliff’s explainer on Graham-Cassidy

This program aired on September 15, 2017.

Transcript:

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. This week I sat in for Thom Hartmann on The Thom Hartmann Program and this week for Off Kilter we are bringing you a few of the conversations I had. Let’s take a listen.

I am pleased to be joined to discuss some news out of the U.S. Census Bureau this week. This week the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual snapshot of poverty, of health insurance, and of incomes in the United States. And following 2015’s historic gains, 2016 was another banner year on all three fronts. Poverty is now finally back to pre-recession levels, median income is up and the share of Americans without health coverage has continued to decline, reaching a new record low of 8.8%. All of this out earlier this week from the U.S. Census Bureau. So clearly a good news report, but all this good news obviously comes amid a political climate where it could quickly be erased. Joining me on the phone right now to discuss what this means and what’s at stake for Americans struggling to make ends meet in this country is Jared Bernstein. He is a fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He’s also the former chief economist for Vice President Joe Biden. You can follow him on Twitter @EconJared and you can read his blog at www.jaredbernsteinblog.com where he makes wonkery lots of fun. Jared, thanks so much for joining the show. Do I have Jared? So trying to get Jared on the line thanks for staying with us —

JARED BERNSTEIN: Yeah, I think you have me now.

VALLAS: There we go, Jared we can hear your lovely, wonderful voice. Jared, thanks so much for joining me this morning. So as I was saying at the top, clearly a good news report out of Census, lots of good news on the poverty rate now reaching actually pre-recession levels for the first time that we’ve seen that. Incomes up, health insurance coverage now at record highs. So 2016 what another good news year all around on the heels of 2015, what’s driving this progress?

BERNSTEIN: Well the tightening labor market of course plays an important role. The unemployment rate last year, 2016 was a little bit below 5%, we were creating about 180,000 jobs per month, that’s a good clip and in fact one of the things we saw pretty clearly in the data is that more people went to work, went into the labor market and many people shift from part time to more full time work and that would increase their annual income, boosting both middle class incomes and lower poverty. This is an important theme that you and I have discussed and I know it’s one that looms large for you and this is the idea that when people have access to gainful, remunerative employment opportunities, I’m talking about low income people, they will take advantage of them. And so too often the poverty debate, especially from the conservative side focuses exclusively on people themselves as if they don’t have a job, they don’t want a job. More often than not, especially if we’re talking about able bodied working age people, they very much want and need employment but the demand side of the equation, the availability of good jobs is left out. So that improved a bit in 2016.

VALLAS: So what role do we think that state and local minimum wage increases that we’ve seen over the past couple of years which we know drove a lot of the progress in the 2015 historic gains on poverty and on income that we saw Census report last year. What do we think that state and local minimum wage increases had to do with the gains that we’ve continued to see into 2016?

BERNSTEIN: Well these data only came out earlier this week and we’re still parsing some of those kinds of questions but we have seen consistently that states which raise their minimum wage above the federal level, the federal level is stuck at $7.25 of course and has been there for many years now, those states tend to show greater wage increases for low wage workers. That’s kind of intuitive and since they don’t really have much of a negative impact on employment availability, they tend to boost people’s income as well so you’ve got people working more employment, more hours typically at higher wages. And so I suspect that when we crunch the number we’ll find that poverty reductions have been significant in place that raised their minimum wages.

VALLAS: Now obviously when it comes to health insurance, it’s hard to have a conversation about progress when it comes to health insurance rates now reaching record highs without mentioning the Affordable Care Act which Republicans are not quite done trying to repeal. We’ll be talking about that later in the show with Andy Slavitt. But I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about what you view as kind of the flip side of the story from Census? We’ve got all of this good news but it isn’t because of decisions that we’re seeing under the Trump administration or from even really the Republicans in congress. It’s all good news left over from the Obama years, isn’t it?

BERNSTEIN: No question. And remember, these data are for 2016 so we were blissfully unaware of a Trump presidency back then, for most of those months. And so yeah, the Affordable Care Act, it’s fingerprints are unquestionably on one particular variable that we look at every year in this report and that is the share of Americans who are uninsured. That share was about 15% before the ACA went into effect, as of this report last year it was below 9%, 8.8%. That’s the lowest level on record. So you can say what you want about the ACA and I myself have some criticisms, some ways that we could get under the hood and improve the performance of the Affordable Care Act. But one thing everybody has to acknowledge, if they’re dealing in facts which of course not everybody is, is that it has been instrumental in lowering the share of Americans without coverage to the lowest level on record.

VALLAS: So one of the things that I personally have expected given that it wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen it from this president is for Donald Trump, despite what you just said about the fact that all of these gains, all of this good news is actually due to policy decisions that pre-date his being sworn in as president. I’m still kind of expecting him to try to take credit for this good news report. I haven’t seen him do it yet, I don’t know if you’ve seen that happen but in fact what I believe that these data end up actually showing us and I’ll say let’s not get the balloons out just yet or pop any corks because what I view these data as telling us is actually not just that we know what works when it comes to cutting poverty, boosting incomes, making sure people have health insurance but actually that all of those gains are incredibly precarious because of the political climate that we’re in and the decisions that if Trump gets his way and if Republicans in congress get their way with for example, their budgets, we’re actually going to see a lot of these gains erased. Some analysis just came out of the Center for American Progress where I work in my day job as it were, finding that if three, just three of the cuts that Donald Trump proposed in his budget released earlier this year had become law. Cuts to nutrition assistance, cuts to energy assistance and actually the rollback of Medicaid expansion and what that would mean for rising out of pocket health insurance costs. 2.3 million more Americans would’ve been poor in 2015, the latest year for which data are available. So really a stark fine point to put what’s at stake here. What are you viewing as what the American people need to be seeing when they think about what’s at stake here and how it plays in with the ongoing budget fight that I’d like to talk to you more about throughout this hour.

BERNSTEIN: Well I stipulate everything you just said and in fact my main theme when I was writing up the results from these data that we’ve been discussing was there’s some momentum in the underlying economy and there are a set of ideas out there that could really push back the wrong way against this momentum. So there are kind of a couple of dynamics worth getting into here. One, I mentioned in my answer to your first question. You asked what are the economic underpinnings of these good results and I talked about the solid labor market. And I’ve noted in your comments today that you’re conscious of this as well. I think it’s actually possible to overinterpret how positive these results are. They definitely are moving things in the right direction but I like to take things in the longer historical context and if you actually look, you made this point. The poverty rate is back to where it was in 2007. OK, in 2007, these are 2016 data so that would be 9 years before, the economy has grown a lot over those nine years and you might ask why is our poverty rate back to just where they were? Why aren’t they lower? Let’s not be a victim of diminished expectations here. Median household income grew sharply over the last two years and I was very glad to see that. It took it back to about the same level it was in 2007, and that’s about the same level it was in the year 2000. So you’re talking about a decade and a half where people in the middle class have been kind of struggling to get ahead. So let’s not conflate a couple of good years with some sort of reversal, a set of structural underlying problems in the U.S. economy that continues to channel growth, even in these data by the way, pretty aggressively to the top of the income scale. Regarding your policy points, the last thing you’d want to do is to screw up the momentum we have right now with policies that reverse some of the very factors that are helping to generate these outcomes. So you mentioned cutting Medicaid. So cutting the heck out of Medicaid, repealing the Affordable Care Act, I mean my last comment, I told you about the progress we’ve made against uninsurance with the ACA and we know for a fact as for the CBO scores on this that the Republican plan would absolutely make that worse.

VALLAS: So I’m going to stop you right there because plenty of time to discuss throughout this hour what these data mean and what we’re actually watching when it comes to the budget and tax fight.

Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. This week I sat in for Thom Hartmann on The Thom Hartmann Program and this week for Off Kilter we are bringing you a few of the conversations I had. Let’s take a listen.

We were just talking before the break about the new Census data finding that poverty is now back to pre-recession levels, a welcome piece of good news. Incomes are now up, health insurance also at record highs and we were also talking about how much of that is actually at stake given the policies that President Trump and his friends in congress are looking to ram through and this is a particularly timely conversation given that Trump and Republicans in congress are now seeking to pivot to what they’re calling quote, “tax reform” and I’m putting that in big scare quotes there because what they’re really talking about is giving massive tax cuts to billionaires so they can buy a second yacht. Would love to hear you talk a little bit about what you see as the road ahead in that fight.

BERNSTEIN: I’m pretty careful not to call it tax reform because that sounds like something good and useful. In fact, it’s an old Washington trick. You say I would to reform Social Security so that means I want to cut it. In fact, in this case reform, again, means cuts, tax cuts. If you look at the plans, they’ve outlined so far and this was actually an interesting wrinkle because it actually is no tax plan yet. All we have are a number of ideas that have been put forth. But we can score those ideas. Things like eliminating the estate tax which is a tax that falls only on the top .2% of the richest estates. Getting rid of the alternative minimum tax, a tax that makes sure that people with, wealthy people with tons of eliminations and deductions have to pay something. Cutting the corporate tax rate by more than half, giving some goodies to multinational corporations. If you total these all up as you suggested, the vast majority of these benefits flow to those at the top of the scale. If you look at the share of the tax cuts going to the top 20% it’s about 70%. If you look at the share going to the middle class it’s a couple of percents. And by the way, this ties into something we were talking about before. What you really should do since these tax cuts are all going to, not all but are largely going to go onto the deficit, at some point congress is going to say, we have to cut spending to pay for the tax cuts. You know they’re not going to say we’re going to raise taxes so they’re just going to say we have to cut spending to pay for the tax cuts. Well who’s that going to hurt? Middle class and poor people again because those are the programs, the spending cuts, will undermine the programs they depend on. So it’s really a double whammy for economically vulnerable families.

VALLAS: So obviously a lot of this gets very technical. I want to actually unpack a lot of this in English and I’m glad I have you for the full hour this hour because I’d like to get into some of those details. But I think what I hear you saying is there is something of a shell game going on here. Either Republicans are going to try to ram through tax cuts for the absolute richest people in this country and possible also corporations on the backs of low income people directly through cuts to those programs to pay for those tax cuts. Or they’re going to engage in some kind of a shell game where they’re doing the tax cuts now, running up the deficit and coming back to us later to say, “Oops, we can’t afford all of these programs, it looks like now we need to cut them.” Am I getting that right Jared Bernstein?

BERNSTEIN: Yeah it’s that latter part that I think is really the play here. I think that the Republican playbook is not at all that simple and doesn’t require a Ph.D in economics to unpack at all. In fact, it may be that if you had a Ph.D in economics it’s harder to see it than it should be.

VALLAS: And you’ve got the Ph.D so we’ll be back with Jared Bernstein right after another short break.

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What’s going on with the budget and tax fight gearing up in congress? Republicans like to call it tax reform and Jared, you were explaining why you never like to call it tax reform because that’s not what it is at all, it’s actually about millionaire and billionaire tax giveaways, possibly also massive tax giveaways to corporations. But I’d love to do is to actually have you help us understand what lies ahead in the weeks and months ahead of us as Republicans try to, as you were describing before the break, sort of use something of a shell game to either directly pay for these tax cuts on the backs of low and moderate income Americans through massive cuts to nutrition assistance, Social Security and everything else, or potentially to try to kick the can down the road, pay for it with massively jacking up the deficit and then come back, as you were explaining and say, “Oops, we can’t afford all of this spending, now we need to cut Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and more.” How are we going to watch them do that in the weeks and months ahead?

BERNSTEIN: Well right now they’re doing kind of a couple things simultaneously. One, is they’re going through some of the budget machinations they need in order to have their tax cuts without a filibuster. So this is an arcane process rule that would enable Democrats in the Senate to block the tax cut. There’s a process called reconciliation that enables them to get around that so they’re kind of writing these process rules that will enable them to do that, I suspect they’ll complete that in a few weeks. At the same time, they’re putting together a tax plan which somewhat remarkably for all the talk you’ve heard about it, they really don’t have a plan. Trump goes and gives a speech about the great tax plan, there is no tax plan. As I mentioned, there are a bunch of component parts, many of them look pretty terrible to me in ways I’ve discussed. But they have to put their tax plan together and while they’re doing that I think one of the things that listeners really need to be made aware of if they’re not already is that they’re really trying to sell this as an upside down version of what it is. They’re kind of looking in the looking glass here and trying to sell the opposite of what they’re actually putting together. They’re selling this as something that will really help working people. And in fact, just this morning Trump was on TV saying that well if we cut the corporate tax rate by more than half, from 35 to 15%, that’s going to create a bunch of jobs for middle class people. Well this is the old supply side, trickle down fairy dust and it really never works. What you end up with is more after tax inequality and less government revenues in much the ways we’ve been discussing.

VALLAS: Well and actually we’ve got a caller who’s right on that topic so I’m going to try and bring in Chad here from Lakewood, Washington. Chad, you are on the air with me and Jared Bernstein, Chad go ahead.

CHAD (CALLER): Thank you very much Rebecca. I just, it blows my mind when people blame the poor when the poor are so disenfranchised. If you earn say $50,000 in a given year, $7 of that is perhaps going to SNAP, welfare, but $4,000 is going to corporate subsidies.

VALLAS: Your reaction, Jared.

BERNSTEIN: Yeah, the caller is tuning into something that is not only really important but really underappreciated. Conservatives have been very successful at focusing on the parts of government that redistribute income to low income people. But of course there’s massive upward redistribution. Much of it occurs through the tax code, and we’ve actually talked about some of it. So if you’re a foreign corporation, you don’t have to pay taxes on your earnings abroad. You can just keep them and that keep is in quotes, you can just “keep” them overseas and not pay any U.S. taxes on them at all. And the reason that “keep” is in quotes is because there are all kinds of games you can play to book them abroad while you have access to them here. That’s just one example. But there are many more ways in which we upwardly redistribute income just as the caller suggested.

VALLAS: And Jared, I feel like we would be remiss in this conversation if we didn’t also bust the myth that somehow massively slashing taxes for the wealthiest in this country also is something that creates jobs. That’s something we’ve heard from Republicans for generations, it’s the old trickle down economics canard. But we need to look no further than Kansas for exhibit A on why that’s a myth. What happened in Kansas and why should we learn from that Jared?

BERNSTEIN: Well it’s an interesting comparison because some of the same actual people, same folks who helped craft the Trump tax plan wrote the tax plan for Kansas and sold it to Governor Brownback out there and it was precisely the kind of trickle down fairy dust that I was trying to disabuse a few minutes ago. The idea was significant cuts in tax rates, they opened up a big loophole so if you have a passthrough business you don’t have to pay any taxes on that at all. It’s a particular type of small business. Well guess what, 100,000 people decided that suddenly they had passthrough businesses because that’s what you do when you can get a big tax break like that. At any rate, after a few years, none of the economic growth effects that were supposed to happen right away. Not of them appeared at all and in fact if anything, Kansas did worse than surrounding states. And of course they were hemorrhaging revenue. Their bond rating had been downgraded twice and the Republican legislature, you know they’re not liberals out there. The Republican legislature cancelled most of the tax cuts, closed that big loophole because they were starting to cut services that actually mean something to people out there like their educational services. They have a good education system there and they’re proud of it and they were starting to undermine it with these foolish tax cuts.

VALLAS: But as you described that’s exactly how we’re going to hear President Trump and his colleagues in congress try to sell his package really as you’ve said, the reverse of what it is. As though it’s supposed to help working families when what it’s really actually is a big box wrapped up in a bow of everything that corporations and the wealthy want for Christmas, or Hannukah. I’m going to bring in another caller who actually wants to talk about Keynesian economics, that’s what happens here on The Thom Hartmann Program, you get lovely nerds. And we’ve got Justin you’re live with Jared Bernstein.

JUSTIN (CALLER): Hi, Jared how are you doing today. Now I’ve looked in the past and I’ve taken a look at GDP and GDP goes from 6 to 4 under Keynesian, and we’ve had spikes that go up to 11 or 12 which brings our GDP much closer and that sort of stuff makes much more jobs, be able to bring manufacturing back and that sort of stuff so I’m wondering why Keynesian has been tossed to the side.

VALLAS: Jared, your thoughts.

BERNSTEIN: I think it’s very much an ideological reason. I was working for the Obama administration the last time we did a very significant Keynesian stimulus package to push back against the Great Recession. And it was actually fast acting and pretty effective. And nothing’s perfect but it certainly helped pull forward a recovery that began in the second half of 2009 so this was actually score 1 for Keynesian economic policy. But that involves a government sector spending resources, typically adding to the deficit, at least temporarily. And if it’s a part of your core ideology that anything government does doesn’t work and makes things worse well then of course you’re going to assail Keynesian economics which has a prominent role for temporary government spending to offset the kind of demand contractions that happen in an economy like ours. So it’s really a discrediting effort, not based on facts but based on this theme that we’ve been talking about throughout our discussion. Shrink government, give the proceeds to the rich. That’s very much part of this.

VALLAS: Which your think tank, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Jared, has termed Robin Hood in reverse which is very much what we’re watching with this fight around the budget and what they’re calling tax reform. Justin from Sellersville, Pennsylvania, thanks so much for joining The Thom Hartmann Program. I’m going to bring in next Adam from New Orleans, Louisiana, he wants to talk about unemployment and also Medicare for All. Adam you’re live with Jared Bernstein on The Thom Hartmann Program.

ADAM (CALLER): Hi, thank you for taking my call. And the question actually more of a global economy kind of question. So how much unemployment and what kind of impact on most of the European economies will actually occur if Medicare for All actually moves forward? When I think of transfer pricing associated from the pharmaceutical industry and how much cash is being literally sucked out of the United States into European economies. I am, a number of people that are actually employed in medical related industries, this can’t be done overnight. It really has to be a very measured practice and just historically and anecdotally. My uncle held the patents on GPS location technology that would’ve enabled top automation of black box technology, elimination of air traffic controllers, the government said no. So many people will be unemployed. So what is, how does this play out?

VALLAS: A lot wrapped up in there but thank you Adam for that, Jared do you have any thoughts in response?

BERNSTEIN: So first of all let me refer folks to a piece that I put up this morning on The Washington Post, the Post Everything section. It’s about Bernie’s plan for Medicare for All plan and I recommend that to you to get my views on this. I take the caller’s point. He raised a lot of things, let me just focus on one. We’re not getting to universal coverage quickly if at all but quickly. And the reason is, as the caller mentioned there are many stakeholders between here and there. But if you actually look at the plan Sanders put forth, it has a nice bit of modularity built into it. That is, it can be broken down and viewed as creating a path, and perhaps as the caller suggested a long term transitional path to something more universal. And the way to start is to allow certain groups to buy into Medicare, could be Medicaid but I think Medicare is probably better in that regard. To buy into Medicare so you might have kids as part of that group or you might take the eligibility ages from 65 down to 60 or 55, changes like that. And you make that available option in say the exchanges as part of the Affordable Care Act. That plants a seed that if properly maintained could I think in a transitional sense move us in that direction in a way that would be far less disruptive but I do think one has to be mindful of path dependency, kind of where we are and where we’re going to try to get.

VALLAS: Thanks so much for your call Adam. I’m going to go to one more call, it’s Robert, he’s calling in from Mission Viejo in California. Robert you are on, oh, I think I’ve lost Robert there. So we’ll go instead to Charles from Opa Locka, Florida. Charles you’re on with Jared Bernstein.

CHARLES (CALLER): Hey, how are you doing Mr. Bernstein.

BERNSTEIN: Good.

CHARLES: My question is this because I live in the south as well, I live in Miami, Florida. I don’t see any industry that employs people on the wholesale. In fact we live in a right to work state. Is this border wall sort of like a confederacy employment program? Because it’s only going to red states and these red states are (inaudible) than the blue states.

VALLAS: An interesting question, so if I’m understanding what you’re asking Charles, you’re sort of asking is Trump’s idea for a border wall something of what he’s viewing as an economic southern strategy? Jared, I don’t know if you have any thoughts there.

BERNSTEIN: No, I don’t think it’s any kind of any economic strategy, I think it’s much more a xenophobia or anti-immigration strategy, trying to signal to his base that he wants to keep people out who he’s created as a kind of a bad guy in this scenario. I do think the absence of industry in places like you’re talking about and I hope you’re safe given the floods down there. I do think the absence of industry is really important and in fact one of the things that I think would help would be to think about a jobs guarantee program. That is if the private sector isn’t creating enough gainful employment for all comers. And it’s interesting, we started this conversation saying that low income people want to work. Able bodied low income people want to work, they can’t possibly get by on what we offer them in poverty programs but they also face insufficient labor demand. That is not enough job opportunities. So when the private sector doesn’t deliver them then the public sector should and I think that would be a very useful solution to explore to help solve this problem.

VALLAS: Thank you so much for your call Charles, and we’ll now go to Mike, he is calling from Niagara Falls, New York. Mike you are on with Jared Bernstein.

Mike, you’re live, your question please.

MIKE (CALLER): I had a question about student loans and how Mr. Bernstein feels about the possibility of restoring bankruptcy protections for the student loan system. There’s currently a bill in the House awaiting more co-sponsorship, H.R. 2366 which would do exactly that. And you know you hear a lot about, you don’t really hear a lot from this administration yet on student debt. (INAUDIBLE) taking away some of Obama’s initiatives to help student debt and I’m from a group called StudentLoans (INAUDIBLE) dot org, and we really feel like bankruptcy protections would start to fix the system that has become essentially predatory.

VALLAS: And you note that this administration hasn’t done much, I would argue they’ve actually started to at least make proposals that are incredibly damaging including taking away and making deep cuts to certain programs in Trump’s budget, at least that’s what he’d like to do if it becomes law that help people afford higher education but Jared you were about to jump in.

BERNSTEIN: I’m very much with the caller on this point. I support what he’s talking about there because we basically tell people that if you want to be a player in today’s global economy, you better go to college. And then we make it incredibly hard for anyone who’s not in the top 5 or 10% to do so. So that kind of a mixed message is not just bad policy and bad politics, it’s bad economics. We really want human capital so let’s not make it harder for people to invest in themselves. Let’s make it easier. It’s virtually impossible to (INAUDIBLE) off a student loan even if you’re unable to pay it. I very much support and even had some of my own fingerprints involved on the Obama income based repayment ideas. Which scale your loan service into your incomes and adjust accordingly. I think that makes a lot of sense.

VALLAS: Mike, thank you for what your organization does, really appreciate it and obviously share the sentiment that Jared just shared.

Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

Welcome to Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. This week I sat in for Thom Hartmann on The Thom Hartmann Program and this week for Off Kilter we are bringing you a few of the conversations I had. Let’s take a listen.

I’m excited in this next segment to talk about a topic that is close to my heart and that is the impact of disaster, natural disasters, climate events on particularly low income communities and communities of color. Once the images fade from the news and the conversations around Hurricanes Harvey and Irma tapers off, I’m quoting here, communities risk what some call the second disaster, a recovery and rebuilding process that leaves behind those most in need. So writes Tracey Ross, my next guest in an op-ed for Think Progress. Tracey is an expert on disaster recovery, she’s also Associate Director of the All-In Cities Initiative at Policy Link. She’s also a dear friend, Tracey, thank you so much for joining the show.

TRACEY ROSS: Thanks for having me Rebecca. It’s fun to be reunited with you on the radio airwaves.

VALLAS: It is a little reunion, you’re also I didn’t say this but my former co-host on what used to be “Talk Poverty Radio” before it became Off Kilter show so nice to have you on the radio where we belong together. But so what is this so-called second disaster that you’re talking about facing the victims of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma?

ROSS: Sure so I should start out by saying you know that I’ve been writing about this for years and researching the impact of natural disasters and extreme whether events in general, like extreme heat on low income communities of color in particular. And so I’ve been heartened by the fact that this has been a lot more coverage than I’d seen in recent years about how these storms impact low income communities and communities of color in terms of just the actual impact of the event. The fact that low income people have housing that cannot withstand these sorts of storms. They tend to live close to environmental hazards. This sort of thing. But what is not really being discussed all too often is this, like I describe in the piece, the second disaster which is the rebuilding process. And that’s something that’s going to be months if not years. We’ve been seeing a lot of coverage, understandably about Hurricane Irma, but the news around Hurricane Harvey has left many people in the dark about what’s going on there now and we call this a second disaster because low-income people, people of color are often left out of the rebuilding process. We saw this in New Orleans following Katrina that as rebuilding efforts were taken under consideration, communities of color weren’t part of the discussion, housing assistance tends to favor homeowners over renters, so there’s a variety of ways that just rebuilding a city, low income people and people of color are pushed deeper into poverty and we see a reinforcement of the inequities they experience year round.

VALLAS: So there’s been some really tragic news reports including some that haven’t gotten nearly enough attention such as slumlords continuing to charge their tenants even though they’ve been forced to evacuate buildings that are no longer actually habitable and even serving people eviction notices when they don’t pay their rent that I would argue and I think most people in their right mind would argue they shouldn’t be forced to pay now that they’ve actually had to leave their building for safety reasons. Lots of terrible stuff going on in terms of how this is playing out now as the media coverage starts to subside but you’re bringing up Hurricane Katrina which in many ways educated folks about the harder impact, the more devastating impact that you mentioned on low income and communities of color for the reasons that you describe but as we start to think about this second disaster and how we might actually be able to prevent it with these storms, what is it that we should be learning from Hurricane Katrina so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past?

ROSS: Sure so, Hurricane Katrina obviously was a wakeup call for the country and I think we have to balance the need for immediate response with very thoughtful and careful planning. My organization PolicyLink, we did a lot of work at the time, we actually set up an office in New Orleans following the rebuilding process and so have learned a lot about that. And we really advocate for equitable rebuilding and that’s centering the needs of communities, making sure that we’re taking into account the economic and social disparities that already exist throughout the region, making sure that we promote what we call triple bottom line investments and that’s ensuring that as you’re working with rebuilders and contractors that there’s community benefits, financial returns and environmental sustainability within the process. And meaningful community participation. That was left out of the rebuilding in Katrina and as a result what we see is that there were a lot of out of state contractors that were in charge of a lot of the rebuilding efforts so that meant that a lot of money was going out of the community. You saw that a lot of the labor on those projects were people who were being exploited. A lot of undocumented immigrants who need access to jobs, still have actually not been paid for the work that they did following Katrina. We also know that a lot of the rebuilding prioritized mixed income housing which is important but the storm itself, it wiped out a significant number of public housing and affordable housing units. And when those weren’t able to return we saw a high spike in the cost of rent. For a two bedroom apartment, within a couple of years, rent raised at least 40% on average. And so the rebuilding process, it prioritized coming back quickly, but it didn’t prioritize coming back smartly and equitably. So there was a missed opportunity for ensuring that all people were going to benefit in the process. So today there’s about 100,000 fewer black residents in New Orleans. The city’s population has returned to about 90% of the pre-Katrina levels, but in the lower 9th ward which we know is the hardest hit, only about 40% of residents have been able to return. A part of that reason is when they were allocating funding for rebuilding efforts, they gave homeowners funding based on home values rather than the costs of repairs and we know in a history of our country in terms of segregation and housing and connections between housing values and race, the people in lower 9th ward were shortchanged on average of about $75,000 of what they needed. So all of this could’ve been avoiding if there was a more equitable rebuilding process. And that’s something that the communities throughout Florida and Houston have an ability to do. It’s not only the smart thing to do, it’s the moral thing but it’s also the economical thing because we’re talking about places where the majority of residents in these hard hit areas are people of color and if they’re left out of the rebuilding process, that’s going to have ramifications on the future workforce and the future of the strength of these local economies.

VALLAS: Now I’m actually going to go to a quick call here that’s very much on topic. We’ve got Peter who’s been waiting on the line from Lakeland, Florida. Peter, go ahead you are on the air with Tracey Ross.

PETER (CALLER): Hey, just a few things. First of all, I think any title with poverty in America is the perfect title because nobody talks about it. One of which is about the people in the national media that couldn’t believe that people weren’t leaving Florida. It takes a lot of money to evacuate Florida. You’re going to figure $300 a night in hotels, plus gas, plus meals. But more importantly, in Houston we’re seeing it right now. All the evictions, we hear it’s probably going to be $100 billion between Florida and Texas. Now here’s the million dollar question, all these evictions, when people lose their jobs for four or five months, does any of that money go to help them pay rent? Does it help people who have the morgage on the house to have the renters in? Does any of that money trickle down or are they going to get evicted as the banks can eventually seal the houses. I mean these are all questions that aren’t being asked in the national media so I’m asking you guys.

VALLAS: Peter, thank you so much for your call and Tracey do you want to respond?

ROSS: Sure and I just want to say Peter’s comments were spot on. Particularly I wanted to just touch on before I respond to the question at the end about the complications that there are in evacuating. One of the important data tools that my organization puts out is the national equity atlas and you can go on and look at data, your particular area. For Houston, we have some measures on access to cars. And a place like Houston which is very spread out, sprawling area, black people often do not have access to cars. About 20% do not. And that makes it really complicated to evacuate. And so being able to anticipate the need for evacuations is going to be really important for these coastal cities as climate change is going to ensure that these quote unquote, “storms of the century” are part of the new normal. So I really appreciate Peter bringing up that point. In terms of these slumlords who are evicting and taking advantage of this situation, it’s really going to be incumbent upon the states as they are receiving funding from the federal government to ensure that they are targeting renters and people who are living within the shelters. Because there are few protections at this time. It’s a very complicated situation, now only for renters but for wage workers. There’s more protections for people earning a salary than for people earning a wage so low income people, and I shouldn’t even just say low income people, I do want to acknowledge the fact that this storm is impacting people of all backgrounds, we just know that it’s exacerbating the impact on low and moderate income people. So those who are renting, specifically, they are in a precarious situation. Same with the low wage workers. So it’s really going to be on states to address this. Unfortunately people are going to be getting away with taking advantage of this and that’s why it’s really important for local politicians, the state government to really step up and address these populations quickly.

VALLAS: And as you said, Tracey it’s not about this being, and we’re certainly not trying to say these storms are only impacting low income people or communities of color. Obviously storms are impacting people of all stripes. But what you said, I think really bears repeating which is that these storms, and we saw this with Hurricane Katrina as well, they really, compound existing inequities that already are out there for all the reasons you’ve laid out and I feel we would be remiss if we didn’t also acknowledge the disproportionate impact on people with disabilities and seniors as well. We saw the awful news reports about 8 people dying in a Florida nursing home. They couldn’t get out and they had no A/C and literally died, those news reports just breaking today. Don’t go away more with Tracey Ross about the fallout from the Hurricanes after this.

[MUSIC]

I’m Rebecca Vallas sitting in for Thom and I’ve been speaking with Tracey Ross who runs the All in Cities Initiative at an organization called PolicyLink based out in California. She’s an expert on disaster recovery and in particular we’ve been talking about how natural disasters impact low income communities and communities of color harder than really pretty much anybody else. Tracey, something I feel isn’t getting nearly enough attention in the last few minutes that I have with you is that President Trump’s proposed budget, released earlier this year actually proposed slashing funds for disaster recovery. So if his budget were the law of the land, not only would we see poverty higher, incomes lower, health insurance really wiped away across the book as we’ve been talking about throughout this show, but we would also see a less prepared nation when it comes to these kinds of disasters.

ROSS: Yeah and you know it’s not surprising I guess, given the agenda he’s been rolling out since day 1. But it is particularly frustrating just because the Obama administration did a lot of work around resilience and recovery, did a lot of work working with state, local and tribal governments and I’ve been very optimistic about the direction we’ve been going in terms of the federal government being able to be a good partner in this work and be able to help localities take preventative measures. Unfortunately this is, Trump’s actions are in step with everything that he’s been doing and I think it’s important also to point out that everything else he said too, he’s cutting measures related to important poverty programs, the Republican congress has proposed cuts for, every congress to cut SNAP and other programs that also are important disaster relief programs because following a disaster, SNAP actually funds disaster SNAP. So for those not familiar this is essentially what we would refer to as food stamps. So we get our disaster food snaps from the general SNAP budget. Same with unemployment assistance. And so this just is not surprising, it’s unfortunate especially because this administration won’t acknowledge the fact that climate change is part of the new normal and it’s fueling these events. So it’s not surprising but I will say that I have been heartened by the fact that so many leaders across the country, local leaders signing onto their own letters saying that they will enact some of the components of the Paris Climate Accords, becoming stronger on resilience efforts. We saw in Philadelphia they have some of the best storm water runoff and green infrastructure measures in place that help prevent flooding and other disaster related aftermath that we’ve seen in other places. So while Trump is not helping the situation, he’s making things worse, local leaders are stepping up.

VALLAS: Well Tracey Ross is the Associate Director of the All in Cities Initiative at PolicyLink. She wrote a piece that you can find at ThinkProgress.org on this second disaster that low income communities and communities of color are unfortunately going to be at risk of facing in the fallout from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma if we don’t actually learn from the mistakes we saw policymakers make in the days of Hurricane Katrina. You can follow Tracey Ross on Twitter @TraceyLRoss. She’s worth a follow because she’s pretty funny on twitter, also in real life. Miss you Tracey, let’s talk soon.

ROSS: Absolutely, let’s talk soon.

VALLAS: Don’t go away, more Off Kilter after the break, I’m Rebecca Vallas.

[MUSIC]

I’m Rebecca Vallas sitting in for Thom Hartmann who is out today and I’m so pleased to be joined by Andy Slavitt, he is a former Obama official who worked on Medicaid, Medicare, health insurance all related things in the Obama administration, Andy thank you so much for joining me on The Thom Hartmann Program today.

ANDY SLAVITT: Good to be here, thanks for having me.

VALLAS: So Republicans in congress, it looks like aren’t quite ready to say they’re done trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, we’re actually watching them this week try to throw one last hail Mary pass, or at least that’s how it appears trying to repeal the ACA and also potentially make huge cuts to Medicaid. What are they up to and do we think it’s going to have any chances of succeeding?

SLAVITT: Well I was talking to one of them actually this morning. They have 16 days left in order to be able to pass a fully partisan bill which is 50 votes. They are working hard to try to make that a priority. In order to do that they need Leader McConnell to agree to give them some floor time and they need President Trump to make this a priority. So I would say for anybody who thinks repeal and replace is over, it’s not. There is tremendous amount of work that still has to be done. A lot of things can happen over the next two weeks, it’s a busy calendar. And I would also say even if it doesn’t happen in the next two weeks, remember the last vote was very very close and both houses of congress and the White House both occupied by a party that really wants to repeal and replace the law. So no reason to take anybody’s eye off the ball.

VALLAS: So part of the reason I describe this as one last hail Mary pass or an attempt at it, we’ll get to see if they are actually able to complete it to continue a very tired football metaphor is because the clock is ticking on what’s known as reconciliation instructions. These are the fast track procedural powers that Republicans have been seeking to use to ram through repeal of the ACA and also in some versions of their proposals huge cuts to Medicaid without a single Democratic vote. And there’s a time limit on how long those instructions, those fast track powers actually are good for and they’re set to expire at the end of the month. Some people are saying that might not even give the Congressional Budget Office, CBO enough time to score the bill.

SLAVITT: Well I wouldn’t count on that, I think the CBO has apparently had the bill for a week. It’s a tough bill to score for a variety of reasons so it’s not an easy job. But you’re absolutely right, once it gets done with that, they still have to go through with what is known as the Byrd Rule which is to make sure that everything in the legislation can pass and then they have to get it on the floor of the Senate. So they don’t have a lot of time. But I will say this, and this is a very important and kind of a subtle point. Because their reconciliation instructions expire, that means that after September 30th they won’t be able to take anything back from the House should this go to the House. And why that’s important is it means that if this goes to the House after getting out of the Senate, the House will have to look at it on a take it or leave it basis. That’s always dangerous because that means people who don’t like it are going to only have two choices, sign on or don’t. And generally speaking most people in the House believe that they would sign it. So it’s not right I think to count anybody’s chickens just yet.

VALLAS: So what happens if they aren’t able to pass anything before the end of the month? Do you think that there’s a chance that they may actually try to use the budget proposal that they are saying they want to pass so that they can do what they’re calling tax reform as we were discussing earlier in the show today, do you think that they might try to use that budget proposal to set new reconciliation instructions to give themselves some extra time?

SLAVITT: Well I think putting health and tax together takes an already complex and difficult thing and makes it more complex and difficult. I don’t think, I do think that the congress, a lot of people in the Congress, both sides of the aisle, that really want to move on from health care. And put it as far behind them as possible. It really does hog your agenda and there’s a lot of other things to take on. Having said that, if they end up with 50 votes because of something that happens in any one of a number of states including New Jersey or Arizona or anywhere else, that could change the entire strategy and outlook. So look, if you’re not in favor of repealing and replacing the ACA, then I think until one of the house of congress changes or the White House changes you’ve got reason to be very nervous.

VALLAS: Now meanwhile as we were talking about earlier in the show, we actually had new data out from the Census Bureau this week that didn’t just look at the poverty rate in the country which now has reached pre-recession levels for the first time since the recession, good news there. Also showed incomes up, we were talking a lot about that in the first hour, but it also showed that the rate of Americans, the share of Americans who don’t have health insurance in this country has now reached record lows. We’re now down to 8.8% of Americans who don’t have health insurance and that’s obviously a story about the Affordable Care Act and also Medicaid expansion. Showing how much is at state if the Affordable Care Act is actually repealed.

SLAVITT: You know it’s really great that you bring that up. When there was a time I was talking with Secretary Burwell who was the Human Services secretary who served alongside me for President Obama and we were just having a conversation, one of us said to the other, wouldn’t it be amazing if this President can leave office with an uninsured rate under 10%? And at that point we’d seen it go down, it had been 16% for 20, 30 years running. It was down to 12%, it was down to 11% and it seemed like the idea of even being able to say that 9 out of 10 Americans were no longer at risk of bankruptcy from a medical bill and had access to regular care would just be an amazing milestone. So to see that today, I hope that people don’t take it for granted, or I hope that people that are just on the scene lately realize what an enormous set of progress that is for our country and we ought to be very proud of that.

VALLAS: So meanwhile on the far opposite side of the political spectrum, this week we actually saw Senator Bernie Sanders unveil legislation that he’s calling Medicare for All. It’s his way of trying to move forward the conversation on universal health insurance and he actually did draw record support from Democrats, a tremendous amount of co-sponsors in the Senate with him, there’s a house piece of legislation that’s a companion that has lots of co-sponsors as well. I have to say it was hard for me to watch this unfold this week without thinking back to the 2008 presidential primary, the Democratic primary when Dennis Kucinich who was running that year was sort of on stage, always at the end, always off on the end in his kind of oversized ill fitting suit and shaking his fist going, Medicare for All! And of course, no one was taking him seriously. But now we’re actually seeing this grow in support and become not maybe a mainstream Democratic idea but something that’s certainly gaining support throughout the caucus. What’s your take on that bill and what you’re seeing in terms of universal health coverage and perhaps even Medicare for All starting to become a more mainstream idea.

SLAVITT: What is it with liberals and ill fitting suits?

[LAUGHTER]

VALLAS: Well it’s not just liberals, I mean take a look at Trump.

[LAUGHTER]

SLAVITT: Well how about that ill fitting suit liberals versus conservatives. I think it would make a great show. So I say first of all congratulations to Senator Sanders for putting forward a bill that really has at its heart a simple vision, every American gets a card at birth and we no longer have to worry about medical expenses again. Now so even before we start getting into the parade of concerns and challenges of which we know there are many including politically entrenched interests and the fact that you have people that have employer based coverage that would have to give that up, and the fact that there’s a serious conversation about how to pay for this. Big things happen when people lay out a marker and lay out a vision and that’s good. And in even better news, this isn’t the only vision coming out. I think over the next week we’re going to see Senator Brian Schatz have a bill come out which moves towards universal coverage that’s an option for all Americans to buy into Medicaid. Chris Murphy is going to have a bill out around buying into Medicare earlier and I’m aware of three or four others not yet unannounced bills that are various of the theme. And to my mind, at this point my opinion the more of these the better.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas, the show is produced each week by Will Urquhart. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @offkiltershow and you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the WeAct Radio Network or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.

Episode 28: The Good News Poverty Report Trump’s Budget Would Erase

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