In making the case for the supplemental income poverty measure proposed by the Administration last week, Matthew Yglesias, who calls the proposed measure an "excellent first step," explains that:

the official US government measure of poverty is based on a very crude estimate. In the 1960s, the average family spend one third of its income on food. So the way the poverty line works is that it calculates an “emergency food” budget for a family, and then triples the resulting number. Modern-day families, of course, spend much less on food but substantially more on housing, health care, and child care so there’s a need for an updated metric to better account for household spending.

An accompanying graphic in his post notes that food now "amounts to around one-seventh [of the median family budget] as the costs of housing, child care, and health care have all risen disproportionately."

This helps explain why they current federal poverty measure isn’t based on a sound conceptual basis anymore (if it ever was), but it also could be read to imply that the proposed measure does more than it actually does to take into account the costs of housing, health care, and child care, and will inevitably result in thresholds that are substantially higher than the current poverty thresholds.

This isn’t the case. Based on the most recently available Census estimates (from October 2009), under the approach proposed by the Administration the reference poverty threshold for a family of four in 2007 would have been somewhere between $23,500 and $27,744, compared to $21,500 under the current measure. Census has made clear that the proposed measure is "different along some dimensions from any estimates that have been produced to date," so these estimates will change, but they are unlikely to move significantly higher than this range. I think the most reasonable guesstimate right now is that the reference threshold comes out near the high end of that range, but that it will almost certainly remain more than $20,000 below the average nationwide amount that family budgets produced by the Economic Policy Institute and other organizations suggest is needed to "make ends meet" at a basic level (as well as the minimum amount that most Americans say in surveys is needed to make ends meet at a basic level).

Moreover, since the proposed approach would also count benefits like the EITC and food stamps that aren't currently counted, you need to discount higher thresholds somewhat for comparison purposes, especially with groups like low-income children who may receive several thousand dollars a year in those benefits. For example, the average EITC for a family with children was $2,488 in 2007.

While the new approach would subtract amounts parents actually spend out-of-pocket on child care, it wouldn't make any adjustment for parents who need quality child care but can't afford it; the same is likely to be the case for health care (although Census suggests it's open to looking at an adjustment for people who are uninsured and simply can't afford to get the care they need). 

Finally, the supplemental poverty threshold could be lower in some states and regions than even the current federal poverty thresholds (depending on whether and how geographic adjustment is done, an issue discussed below), and for certain groups (such as homeowners without mortgages, who will have their own threshold under the proposed approach).

For these reasons, I think progressives should be cautious about implying that the proposed supplemental poverty measure is really a direct measure of the amount families need to meet basic needs, even the limited set of them included in the measure. It might be better to frame this as an “extremely low” income measure, for example, than as a “low” income measure.

Yglesias also faults the current poverty line for failing to take into account "considerable place-to-place variation in prices, especially in the price of housing." And he links to a CAP release on the proposed measure that includes this argument:

The traditional measure includes no adjustment for geographic disparities in cost of living. This means that two families with the same income—one in Tate County, Mississippi and the other in Seattle, Washington—are considered equally as well off despite the fact that [HUD's] fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $574 per month in the former and $987 per month in the latter.

Here, again, some caution is in order. Rents are certainly higher in Seattle than in Tate County, Mississippi, but what this means for poverty measurement is considerably more complex than this discussion suggests. Whether or not these two families with same incomes should be “considered equally well off” depends on a number of real-world factors, most of which will lead us to conclude that the Mississippi family is objectively worse off as the Seattle family, even holding income equal.

First, there are problems with using HUD's Fair Market Rents to make comparisons like these. The actual typical difference in housing expenditures between the two families may be considerably less than HUD's Fair Market Rent (FMR) figures suggest. Some data suggests that the actual geographic difference in expenditures is less than the FMR differences, and at a 2005 National Academy of Sciences workshop on poverty measurement, HUD staff noted a dozen specific problems with using FMR data for geographic adjustment purposes. For these and other reasons, Commerce is planning to use FMRs to make the adjustments (the economist Rebecca Blank, now at Census, has previously called them “crude”). Also, there may be systematic differences in housing quality that aren't captured in the data that's available.

Second, as was noted at the 2005 workshop, “rents reflect both amenities and disamenities of a geographic area.” These amenities and disamenities clearly impact how “well off” people are in various ways. So, for example, higher rents in Seattle reflect things like its public transportation system and other beneficial public structures that prosperous progressives communities provide to their citizens as well as greater employment and educational opportunities. These public amenities improve the quality of life for residents of progressive communities. Many if not most of these amenities are not available in conservative, economically depressed, rural counties in the Mississippi Delta.

Finally, considerable other evidence suggests that low-income Mississippians are considerably worse off in economic and social terms than low-income Washingtonians. Despite low rents, Mississippi has the nation’s highest level of food insecurity and hunger (17.4%), while the relatively high-rent Washington has a considerably lower rate of food insecurity (11.1%). Similarly, the Delta region of Mississippi that Tate County is located in scores lower on the American Human Development Index (“a numerical measure of well-being and opportunity made up of health, education, and income indicators”) than any other region of Mississippi, a state which itself scores dead last among the 50 states on the index. Finally, the Congressional District that Tate County is located in, Mississippi’s 1st, ranks 416th out of 436 districts on the American HDI; by comparison, the Congressional District that Seattle is located in, Washington’s 7th, ranks 28th out of 436 districts. You might want to ask yourself, if you were given the same amount of income and the choice of growing up in either Seattle or Tate County, Mississippi, which one would you choose: 28th or 416th?

Related to this is an important question about whether geographic adjustment should be part of any measure that is used for the purpose of a national poverty reduction target. Do we want to bring people in Tate County, Mississippi up to a national standard, or should we set the bar lower for because rents are lower there? I’m strongly in favor of a national standard for Tate County, Mississippi, not a dismal Mississippi one. Similarly, poverty estimates produced by CLASP in November 2009 using Census' own on-line calculator for producing alternative poverty measures found that West Virginia's poverty measure would be lower than Massachusetts' (12.3% vs. 14.2%). I have a hard time believing that the West Virginia social and economic model does a better job of fighting poverty than the Massachusetts one, and other direct measures of deprivation and economic don't support that conclusion. These numbers are likely to change somewhat as Census refines its measure, but they need to change quite a bit to be consistent with what most data tells us about geographic differences in deprivation, and what state-level social and economic policies work best in reducing poverty.

• The Coffee Party USA, Mission: "The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them."
• Dean Baker, Missing the Story on Iceland: Can the Bankers Steal Your Kids' Money?: "... the [banking collapse in] Iceland makes a mockery of anyone who claims to support leaving financial activities to the market. In almost all cases, actors in financial markets assume that governments will stand behind banks at the end of the day. Therefore when they say want the government to leave things to the market they are lying. They just want to be able to take risks with taxpayers money, without being fettered by regulations limiting the extent of these risks. In short, the finance boys want a free lunch, not a free market."
• Paul Krugman, Debt is a Political Issue: "... if you’re worried about the US fiscal position, you should not be focused on this year’s deficit, let alone the 0.07% of GDP in unemployment benefits Bunning tried to stop. You should, instead, worry about when investors will lose confidence in a country where one party insists both that raising taxes is anathema and that trying to rein in Medicare spending means creating death panels."
• Sherry Linkon, Why Working Class Literature Matters: "Working-class literary studies is just getting started. In two decades, the field has moved from excavating the long-buried texts of worker writers from the last three centuries to developing an ever-more complex understanding of the value of class as a critical tool for interpreting literature of all kinds."
• Marion Nestle, Recognize Food Brands, Even 3-Year Olds Do This: "I’m not sure why this would be news to anyone who has taken a toddler to a grocery store, but researchers at the University of Michigan have now demonstrated that very young children recognize food brands, especially McDonald’s. ... It’s good to have the research and the implications are clear: something must be done to put some curbs on food marketing to kids."
• Teryn Norris, To Make Poverty History, Make Clear Energy Cheap: "The United States was a driving force behind the worldwide expansion of prosperity and security in the 20th century. Today, a new American project to make clean energy cheap can alleviate untold human suffering and injustice, develop the world's strongest clean energy industry, and help save the world from climate destabilization. In short, it may be our generation's single greatest opportunity to advance global prosperity in the 21st century and secure the lives of future generations. As Bill Gates put it, "This is the one with the greatest impact.""
  

• John Powell, Tailoring Job Relief to America's Diverse Communities: "In reality, the goal of the civil rights movement, like the goal of a fair recovery, is universal. On most issues, the goal of blacks or Latinos is no different than the goal of whites. What stands apart are the varied needs of each group that must be met to reach these goals, not merely because of race but also because they have different opportunities and structures for advancement."
• Bureau of Labor Statistics, Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers: 2009: "In 2009, 72.6 million American workers age 16 and over were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.3 percent of all wage and salary workers. ... Among those paid by the hour, 980,000 earned exactly the prevailing Federal minimum wage in 2009. Nearly 2.6 million had wages below the minimum.2 Together, these 3.6 million workers with wages at or below the minimum made up 4.9 percent of all hourly-paid workers."
• Center for Social Inclusion, Broadband in the Mississippi Delta: A 21st Century Racial Justice Issue: "The Broadband in the Mississippi Delta report analyzes broadband availability and economic opportunity in Mississippi and the impact it has on communities of color. With far too little internet access in communities of color, hundreds of thousands are effectively prevented from contributing to the economy."
  

• Crooked Timber, Measuring Justice: "Cambridge has just published a new book, Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, which Ingrid and I edited (the idea of doing it was entirely Ingrid’s, I should say, and a brilliant idea it turned out to be). Its a fairly tightly focused collection, for which we invited two kinds of contribution. It opens with a shortened version of Pogge’s essay “Can the Capabilities Approach be Justified?” which many of the contributors refer back to, and the first part continues with a series of chapters considering the relative merits of Rawls’s social primary goods approach and the capabilities approach to the metric of justice; for this we invited contributors whom we believed would defend one or another of these metrics while giving careful criticisms of the rival, plus Dick Arneson whom we believed (rightly) could be relied on to help make progress despite not being associated with either view. For the second part we invited contributors who would think about some specific issue of justice (in health, education, gender, the family, disability) and consider the relative merits of the approaches with respect to that specific issue. We wrote a short analytical introduction which locates the debate in a broader context, and which, we hope, helps guide the reader through the book (the CUP page has a pdf of it, so you can judge for yourselves); the book concludes with a nice, partly autobiographical, essay by Sen engaging with the chapters in the first part of the book."
• Chicago News Cooperative, Environmentalist Prods Fellow Blacks to Join in Her Crusade: "Ms. Davis also preaches do-for-self to go along with her gospel of green. “The move toward eco-friendly development, and the jobs it creates,” she said, “is an opportunity for blacks and other minorities to take more control of their destiny. In that sense, it is a way to move forward for communities that often feel left behind by economic opportunity.” “What we reject is the ‘Help the Negro Industry,’ ” she said. “People coming into our community, thinking they know best, trying to save us. We can save ourselves. “The ‘Help the Negro Industry’ is what allowed billions of dollars to come down for urban renewal, but the urban did not get renewed. We are absolutely committed that urban renewal not be repeated.” Ms. Davis said she believed that minorities must educate and prepare themselves to take advantage of the changing, more environmentally attuned economy. It was just as important, she said, to educate people about the “economics of ecology” as it was to protest the dire environmental conditions in many black and Latino neighborhoods — including accusations by some that “environmental racism” contributes to the problem."
• Sarika Gupta, Reconciliation and Representation: The Share of the Population Represented by the Democratic Majority: "With the debate over health care dragging on, it is becoming increasingly likely that the Senate will pass a bill through the reconciliation process, requiring just a simple majority rather than the super-majority needed to break a filibuster. This paper shows that if this path is taken, senators who represent the vast majority of the nation’s population will have supported the bill. This assessment holds even if several of the senators who have indicated serious reservations end up voting against it."
  

• Michael Sandel, Obama and Civic Idealism: "Unlike the anti-bigness liberalism of the progressive era and early New Deal, the social-welfare liberalism of FDR in 1944 is recognizable as the liberalism of our time. The great liberal causes of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s—civil rights, Medicare and Medicaid, racial and gender equality, federal support for education, a more generous welfare state—were about using government to provide equal opportunity and a social safety net, not about using government to rein in the political influence of big banks and corporations. Social-welfare liberalism seems a more practical doctrine than the anti-bigness version of earlier progressives. It is hard to imagine how to break up the large financial institutions and corporations that dominate modern economic life. And yet I believe it’s a mistake for contemporary liberals to give up on the old progressive project of exerting democratic control over economic institutions. In fact, it’s a mistake that has backfired on the Obama presidency. The initial reluctance of Barack Obama and his economic advisers to take a tougher line on the banks has led to a populist backlash that now threatens his agenda."
• Boston Globe, It's Money that Matters: "IDEAS: What are the psychological or sociological effects of inequality? Are you saying that the “social pain” you describe can be a cause of violence in unequal societies?
  WILKINSON: I think people are extremely sensitive to status differentiation and to being looked down on, or disrespected, and those often seem to be the triggers to violence. We quote an American prison psychiatrist who goes so far as to say he’s never seen a serious act of violence that wasn’t provoked by loss of face or humiliation, and so on. And in more unequal societies, status matters even more. People judge each other more by status. There’s more insecurity. And people at the bottom are more often excluded from the markers of status, the jobs and housing and cars, so they become even more touchy about how they’re seen."
• Department of Energy, Progress in Implementing the Department of Energy's Weatherization Assistance Program Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: "Certain states also faced fiscal challenges that contributed to the delay in the implementation of the Weatherization Program. For example, because of budget shortfalls associated with the economic downturn, certain states were under hiring freezes that applied to all employees regardless of the source of their funding, including those tasked with weatherization-related work. In other states, progress was impacted because personnel involved with the program were subject to significant state-wide furloughs. Further, the approval of state budgets was delayed in states such as Pennsylvania as legislators deliberated over how to address overall budget shortfalls. Lacking staff, states were unable to perform required implementation tasks necessary to handle the large infusion of Recovery Act Weatherization Program funding."
  

• Steven Greenhouse, Plan to Seek Use of U.S. Contracts as a Wage Lever: "The Obama administration is planning to use the government’s enormous buying power to prod private companies to improve wages and benefits for millions of workers, according to White House officials and several interest groups briefed on the plan. By altering how it awards $500 billion in contracts each year, the government would disqualify more companies with labor, environmental or other violations and give an edge to companies that offer better levels of pay, health coverage, pensions and other benefits, the officials said. ... One federal official said the proposed policy would encourage procurement officers to favor companies with better compensation packages only if choosing them did not add substantially to contract costs. As an example, he said, if two companies each bid $10 million for a contract, and one had considerably better wages and pensions than the other, that company would be favored."
• Pavan Trivedi, Borough President Stringer Provides a "Blueprint" for the Creation of a Truly Sustainable Food System in NYC : "In response to an increasing global interest in food sustainability, and to the lack of all-inclusive, tangible, local governmental initiatives in the field, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer has released “FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System.” The first of its kind, it serves as the most comprehensive effort to unify and reform New York City’s policies regarding the production, distribution, consumption, and disposal of food."
• Noah Kazis, Fun Facts About the Sad State of American Parking Policy: "If you haven't checked out the ITDP parking report we covered yesterday, it's a highly readable piece of research, walking you through parking policy's checkered past and potentially brighter future. In addition to describing six cases of innovative parking strategies, the authors draw from a wide-ranging body of evidence about the woeful state of most current parking policy, marshaling revealing facts and figures. We culled some of the ones that leap out the most. ... Parking typically represents a full 10 percent of development costs. What's more, the people who actually park only pay 5 percent of the cost of non-residential parking, meaning that public subsidies and developer capital pay for the rest. In San Francisco, parking requirements have reduced the number of affordable housing units nonprofit developers can build by 20 percent, with each residence costing 20 percent more to build than it would have without parking."
• Jim Sleeper, A Truth that Barely Speaks Its Name: "Alexander Hamilton hoped that "reflection and choice" would grow in what we now call the public sphere, a place that could be noisy but luminous, with constellations of respected seers focusing us on key decisions. Instead we're in outer space, every speaker a shooting star amid whirling swarms of asteroids. Our political universe seems increasingly incoherent and amnesiac, lurching ever more frighteningly toward "accident and force." But something very orderly explains it, too: the taboo against serious criticism of business and finance capital. It keeps Tea Partiers from seeing that corporate 'speech' and corporate welfare are dissolving the public sphere and their freedom. Michael Moore's movie Capitalism tried to show it. But the taboo held. Why?"
  

• Kirwan Institute, Race and Recovery Index: "The Race-Recovery Index, a project of the Kirwan Institute, is designed to measure how all people, but particularly marginalized populations, are faring in the midst of the national recovery efforts. The two primary tools for measurement that will be used on a monthly basis will be the national unemployment figures by race, and the Federal contract procurement of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). Additional forms of measurement may eventually be added. ... An overall look at Federal ARRA contracting reveals noticeable inequality. Despite the fact that Women-owned, Latino-owned, and Black-owned businesses account for 28.2%, 6.8%, and 5.2% of all U.S. businesses respectively, as of February 1, 2010 they had only received 2.4%, 1.6%, and 1.1% of the value of Federal ARRA contracts that have been procured (see Table 3)."
• Nebraska Appleseed, Back to School, Back to Work: Winning Strategies for Building Economic Opportunity in Nebraska: "“Nebraska has the opportunity to create policies, pathways, and partnerships that will make sure Nebraska businesses have the skilled workers they need and families have the opportunity to build a better life” states Rebecca Gould, Executive Director of the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest, “Building education, job training, and work supports opportunities for low-income Nebraskans is key for economic recovery today and state prosperity in the future.”"
• Chris Dillow, Taxis and Taxes: "The best evidence we have on the income elasticity of labour supply - the nearest we’re likely to get to a natural experiment - is consistent with higher taxes actually calling forth greater, not smaller, labour supply. Yes, of course there is a Laffer curve - it‘s just that we might be on the upward-sloping part of it."
• Mark Weisbrot, Independent Latin America Forms Its Own Organization: "Latin America took another historic step forward this week with the creation of a new regional organization of 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries. The United States and Canada were excluded. The increasing independence of Latin America has been one of the most important geopolitical changes over the last decade, affecting not only the region but the rest of the world as well. For example, Brazil has publicly supported Iran’s right to enrich uranium and opposed further sanctions against the country. Latin America, once under the control of the United States, is increasingly emerging as a power bloc with its own interests and agenda."
• Edward Skidelsky, Words that Think for Us: The Hollowness of Human Capital: "Of the many harms inflicted by economics on the English language, “human capital” is the most grievous. ... The phrase “human capital” is now so thoroughly naturalised that we seldom pause to ponder its implications. What is capital anyway? Capital is not a particular kind of good, but any good viewed in relation to certain interests. A donkey is capital to the wood-carrier. A derelict church is capital to the restaurant entrepreneur. Capital, in short, is wealth viewed not as an end in itself but as a means to more wealth. The phrase “human capital” insinuates that human beings too are to be viewed in this light—as instruments of the productive process. We have all of us attained the status which Aristotle reserved for slaves, that of living tools. What a triumph for the dismal science! Keynes naively supposed that economic growth was for the sake of personal cultivation. His modern successors have put him right: personal cultivation is for the sake of economic growth.’"
  

• NY Times, A Diploma in 10th Grade?: "The Times reported this week that under a program starting next year, some high school sophomores in eight states will have a chance to earn a diploma and head straight to community college. To do so, however, they will have to pass academic tests known as board exams. If they don’t pass the tests in the 10th grade, they can take them again in their junior and senior years. The National Center on Education and the Economy, the nonprofit group that is organizing the program, says that students will have to meet basic requirements before they go to college and that it hopes this will reduce the need for remedial classes in college."
• Matt Yglesias, The Spending Tug: "I’ve previously mentioned Kinder & Kam’s US Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion but it helps shed some light on this issue. They use National Election Survey data and show that if you restrict your attention to white Americans then ethnocentric views (both in terms of positive views of whites and negative views of non-whites) is correlated with hostility to means-tested welfare programs. The relationship remains statistically significant even when you control for partisanship and for self-described political beliefs regarding egalitarianism and limited government. But if you look at views on social insurance programs—Social Security and Medicare—you get the reverse result. Ethnocentrism is associated with support for increases in Social Security and Medicare spending, again even when you control for partisanship and self-described political beliefs regarding egalitarianism and limited government. And what seems to matter here isn’t dislike for non-whites, but positive solidaristic feelings about other white people."
• Wall Street Journal, SBA-Backed Loans are Bright Spot in Gloomy Climate: "SBA-backed loans in the past have made up only a small portion of overall small-business loans—around 7% to 8% according to the SBA's estimations, and as little as 1% by other counts. But thanks to stimulus-related measures, SBA loans this year could be "pushing 10% to 15%," according to industry expert Bob Coleman, who keeps a pulse on SBA lending through his independent publication, the Coleman Report. Business owners who have been turned down for conventional loans say they're having better luck applying for SBA loans. Dale McCoy, who owns Lite Metals Company Inc., a foundry in Ravenna, Ohio, says he approached several banks between June and October but was unable to get approval for a $735,000 loan to cover debt on the company's purchase of a small, captive foundry specializing in airplane wheels that is currently profitable."
  

• Interview of Dan Ariely, How U.S. Feels About Wealth Gap: "Right now the top 20 percent of the people have about 85 percent of the wealth. People think that they only own 68 percent of the wealth, so people underestimate the inequity, but if you ask them what's kind of an ideal world in the Rawls kind of sense that you would actually want to participate in, they say 33 percent. So they say in an ideal world, we want the top 20 percent to own more than 20 percent, we want them to be wealthier, but we want them to own about 33 percent of the wealth. ... The main lesson for me from this whole study is that when we look at the political arena, we kind of have this huge polarization, and yet when we ask people a question that is not tainted by saying Republicans or Democrats -- it's just formed and here are the numbers, and what kind of society do you want to live in -- the answers come out quite close. And for me that's kind of the optimistic outcome of all of this is in fact as a society, I think we're much more similar to each other than the political arena plays out how it looks like."
• Gina Livermore, Work-Oriented Social Security Disability Beneficiaries: "The Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) programs provide income support to working-age individuals (age 18 to 65) deemed unable to engage in substantial gainful activity (SGA) due to a significant and long-lasting health condition. Given these program eligibility criteria, it is not surprising that only about 10 percent of SSI and SSDI beneficiaries are working at any given time. However, many more indicate that their personal goals include work or that they see themselves working in the near future.... In 2004, 40 percent of working-age disability beneficiaries reported having work goals or expectations. Based on the current number of disability program participants, that percentage translates into about 4.5 million individuals"
• Urban Institute, Health Care Spending Under Reform: Less Uncompensated Care and Lower Costs to Small Employers: "In this brief, we estimate that the annual cost of uncompensated health care for the uninsured would decrease from $61 billion to $25 billion under health reform legislation passed in the House. Because the government finances about three-quarters of uncompensated care, up to $27 billion per year could be used to offset the expansion of Medicaid and subsidies to employers and individuals. Overall, employers' net costs would increase by 2.9 percent over the current system, but small employers' net costs would decrease 8 percent due to employer subsidies, the expansion of Medicaid, and exemptions from penalties for not offering insurance."
• NY Times, Phillip Martin, Who Led His Tribe to Wealth, Is Dead at 83: "Phillip Martin, a former chief of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, who guided his tribe from grinding poverty in the red clay hills of east central Mississippi to become proprietor of one of the state’s leading business empires, died Feb. 4 in Jackson, Miss. ... When Chief Martin was first elected in 1979, the Choctaws in Mississippi were still relegated to the hardscrabble existence that had repressed them for generations. In 1831, a year after passage of the federal Indian Removal Act, most of the Choctaws were forced to walk what became known as the Trail of Tears to resettlement in the Oklahoma Territories. Over the decades, those Choctaws who remained in Mississippi eked out livings through sharecropping and unskilled labor. Into the early 1970s unemployment on the reservation stood at nearly 75 percent. Chief Martin changed all that, and the turnaround was all the more remarkable because it was well under way before the rise of tribal casinos after passage of the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. “He was truly one of the first and most important leaders in the drive for tribal self-determination,” Joseph Kalt, co-director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, said in an interview. “Chief Martin led this movement in which first the Mississippi Choctaw and then many other Indian nations have said: ‘We’re just going to run everything ourselves. We’re building our own schools, our own police department, our own health program, our own economy.’ ”"
  

• Contra Costa Times, Stimulus housing plan slow to take shape: "A year into a $6 billion federal program to buy up, rehab and sell abandoned properties in hard-hit neighborhoods, the bulk of the first $40 million in Bay Area grants remains unspent. Cities and counties are struggling to get their hands on the right homes, competing with cash-carrying investors and thwarted by banks reluctant to put foreclosed houses on the market. The creeping pace of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program seems to defy both the idea of rapid federal stimulus and the fast flow of houses bobbing into foreclosure — one every 18 minutes in the Bay Area. Housing experts say its troubles are partly attributable to red tape and overwhelmed banks, but mostly to what they never anticipated: a surge in the market for beleaguered properties."
• Harley Shaiken, Put the brakes on Toyota's NUMMI plant closure in Fremont: "President Barack Obama mentioned "jobs" 23 times in his State of the Union address, underscoring that the fragile recovery is bypassing millions of Americans. About the last thing the economy needs is a major plant closing. Nonetheless, Toyota is going ahead with plans to close the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. assembly plant — a joint venture started in 1984 with General Motors — in Fremont, on April 1. Nearly 5,000 NUMMI jobs will evaporate and up to 50,000 jobs are at risk, including those at 1,000 suppliers throughout the state, according to the company's own numbers. At stake for thousands are homes, college educations and a middle-class lifestyle that came out of decades of hard work."
• NY Times, In Detroit, Is There Life After The Big Three?: "CRUISE the blighted streets that shoot off in either direction from 8 Mile Road, and the scars of the automotive crisis abound. “For sale” signs adorn the front of long-shuttered metal, paint and tool-and-die shops. And at factories still in business, the small number of cars in the parking lots testify that the shops are working below capacity. But pull into the bustling headquarters of W Industries, a compound of imposing black structures at 8 Mile and Hoover Street, and you’ll encounter a more hopeful vision of Detroit’s future. Once an exclusive supplier to the auto industry, this machine tool and parts company is rolling in new business."