This WSJ article on credit for low-income people is pretty ridiculous. It equates legitimate mortgages and loans with predatory lending and doesn't assign enough responsibility to the economy for default rates. Here's its frame:

"We saw an extension of credit to a much deeper socioeconomic level, and they got access to the same credit instruments as middle-class and mainstream Americans," says Ronald Mann, a Columbia University law professor. Now, "it will be harder for families at the bottom of the income ladder to get credit cards," he says.

But are payday loans mainstream?

Cash-strapped workers have long obtained advances through "payday loans," available at storefront lenders for fees that equate to high annual interest rates. Even that move is not so easy now.

"More customers are walking in the door, but turndowns are up," said Steven Schlein, a spokesman for the payday-loan industry's trade group, the Community Financial Services Association of America.

Payday lending is unique to low-income communities. It depends on a desperate and vulnerable client base, and it expanded dramatically in the last 15 years. That makes it neither mainstream nor something workers have "long obtained." And are all forms of mortgage lending mainstream?

For families with incomes between about $20,500 and $37,000, the ratio of debt to assets rose to 18.5% in 2007 from 14.4% in 1998 -- more sharply than the increase among the overall population -- according to the Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances. In addition, the chances of default and delinquency on home mortgages are higher among lower-income households, according to data from Equifax and Moody's Economy.com.

The democratization of credit began decades ago. Federal legislation in the late 1970s required banks to avoid discriminatory lending and meet the needs of local communities, spawning a wave of home buying and entrepreneurship in lower-income neighborhoods. The rate of homeownership in families with incomes in the bottom two-fifths rose to nearly 49% by 2001 from below 44% in 1989, according to Fed data analyzed by Mr. Mann at Columbia.

There's no distinction between subprime and prime mortgages here. Federal legislation - like the Community Reinvestment Act- didn't compel lenders to sell subprime mortgages, with their high default rate and unjust terms. It compelled them to make mainstream loans in neighborhoods with qualified borrowers that are bypassed out of prejudice. And mainstream mortgages for lower-income families, by definition, are a good bet during normal economic conditions. They may be defaulting more now not because they're for lower-income borrowers, but because the economy is in the deepest recession since the Great Depression.

The article also goes over credit card debts, and how low-income people have gotten greater access to loans through credit cards, and how that's coming to an end now. Perhaps there's something to this: a great many people were issued credit cards who may have not had the means or the know-how to pay them off. Of course, this trend is by no means isolated to low-income people, as debt levels have grown tremendously for people of all incomes over the last 30 or so years. Recall that the personal savings rate in 2006 was .4 percent. Inherent in the issue of low-income people's debts is the even trickier question of how we as a society are going to pay back all we've borrowed, and what's going to replace the "plastic safety net."

• Pew Research Center, Covering the Great Recession: "The gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression has been covered in the media largely from the top down, told primarily from the perspective of the Obama Administration and big business, and reflected the voices and ideas of people in institutions more than those of everyday Americans, according to a new study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Citizens may be the primary victims of the downturn, but they have not been not the primary actors in the media depiction of it."
• Anne Golden, Poverty Debate: Raise the Quality of Life for All: "Supporters of relative measures of poverty argue that these measures must take into account the critical issue of social exclusion. Relative poverty is about inequality in social engagement; falling markedly behind the community average effectively excludes the poor from the normal life of society. The OECD argues that, in order to fully participate in the social life of a community, individuals may need a level of resources that is not too inferior to the norm in that community. John Kenneth Galbraith argued many years ago in The Affluent Society that a relative measure of poverty accounts for what the poor cannot have as the minimum necessary for decency — the poor “are degraded…they live outside the grades or categories which the community regards as respectable.” Moreover, a relative measure of poverty is not static; what constitutes an acceptable quality of life changes over time. A relative concept of poverty is thus much more closely related to the Conference Board’s goal — to measure and compare the “quality of life” of Canadians — than strict requirements for food and shelter that enable a person to physically survive."
• Duncan Green, Do We Need to Ration Growth, and If So, Who Gets What's Left?: "Spoke at a Quaker conference on the ‘zero growth economy’ at the weekend. Quaker meetings are different: when I finished speaking to an audience of 350 people, there was total hear-a-pin-drop silence. Instead of clapping, people reflect, eyes closed, on what they have just heard. And no, even though it was after lunch, they weren’t asleep (well, most of them) and it wasn’t just me – the next speaker got the same treatment, despite beginning his talk by acting out the train-wreck metaphor, ending with him running into a closed door at full speed and slumping to the ground. The two pigeons flying round the hall just added to the sense that this was not an average meeting. Actually, I really enjoyed it – free from all the rigmarole of applause, the quiet, dignified exchange and moments of shared silence felt respectful, even intimate. Plus Quakers are great readers .... Much of the discussion revolved around the role of believers who are neither lobbyists nor scientists. It came down to changing attitudes and beliefs to prepare the ground for more fundamental shifts : ‘We Quakers are being called to be the midwives of a new style of living and being’ one said. Recalling the history of the Quaker-led abolition of slavery, I wouldn’t bet against them achieving something significant."
• FedThread: "FedThread is a new way of interacting with the Federal Register. FedThread gives you: collaborative annotation: Attach a note to any paragraph of the Federal Register; start a conversation; advanced search: Search the Federal Register (back to 2000) on full text, by date, agency, and other fields; customized feeds: Turn any search into an RSS or email feed, which will send you any new items that match the search query."
• Matthew Slaugher, Time to Tackle America's Widening Inequality: "... what to do [about widening inequality]? Policymakers have long quibbled over the facts. They have also invoked vague and distant remedies. A better educated US workforce? Upgrading skills is terrific – but it takes generations. It took more than 60 years for the US to boost the college-graduate share of the labour force from 6 per cent in 1945 to 29.8 per cent today – and that entailed government programmes and profound socio-economic changes.... Unemployment insurance was introduced in the 1930s, designed to replace a worker’s income temporarily until rehired by the same company. Today’s unemployment risks are much more involved and workers need a broader safety net. The higher costs of this overhaul can be paid for by raising the FICA cap and/or marginal rate."
• John Holbro, Mindhacks for the Fingertips: "Tell me of your time-saving note-taking methods, but don’t tell me to type it all in. What are good scanning products and OCR software suites and notetaking software. I’ve been using Zotero and I like it just fine. But maybe DEVONthink is better enough to be worth paying for, especially with the OCR?"
  

In yesterday's Grand Forks (ND) Herald: Minnesota Lawmakers Look at Cheap Ways to End Poverty.

Good luck with that.

• Matt Smith, Stimulus Wreckage (SF Weekly): "In August, 13 Corinthian students in Texas filed a lawsuit alleging their teachers "were either unqualified to teach in their ... fields, or simply uninterested in teaching." These were just the latest in a nationwide flood: According to Courthouse News Service, more than 80 such lawsuits have been filed against Corinthian since 2005. Given all these complaints, I was surprised to discover that Corinthian Colleges, Inc. is a prime beneficiary of the Obama administration's stimulus package. The $787 billion package — supposedly a paragon of accountability and transparency — included $17 billion to increase by $500 the amount of money each student may receive to pay for college classes under the Pell Grant program, which provides money to low-income undergraduates. Nearly 70 percent of Corinthian students receive such grants, the company reports.
• Sara Goldrick-Rab, Surprise: Public Support Boosts Public Enrollment!: "Stephanie Riegg Cellini, an assistant professor at George Washington University, has conducted a rigorous analysis of enrollment in California that tackles these hypotheses from a useful angle. She asks: What happens to enrollment when public support for community colleges increases? Does enrollment shift from private to public? Does the number of proprietary colleges decline?"
• Tom Jacobs, Immersion in Nature Makes Us Nicer (Miller-McCune): "A series of studies suggests immersion in nature "brings individuals closer to others, whereas human-made environments orient goals toward more selfish or self-interested ends," according to a paper posted on the Web site of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. This appears to be the first research to examine the impact of the natural world on people's values and aspirations, and its findings have intriguing implications for architects, designers and urban planners."
  

• Katrina Vanden Heuvel, A Compass for Fair Food: "Over the years, The Nation and I have closely tracked the heroic work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) as they have fought to protect agriculture workers in the fields of Florida from exploitation. CIW has exposed cases of slavery and worked with the Department of Justice to successfully prosecute them. It has carried out a Campaign for Fair Food to raise wages and improve working conditions. In short, it has led a movement that recognizes the dignity of the people who harvest the food we eat, and rewards and protects their labor. ... On Friday in Capitol Hill, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis attended a press conference along with representatives of CIW and the world's largest food service company, Compass Group, to announce that the company will pay an extra 1.5 cents per pound of tomatoes that it purchases annually, with one cent per pound going directly to the farmworkers. Compass Group purchases over 10 million pounds of tomatoes every year, and serves 6 million meals at over 10,000 locations every day."
• Gretchen Morgenson, The Cost of Saving These Whales: "Because our government wouldn’t dream of calculating the hidden costs associated with the bailout binge — taxpayers might become even angrier than they already are — it is gratifying that the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal research group in Washington, has taken a stab at the task. .... Using data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Mr. Baker’s study found that the spread between the average cost at smaller banks and at larger institutions widened significantly after March 2008, when the United States government brokered the Bear Stearns rescue."
• GuideStar, 2009 GuidStar Nonprofit Compensation Report Just Published: "Findings reported in the executive summary include: Median compensation of females lagged behind that of males when considering comparable positions at similar organizations. Females held 56 percent of CEO positions at organizations with expenses of $1 million or less but only 36 percent at organizations with expenses of greater than $1 million. These numbers were comparable to 2006. Overall, women held 47 percent of the positions reported upon (an increase of 1 percentage point over 2006) but received only 35 percent of the total compensation."
• MDRC, Can Teacher Training in Classroom Management Make a Difference for Children's Experiences in Preschool?: ".... in survey after survey, teachers consistently emphasize their need for professional development and other supports to help them address children’s behavioral issues. ... The early results reported here are from the Newark demonstration, and they are well-aligned with findings from an earlier study of a similar demonstration, the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP). In brief, FOL and CSRP together provide evidence that the intervention: Improved teachers’ ability to effectively support children’s behavior and emotional development; Increased instructional time and created a positive climate for learning in classrooms; Reduced conflictual and acting-out behaviors by children; and Improved children’s ability to focus their attention, to curb their impulsivity, and to show greater engagement in the classroom."
  

The Matt Yglesias post that Shawn flags makes an important point, but I think it needs to be refined. Sure, moralism and sensational language could liven up progressive arguments, but doesn't everybody already know this? Everybody's read Lakoff and Western and all the pollsters. The problem is that they haven't quite hit on the right sales pitch.

What I think your typical pitch tends to overlook is that social concerns trump economic ones. Karl Polanyi articulates this idea best in The Great Transformation. Here he's discussing the ideas of Robert Owen, a British social reformer and urban planner(!) in the early 1800s:

But essentially, what he observed was true of town and village laborers alike, namely, that "they are at present in a situation infintely more degraded and miserable than they were before the introduction of those manufactories, upon the success of which their bare subsistence now depends." here again, he hit rock bottom, emphasizing not incomes but degradation and misery. And as the prime cause of this degradation he, rightly again, pointed to the dependence for bare subsistence on the factor. He grasped the fact that what appeared primarily as an economic problem was essentially a social one. In economic terms the worker was certainly exploited: he did not get in exchange that which was his due. But important though this was, it was far from all. In spite of exploitation, he might have been financilly better off than before. But a principle quite unfavorable to individual and general happiness was wreaking havoc with his social environment, his neighborhood, his standing in the community, his craft; in a word, with those relationships to nature and man in which his economic existence was formerly embedded. The Industrial Revolution was causing a social dislocation of stupendous proportions, and the problem of poverty was merely the economic aspect of this event

The point he's making is about social reality, but that's what political appeals are made of. In essence the usual pitch for health care defines the problem in economic terms- that health care is a good or service that's too expensive and not enough people who want it have it. But a more potent argument would define it as a social problem- that not having health care can be a degrading and alienating experience and that it's a barrier to inclusion in mainstream society. It both reflects and reinforces the breakdown of the national community, so it must be addressed.

I didn't read Polanyi for class, but the tension between community and development is a recurring theme in lots of my classes, and the deepest thinkers in planning all grapple with it. I think it's the thing that makes planning an interesting and complex field, because it's dedicated to both building up a sense of community and creating the economic improvements that threaten communities. So maybe if President Obama had a few more planners on staff...

• Matthew Yglesias, Grayson Breaks the Rules: "I think the real issue—and the real import—of Grayson’s statement is that it involved breaking one of the unspoken rules of modern American politics. The rule is that conservatives talk about their causes in stark, moralistic terms and progressives don’t. Instead, progressives talk about our causes in bloodless technocratic terms. .... There’s a semi-legitimate practical reason for this, namely the fact that substantially more people identify as conservatives than identify as liberals. Consequently, progressive politicians are at pains to describe their proposals as essentially pragmatic and non-ideological which doesn’t lend itself to moralism. That all makes sense as far as it goes, but I think there are some real limits to how far it does go. For one thing, it puts you at a permanent kind of rhetorical disadvantage. But for another thing, it’s just very hard to do big things without a certain amount of moralism. In particular, you really can’t talk about the climate change issue in a sensible way without mentioning the irreducible wrongness of residents of a large developed nation endangering the lives and livelihoods of a couple billion people in the developing world with our industrial activities."
• TAPPED, More American than the Hood: "I think Ta-Nehisi makes a larger point about American culture here: "There is a culture to being fat, and putting fresh veggies in the hood isn't enough to counter it. The culture is complicated--and its more American than it is hood. I would encourage people to think about all the negative ways we cope. The upper-class may not be fat, but in my experience, they know their way around the tequila bottle." Ok, but the thing is, most American cultural idiosyncrasies that adversely affect those without the financial resources to mitigate the results are "more American than they are hood," whether it's admiration of violence, sexism, materialism, cutthroat capitalism, or even poor eating habits. The hood just provides a convenient scapegoat, a way for the comfortable to remind themselves how much better they are than "those people." Everything that is hood is more American than hood. It's America without the pretense."
• Nancy Folbre, Valuing Unpaid Work Matters: "The movement of women into paid employment represents one of the most important labor force trends of the last 50 years. But as women increased their hours of paid work, they decreased their hours of unpaid work. While men began doing a bit more housework and child care, they didn’t take up the slack. As a result, the increases in G.D.P. that we have experienced since 1960 probably overstate improvements in our living standards. Sure, our family income went up, but we had to spend a larger portion of that income purchasing food away from home, housekeeping, child care and elder care services that were once provided outside the market. Our public policies continue to define economic welfare — and eligibility for public assistance — entirely in terms of family income. Yet there is a big difference in living standards among families with the same income but different amounts of time to devote to unpaid work."
  

From The Economy of Cities:

Earlier in this century, it was conventionally supposed by American philanthropists that poverty is caused by disease. Healthy people, it was reasoned, would be more productive, have more initiative, be more capable of helping themselves, than people in ill health. Poverty was analyzed as a vicious circle in which poverty leads to disease and disease reinforces poverty. Measures to combat disease turned out to be quite successful at combating disease, irrelevant for combating poverty. They helped lead to a situation that is now being diagnosed as a different vicious circle- poverty-overpopulation-poverty. To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is not the result of any processes; it is only the absence of heat. Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development. It can be overcome only if the relevant economic processes are in motion.

In a labor market approaching 10 percent unemployment, that's not a bad way to think about poverty.

• National Academies Press On-line Store, Swine Flu Microbe Plush Toy: "Soft and cuddly, this H1N1 Microbe is the only virus you'll want to give or receive this season. Made from polyester fiber. Recommended for ages 3 and up."
• New York Times, In Bad Times for Capitalism, Socialists in Europe Suffer: "Some American conservatives demonize President Obama’s fiscal stimulus and health care overhaul as a dangerous turn toward European-style Socialism — but it is Europe’s right, not left, that is setting its political agenda. Europe’s center-right parties have embraced many ideas of the left: generous welfare benefits, nationalized health care, sharp restrictions on carbon emissions, the ceding of some sovereignty to the European Union. But they have won votes by promising to deliver more efficiently than the left, while working to lower taxes, improve financial regulation, and grapple with aging populations. Europe’s conservatives, says Michel Winock, a historian at the Paris Institut d’Études Politiques, “have adapted themselves to modernity.” When Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Germany’s Angela Merkel condemn the excesses of the “Anglo-Saxon model” of capitalism while praising the protective power of the state, they are using Socialist ideas that have become mainstream, he said."
• Jonathan Cohn, Line of the Day: Debbie Stabenow: Via Wonkroom comes this back-and-forth at the Senate Finance hearings, between Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican, and Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat. The subject is requirements that all insurance policies cover certain benefits. KYL: "I don't need maternity care."STABENOW: "I think your mom probably did." I'm hard-pressed to think of a single exchange that better captures the sensibilities of our two political parties--or the principle of shared risk upon which universal coverage is based."
• Paul Krugman, Crowding In: "Under the kind of conditions we’re now facing, the main determinant of business investment is the state of the economy, as evidenced by the plunge in investment shown in the figure. This, in turn, means that anything that improves the state of the economy, including fiscal stimulus, leads to more investment, and hence raises the economy’s future potential. That is, under current conditions deficit spending doesn’t lead to crowding out [of private investment]— it leads to crowding in. In fact, you could argue that the worst thing we can do for future generations is NOT to run sufficiently large deficits right now. Things won’t always work this way. Eventually we’ll emerge from the liquidity trap, and the normal rules of economic prudence will reassert themselves. But we are not there, or anywhere close to there, right now.
  

• Ron Haskins, The Threat to Work: "Having worked on the welfare reform legislation and several of the expansions of work supports when I was a Hill staffer with the Ways and Means Committee, I vividly recall the optimism many of us felt about the strategy of requiring work and then supplementing low wages with work supports. But now we face a huge question: Will the jobs come back? In a future posting, I will discuss several ideas about how to fight this threat to the most successful anti-poverty policy the nation has yet devised."
• Theresa Ghilarducci, A Rice-Pudding Recession: "Investing in a rice pudding franchise? Sadly, what you learn in the popular culture and in entrepreneur classes is that if you can't get a job, buy one. A Rand study found over two-thirds of young black men want to start their own businesses compared to 63 percent of young white men."
• William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson, Helping Students Finish the 4-Year Run: "Student's choices of where to apply to college are enormously important. A surprisingly large number of students—especially those from poor families and those who are African-American or Hispanic—"undermatch." That is, they go to less demanding four-year institutions than they are qualified to attend, to two-year colleges, or to no college at all. For example, 59 percent of students in the bottom quartile of family income undermatch; 27 percent in the top quartile do so. In addition, 64 percent of students whose parents have no college education undermatch, compared with 41 percent of those whose parents have college degrees and 31 percent whose parents have graduate degrees (see Figure 3)."