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Link Biscuits: 18 February 2010

Submitted by Shawn Fremstad on Thu, 02/18/2010 - 11:10
  • 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.’ ”"