Open Thread for Night Owls and Early Birds

Leslie Eaton at The New York Times is reporting Poor Are Lagging in Hurricane Aid From Mississippi:

Like the other Gulf Coast states battered by Hurricane Katrina, Mississippi was required by Congress to spend half of its billions in federal grant money to help low-income citizens trying to recover from the storm.

But so far, the state has spent $1.7 billion in federal money on programs that have mostly benefited relatively affluent residents and big businesses. The money has gone to compensate many middle- and upper-income homeowners, to aid utility companies whose equipment was damaged and to prop up the state’s insurance system.

Just $167 million, or about 10 percent of the federal money, has been spent on programs dedicated to helping the poor, mostly through a smaller grant program for lower-income homeowners.

And while that total will certainly increase, Mississippi has set aside just 23 percent of its $5.5 billion grant money — $1.25 billion — for these programs. About 37 percent of the residents of the state’s coast are low income, according to federal figures.

Sam Pizzigati points out in Deregulating the American Dream at Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:

Just 1 percent of Americans currently hold about half the financial wealth of the entire United States.

Meanwhile, notes Washington University sociologist Mark Rank, the nation' s bottom 60 percent hold less than 1 percent of that wealth, and 75 percent of Americans, sometime in their adult lives, can now expect to "experience a year either in poverty or near poverty." ...

If the United States keeps to its present course, Rank predicted last week at an insight-rich national conference on inequality in North Carolina, the nation could "begin to reflect the bifurcation patterns more typical of third-world countries," with the privileged opting to "physically separate themselves from the middle and bottom." ...

The good news? Inequality amounts to an unnatural disaster. Conscious political decisions have helped make the United States deeply unequal. Conscious political decisions can, by the same token, help undo that inequality.

From Mark Nord, Margaret Andrews, and Steven Carlson in the November 2007 release of the annual Household Food Security in the United States:

Eighty-nine percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2006, meaning that they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The remaining households (10.9 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year. About one-third of food insecure households (4.0 percent of all U.S. households) had very low food security—meaning that the food intake of one or more adults was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food. Prevalence rates of food insecurity and very low food security were essentially unchanged from those in 2005. The typical food-secure household spent 31 percent more on food than the typical food-insecure household of the same size and household composition. Just over half of all food-insecure households participated in one or more of the three largest Federal food and nutrition assistance programs during the month prior to USDA’s annual Food Security Survey.

Have you ever been poor? Are you still?