Every Other Year.......
I had Bandit to the vet the day after 4th of July. The vet asked, "How did Bandit do with the fireworks last night?" I replied, "Well, every other year it hasn't bothered him and it did last night." The vet
Societal Trends...The Good News..... Job Full Recovery Since Recession.. Sort of....
The Star Tribune reports today, "Propelled by a burst of hiring in August, Minnesota has finally recaptured all the jobs it lost during the Great Recession. Employers added 12,200 positions last
month, the state reported Thursday, with significant gains in education
and retail.
Unemployment ticked down to 5.1 percent, well below the national average
of 7.3 percent. The recession and recovery have shifted
the mix. Health care, private education and back-end office jobs have
proliferated. But gains in many other fields have been
tepid, and key middle-class jobs in construction and manufacturing are
still missing. “A lot of the job mix that we see now compared to 2008 would be shifted towards generally lesser-paying occupations,” Hine said. Minnesota had a near-record number of job openings this summer, and good jobs are available, but the median wage offer fell to $12.50 an hour in July, more of the openings were part time and the number of temporary jobs has surged in recent months." So more jobs.... but, they pay less.
Unemployment ticked down to 5.1 percent, well below the national average
of 7.3 percent. The recession and recovery have shifted
the mix. Health care, private education and back-end office jobs have
proliferated. But gains in many other fields have been
tepid, and key middle-class jobs in construction and manufacturing are
still missing. “A lot of the job mix that we see now compared to 2008 would be shifted towards generally lesser-paying occupations,” Hine said. Minnesota had a near-record number of job openings this summer, and good jobs are available, but the median wage offer fell to $12.50 an hour in July, more of the openings were part time and the number of temporary jobs has surged in recent months." So more jobs.... but, they pay less. Family Trends....Why does it seem so hard for families to "get ahead"?
So, based on the job data above, data analysis from Pew Research Center makes more sense, "On Tuesday the Census Bureau released its annual trove of data on income, poverty and health insurance in 2012. Here were some of the key findings on household income:New data show that median household income has stagnated for the longest period since the government began collecting such data in 1967.
In 2012 the median household income was $51,017, still below the pre-recession 2007 level ($55,627) and also below the all-time peak level reached in 1999 ($56,080). So the typical American household had 9% less income in 2012 than it did 13 years earlier (all figures adjusted for inflation). The 2012 level is just above where it had stood as of 1995 ($50,978)." These are staggering statistics. How does our extension programming reflect this phenomenon?
Impact on Individuals...Poverty undermines cognitive ability
Star Tribune editorial today states...."Liberals tend to blame poverty on economic and
political systems rigged to benefit the well-off. Conservatives tend to
blame poverty on the disorganized lives of the poor themselves. New
research on the brain published last month in the journal Science
concurs that poor people often make poor decisions about their lives —
but they do so because they’re poor. The human brain has only so much
bandwidth, the study explains. That’s why talking on your cellphone
while driving is such a bad idea. It’s why air traffic controllers
preoccupied with preventing a midair collision neglect other flights. In
a similar fashion, poverty imposes a heavy cumulative load on the poor,
so heavy that there’s too little brainpower left over to do the things
that might raise their circumstances. What the researchers uncovered wasn’t stress in a clinical sense, but
the inability to clear mental space to cope with matters other than
scarcity, they said. The results were especially troubling, they said,
because a narrower cognitive bandwidth is likely to exacerbate
tendencies that the poor already exhibit, including less use of
preventive health care, careless work habits and less-attentive
parenting. The authors emphasized that they were not blaming the poor,
but merely describing the effects that poverty imposes. Poverty has stymied U.S. policymakers for Again, how do we take such information into our educational program planning, objectives, expected outcomes?decades. President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” in the 1960s helped the elderly, thanks to Medicare, and stabilized many poor families. But it didn’t stamp out the problem."
How does public policy respond? Some hear "Every Other Year" Differently...
Again, the Star Tribune reports today, "U.S. House Republicans
approved a plan Thursday that would scale back spending on the food
stamp program, eliminating food aid for about 32,000 Minnesotans.
Over the next 10 years, the bill would cut $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Republican lawmakers said the bill is designed to make sure that the unemployed try to support themselves rather than rely on government benefits.In Minnesota, the number of SNAP participants has increased about 90 percent in the past five years, rising from 289,000 to 550,000. Nationally, participation has increased 70 percent over that same period."
We all have access to the information I have provided in this blog today.. yet, we all hear it differently.
Over the next 10 years, the bill would cut $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Republican lawmakers said the bill is designed to make sure that the unemployed try to support themselves rather than rely on government benefits.In Minnesota, the number of SNAP participants has increased about 90 percent in the past five years, rising from 289,000 to 550,000. Nationally, participation has increased 70 percent over that same period."
We all have access to the information I have provided in this blog today.. yet, we all hear it differently.
