Minding the reality gap

Minding the Gap
Matt Asher - Probability and statistics blog

Officially, unemployment in the US is declining. It’s fallen from a high of 9.1% a couple years ago, to 7.8% in recent months. This would be good news, if the official unemployment rate measured unemployment, in the everyday sense of the word. It doesn’t. The technical definition of “U3″ unemployment, the most commonly reported figure, excludes people who’ve given up looking for work, those who’ve retired early due to market conditions, and workers so part time they clock in just one hour per week.

Most critically, unemployment excludes the 14 million American on disability benefits, a number which has quadrupled over the last 30 years. If you include just this one segment of the population in the official numbers, the unemployment rate would double. On Saturday, This American Life devoted their entire hour to an exploration of this statistic. Russ Robert’s, who’s podcast I’ve recommend in the past, discussed the same topic last year. Despite the magnitude of the program and the scale of the change, these are the only outlets I know of to report on the disability number, and on the implications it has for how we interpret the decline in U3 unemployment.

Targeting the number, not the reality

Statistics, in the sense of numerical estimates, are measures which attempt to condense the complex world of millions of people into a single data point. Honest statistics come with margins of error (the most honest indicate, at least qualitatively, a margin of error for their margin of error). But even the best statistical measures are merely symptoms of some underlying reality; they reflect some aspect of the reality as accurately as possible. The danger with repeated presentations of any statistic (as in the quarterly, monthly, and even hourly reporting of GDP, unemployment, and Dow Jones averages), is that we start to focus on this number by itself, regardless of the reality it was created to represent. It’s as if the patient has a high fever and all anyone talks about is what the thermometer says. Eventually the focus becomes, “How do we get the thermometer reading down?” All manner of effort goes into reducing the reading, irrespective of the short, and certainly long-term, health of the patient. When politicians speak about targeting unemployment figures, this is what they mean, quite literally. Their goal is to bring down the rate that gets reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number discussed on television and in every mainstream source of media.

Politicians focus on high profile metrics, and not the underlying realities, because the bigger and more complicated the system, the easier it is to tweak the method of measurement or its numeric output, relative to the difficulty of fixing the system itself. Instead of creating conditions which allow for growth in employment (which would likely require a reduction in politicians’ legislative and financial powers), the US has quietly moved a huge segment of its population off welfare, which counts against unemployment, and into disability and prisons — the incarcerated also don’t count in U3, whether they are slaving away behind bars or not.

How metrics go bad

Over time, all social metrics diverge from the reality they were created to reflect. Sometimes this is the result of a natural drift in the underlying conditions; the metric no longer captures the same information it had in the past, or no longer represents the broad segment of society it once did. For example, the number of physical letters delivered by the postal service no longer tracks the level of communication between citizens.

Statistics and the reality they were designed to represent are also forced apart through deliberate manipulation. Official unemployment figures are just one example of an aggressively targeted/manipulated metric. Another widely abused figure is the official inflation rate, or core Consumer Price Index. This measure excludes food and energy prices, for the stated reason that they are highly volatile. Of course, these commodities represent a significant fraction of nearly everyone’s budget, and their prices can be a leading indicator of inflation. The CPI also uses a complex formula to calculate “hedonics,” which mark down reported prices based on how much better the new version of a product is compared to the old one (do a search for “let them eat iPads”).

I don’t see it as a coincidence that unemployment and inflation figures are among the most widely reported and the most actively manipulated. In fact, I take the following to be an empirical trend so strong I’m willing to call it a law: the greater the visibility of a metric, the more money and careers riding on it, the higher the likelihood it will be “targeted.” In this light, the great scandal related to manipulation of LIBOR, a number which serves as pivot point for trillions of dollars in contracts, is that the figure was assumed to be accurate to begin with.

Often the very credibility of the metric, built up over time by its integrity and ability to reflect an essential feature of the underlying reality, is cashed in by those who manipulate it. Such was the case with the credit ratings agencies: after a long run of prudent assessments, they relaxed their standards for evaluating mortgage bundles, cashing in on the windfall profits generated by the housing bubble.

Why we don’t see the gaps

It might seem like the disconnect between a statistic and reality would cause a dissonance that, once large enough to be clearly visible, would lead to reformulation of the statistic, bringing it back in line with the underlying fundamentals. Clearly there are natural pressures in that direction. For example, people laid off at the beginning of a recession are unlikely to believe that the recovery has begun until they themselves go back to work. Their skepticism of the unemployment figure erodes its credibility. Unfortunately, two powerful forces work against the re-alignment of metric and reality: the first related to momentum and our blindness to small changes, the second having to do with the effects of reflexivity and willful ignorance.

In terms of inertia, humans have a built-in tendency to believe that what has been will continue to be. More sharply, the longer a trend has continued, the longer we presume it will continue — if it hasn’t happened yet, how could it happen now? Laplace’s rule of succession is our best tool for estimating probabilities under the assumption of a constant generating process, one that spits out a stream of conditionally independent (exchangeable) data points. But the rule of succession fails utterly, at times spectacularly, when the underlying conditions change. And underlying conditions always change!

These changes, when they come slowly, pass under our radar. Humans are great at noticing large differences from one day to the next, but poor at detecting slow changes over long periods of time. Ever walked by an old store with an awning or sign that’s filthy and falling apart? You wonder how the store owner could fail to notice the problem, but there was never any one moment when it passed from shiny and new to old and decrepit. If you think you’d never be as blind as that shop keeper, look down at your keyboard right now. As with our environment, if the gap between statistic and reality changes slowly, over time, we may not see the changes. Meanwhile, historical use of the statistic lends weight to it’s credibility, reducing the chance that we’d notice or question the change — it has to be right, it’s what we’ve always used!

The perceived stability of slowly changing systems encourages participants to depend on or exploit it. This, in turn, can create long term instabilities as minor fluctuations trigger extreme reactions on the part of participants. Throughout the late 20th century and the first years of the 21st, a large number of investors participated in the “Carry Trade,” a scheme which depended on the long term stability of the Yen, and of the differential between borrowing rates in Japan and interest rates abroad. When conditions changed in 2008, investors “unwound” these trades at full speed, spiking volatility and encouraging even more traders to exit their positions as fast as they could.

These feedback loops are an example of reflexivity, the tendency in some complex systems for perception (everyone will panic and sell) to affect reality (everyone panics and sells). Reflexivity can turn statistical pronouncements into self-fulfilling prophecies, at least for a time. The belief that inflation is low, if widespread, can suppress inflation in and of itself! If I believe that the cash in my wallet and the deposits in my bank account will still be worth essentially the same amount tomorrow or in a year, then I’m less likely to rush out to exchange my currency for hard goods. Conversely, once it’s clear that my Bank of Zimbabwe Bearer Cheques have a steeply declining half-life of purchasing power, then I’m going to trade these paper notes for tangible goods as quickly as possible, nominal price be damned!


Don’t look down

If perception can shape reality, then does the gap between reality and statistic matter? Clearly, the people who benefit most from the status quo do their best to avoid looking down, lest they encourage others to do the same. More generally, though, can we keep going forward so long as we don’t look down, like Wile E. Coyote chasing the road runner off a cliff?

The clear empirical answer to that questions is: “Yes, at least for a while.” The key is that no one knows how long this while can last, nor is it clear what happens when the reckoning comes. Despite what ignorant commentators might have said ex post facto, by 2006 there was wide understanding that housing prices were becoming un-sustainably inflated. In 2008, US prices crashed back down to earth. North of the border, in Canada, the seemingly equally inflated housing market stumbled, shrugged, then continued along at more level, but still gravity-defying trajectory.

The high cost of maintaining the facade

Even as the pressures to close the gap grow along with its size, the larger the divergence between official numbers and reality, the greater the pressures to keep up the facade. If the fictional single entity we call “the economy” appears to be doing better, politicians get re-elected and consumers spend more money. When the music finally stops, so too will the gravy-train for a number of vested interests. So the day of reckoning just keeps getting worse and worse as more and more resources go into maintaining the illusion, into reassuring the public that nothing’s wrong, into extending, pretending, and even, if need be, shooting the messenger.

It’s not just politicians and corporations who become invested in hiding and ignoring the gap. We believe official statistics because we want to believe them, and we act as if we believe them because we believe that others believe them. We buy houses or stocks at inflated prices on the hope that someone else will buy them from us at an even more inflated price.

My (strong) belief is that most economic and political Black Swans are the result of mass delusion, based on our faith in the quality and meaning of prominently reported, endlessly repeated, officially sanctioned statistics. The illustration at the beginning of this post comes from a comic I authored about a character who makes his living off just this gap between official data and the reality on the ground, a gap that always closes, sooner or later, making some rich and toppling others.

Criminalizing the poor: from welfare to cellfare

RT | Christopher Petrella
24 February, 2012


On August 22, 1996 President Bill Clinton signed into law his now infamous Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act thereby “end[ing] welfare as we have come to know it.” The Act replaced Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). TANF establishes a lifetime limit of 60 months (5 years) for federal assistance, mandates that single parents participate in work activities for an average of 30 hours per week, and caps federal block grant contributions to states at $16.6 billion per year. (As a result of inflation the real value of the TANF block grant has already fallen by 28%.)

And despite few fluctuations in the poverty rate since TANF supplanted AFCD, the participation rate among eligible families has plummeted by 52% since1995. http://democrats.waysandmeans.house.gov/press/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=11053

Over the same time period—and despite flat to declining crime rates— the U.S. prison and jail population has increased by 44%. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1278

Perhaps a quickly expanding prison population is precisely the unspoken foundation upon which “welfare to workfare” rests. We haven’t “ended welfare;” instead we’ve invisiblized it by shifting its beneficiaries from the public square to the prison yard.

The atrophy of the social welfare state and the growth of the penal state represent a double criminalization of poverty. Considering TANF/AFDC data alongside trends in incarceration is necessary for rethinking the role of the state in provisioning basic social services. The transition from welfare to workfare and the proliferation of bodies behind bars taken together “work to marginalize populations—by forcing them off the public aid rolls, on the one side, and holding them under lock, on the other—and eventually pushing them into the peripheral [and deeply precarious] sectors of the labor market.” http://loicwacquant.net/assets/Papers/WEDDINGWORKFAREPRISONFARE-FINAL.pdf

The shared historical roots and political convergences of the assistantial and penitential functions of the state are further validated by the fact that the “social profile” of their respective beneficiaries is uncannily similar. For instance, 50% of former AFDC recipients throughout the early 1990s lived at or below half of the poverty line. Today, 65% of inmates in the United States inhabit the same category.
http://loicwacquant.net/assets/Papers/CRAFTINGNEOLIBERALSTATE-pub.pdf

Both populations, as well, are disproportionately composed of people of color. In1995, 37.2% and 20.7% of AFDC recipients were Black or Latin@, respectively, http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/ofa/character/FY95/t10.htm

and in 2010 40% and 20% of state and federal inmates were Black and Latin@, respectively.
http://www.cjcj.org/files/racial_disproportionality.pdf .

Finally, 44% of AFDC recipients in 1994 had not finished high school compared to 41% of those incarcerated in 2003, the most recent year for which data is available. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/ecp.pdf

The relationship between the sudden but substantial growth in containment justified through the rhetoric of social dishonor and emergence of workfare as a condition of federal subsidy represents an intra-State struggle over its basic social function.

Simply asked, what is the role of the State? And further, what ought to be the role of the State? (Should the role of the State, as neoliberals contend, be limited to safeguarding the so-called “free market” and protecting contracts???)

The double criminalization of poverty marked by ...

1. reducing public aid to low income people of color (disproportionately) and  
2. locking them up (disproportionately) for being poor...

is evidence that the State is trying to re-architecting itself on our watch.

Further, the double criminalization of poverty serves an important ideological function in that it allows the corporate class to attribute widespread unemployment and poverty to personal moral depravity instead of material deprivation. The poor are not depraved; they’re deprived of the basic social resources to secure a dignified standard of living. In the end, the survival of any “criminal State” hinges on its ability to individualize criminality so as to divert attention from its complicitous role in its production.

Saving the Warfare-Welfare State

The difference is over means not ends.
Sheldon Richman
April 15, 2011

Why does everyone think Washington is plagued by excessive partisanship? The contest over how to address the fiscal debacle says otherwise: Both divisions of the uniparty (Democrat and Republican) agree that the warfare-welfare state must be saved. It’s the means not the end that divides them.

Rep. Paul Ryan, who leads the Republican side, declares that his goal in seeking a balanced budget (someday) is to save the three pillars of the welfare state—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—for “our children’s generation.” “I support these missions,” he says. He would “voucherize” Medicare and give states discretionary Medicaid block grants because, he says, the alternative is insolvency. He would maintain Social Security, while permitting people under 55 to put one-third of their Social Security taxes into government-guaranteed accounts. (They would still have to pay current retirees’ Social Security benefits.) His substitute for Obamacare would give a cash subsidy—he uses the Washington gobbledygook “refundable tax credit”—to “[ensure] universal access to affordable health insurance.”

So, although couched in the rhetoric of liberty and self-reliance, Ryan’s plan aims at saving the welfare state from itself, while giving insurance and investment companies more of a role, not to mention a cut of the taxpayers’ money.

Growth Path

Likewise, Ryan’s plan would leave military spending—misleadingly called “defense” spending—on its growth path, even though it has doubled in the last decade. With the government spending hundreds of billions of dollars in three overt and several covert wars, Ryan shows no inclination to question the global military policy that milks the taxpayers, wreaks destruction abroad, and creates a desire for revenge.

As former Reagan administration Pentagon official Lawrence Korb noted, “Apparently Ryan was taken in by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s claims that he has already proposed $178 billion in savings in defense spending. These were not real cuts. Gates plowed $100 billion of his ‘savings’ back into the budget for other programs while the remaining $78 billion merely reduced projected growth in the defense budget.”

Ryan’s package has other ingredients, such as cutting the top rate for the individual and corporate income tax to 25 percent, while broadening the tax base. He would also reportedly trim some corporate and agricultural welfare, but he leaves the principle in place.

Ryan thus reveals himself as not as one who has rethought the U.S. government’s current domestic and global missions and understands the need for a radical revision, but rather as one who seeks to fortify those missions by preventing insolvency and forced liquidation. The ruling establishment would have little reason to be concerned if Ryan prevailed.

Obama Response

In response, President Obama has now offered an outline — not much detail yet — of an alternative plan to cut the deficit, however, again the differences with Ryan are over means not ends. He too seeks to preserve the warfare-welfare state but would do so with fewer spending cuts than Ryan, higher taxes on the wealthy, an end to the business tax preferences he dislikes (while keeping those he approves of), and no operational changes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

On defense, Obama calls for the elimination of Pentagon waste (edgy!), however, every president does that and it never amounts to much. (The Department of Defense is routinely unable to account for billions of dollars.) Obama says the government will “have to conduct a fundamental review of America’s missions,” but how serious can he be? He’s just led NATO forces into Libya on an undefined, open-ended military adventure, while overt and covert wars continue to rage throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. He shows no willingness to rethink the unipartisan global-policeman policy that accounts for so much of the fiscal burden (over a trillion a year) and creates the need for bloated and costly “homeland security” that undermines our liberty. As Korb says, “The Obama administration already plans to spend 20 percent more on defense than was spent on defense during the Bush administration.”

Satisfying the Base

Thus we see Obama’s basic agreement with Ryan’s wing of the uniparty, though the latter would rely on the tax-funded “private” sector more than the former would. Of course each side highlights the differences to make them appear to be matters of kind rather than degree or method. This way each can keep its base rhetorically satisfied (or try). Obama’s team talks about the need for the rich to sacrifice to the middle class and poor, while Ryan’s team counters that the private sector is where the action should be. Democrats accuse Republicans of wanting to end Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (they don’t), while Republicans accuse Democrats of being Marxian socialists (they’re not).

But here’s the thing: Both seek to retain the fundamental status quo in which the State parcels out favors to reigning interests while providing succor to the vulnerable in a combined spirit of charity and fear. Fear of what? In the case of the elderly, fear of their political clout at the ballot box; in the case of those shut out the economic system because of lousy government schools, occupational licensing, and cartelization via the subsidy and regulatory regime, fear of a frustration that could turn into unrest.

Globally the Obama side emphasizes the supposed humanitarian rationale for military intervention while his internecine rivals emphasize the security rationale. But they agree on the premise — that it is the proper job of the U.S. government to police the world, at least where there is oil and other things coveted by the ruling elite.

Thus The Charade continues.

"Poor people with money should be outlaws" say Minnesota Republicans

By Staff | Monday March 21, 2011

 

St. Paul, MN – Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month. This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.

On March 15, Angel Buechner of the Welfare Rights Committee testified in front of the House Health and Human Services Reform Committee on House File 171. Buechner told committee members, “We would like to address the provision that makes it illegal for MFIP [one of Minnesota’s welfare programs] families to withdraw cash from the cash portion of the MFIP grant - and in fact, appears to make it illegal for MFIP families to have any type of money at all in their pockets. How do you expect people to take care of business like paying bills such as lights, gas, water, trash and phone?”

House File 171 would make it so that families on MFIP - and disabled single adults on General Assistance and Minnesota Supplemental Aid - could not have their cash grants in cash or put into a checking account. Rather, they could only use a state-issued debit card at special terminals in certain businesses that are set up to accept the card.

The bill also calls for unconstitutional residency requirements, not allowing the debit card to be used across state lines and other provisions that the Welfare Rights Committee and others consider unacceptable.

Buechner testified, “We’ll leave you with this. It is not right to punish a whole group because of the supposed actions of a few. You in this room could have a pretty rough time if that was the case. It is not right to stigmatize and dehumanize women living the hard life of trying to raise children while living 60% below the poverty level. It is not right to use racist, bumper-sticker hate to inflict human misery for political gain.”

Poverty's Penalty

(When you are so poor you can barely afford to pay for food for your family and gas for your car so that you can drive to interviews, things like your insurance can lapse. I know in Texas, our mass transit system isn't as effective as other states--it is said you have to drive everywhere--so driving is paramount, even if your coverage lapses. If your insurance lapses before your inspection expires, they won't inspect your car. If you are driving to your interview and get pulled over by the police for an expired inspection, they'll discover you don't have insurance and arrest you on the spot. That is an example of the "poverty penalty." You have to drive to your job interview to get the job to pay you the money to get your car legal. But you are penalized for it. You pay more to be poor. But in California, if you're on welfare, you don't even get your 4th Amendment rights anymore!--jef)

***

by Christopher Brauchli | Monday, September 6, 2010 by CommonDreams.org

". . .[W]ith liberty and justice for all." 

~The Pledge of Allegiance

Opinions from Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal are of interest to a variety of people. Lawyers read them in order to learn what the law is with respect to issues that have been ruled on by the Courts in the Circuits in which they live. The poor, who live within the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, read them to learn how their constitutional rights differ from those of the well off. They were reminded of this in August by the same court that had tutored them three years earlier in the case of Rochio Sanchez v. County of San Diego.

Sanchez was decided by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in April 2007 and the U.S. Supreme Court announced in November of that year that it would not review the court's decision. The case stands for the proposition that it is OK to search people's homes without a warrant. Before my readers rush to add strong locks to all their doors I must reassure them. The case has no applicability to my readers. Their homes are protected by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that bans unreasonable searches and seizures. The people in California whose homes are not protected by the Fourth Amendment are those on welfare.

In 1997, the San Diego District Attorney came up with "Project 100%." Under the program those wanting to participate in the county welfare program must consent to unannounced visits from members of the Public Affairs Fraud Division who walk through the house looking in drawers, medicine cabinets, etc. to make sure no crimes are being committed. The practical consequences are that welfare recipients are forced to trade the protection afforded by the Fourth Amendment for welfare benefits. That is not, of course, how the judge who wrote for the majority sees it. It is how Judge Harry Pregerson, writing for the dissenters, sees it. He said: "This case is nothing less than an attack on the poor. San Diego's program strips these individuals of their rights of privacy. . . . This is especially atrocious in light of the fact that we do not require similar intrusions into the homes and lives of others who receive government entitlements. The government does not search through the closets and medicine cabinets of farmers receiving subsides."

The poor have now learned of yet another way in which the protection given many by the Fourth Amendment does not benefit them. It has to do with curtilage. That is the area around the home and includes such things as porches, driveways, front walks, etc. For 4th Amendment purposes curtilage was treated the same as the inside of the house. A warrant was needed to search the curtilage. The case of U.S. v. Pineda-Moreno in which a final decision was made in August changed that.

Pineda-Moreno addressed the question of whether the police can come onto a driveway at night without a warrant and attach a tracking device to the resident's car. The answer given by the 9th Circuit court is that it's OK. Judge Kozinski, one of the dissenters in the earlier case wrote a dissent this time around.

He began saying: " Having previously decimated the protections the Fourth Amendment accords to the home itself. . . . Our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home's curtilage . . . . 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last." He observed that the majority justified its holding by saying that delivery people, children, etc. could use the driveway and sidewalk to get to the front door and, therefore, the resident had no expectation of privacy there. He observed that people with gated houses, electric fences, etc. were unaffected by the ruling since the general public cannot get near their curtilage. Addressing the insensitivity of the majority to the plight of the poor he said: "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist. No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges. . . . The everyday problems of people who live in poverty are not close to our hearts and minds because that's not how we and our friends live. Yet poor people are entitled to privacy, even if they can't afford all the gadgets of the wealthy for ensuring it. . . . [T]he constitution doesn't prefer the rich over the poor. . . . The panel's breezy opinion is troubling on a number of grounds, not least among them its unselfconscious cultural elitism. . . . Today's decision is but one more step down the gloomy path the current Judiciary has chosen to follow with regard to the liberties protected by the Fourth Amendment. Sadly, I predict that there will be many more such decisions to come." Sadly, given the proclivities of today's Supreme Court, he's probably right.

Budget Genocide Sweeps Across the Nation

(This article will go against the grain for some of you. Sorry...but it's too easy to blame poor people for being poor. That they alone are responsible for their situation. It's not true in most cases.--jef)

~~~o~~~

Budget Genocide Sweeps Across the Nation
Thursday 15 April 2010
by: Lisa Gray–Garcia

Thousands of poor people of color face hunger, illness, death and homelessness due to welfare, housing and health care budget cuts across the nation.

How long does it take to kill the spirit of 7,000 people? How long does it take to forget about 7,000 people? Or 600 people, 10,000 or 22,000 people? There are 7,000 residents of Alameda County facing hunger, desperation and death in April when their general assistance (GA) (welfare) benefits are cut off; 10,500 people face homelessness in New York due to cuts to Section 8. In 2009, 600 people were cut off of GA in Salt Lake City, Utah, and 22,000 recipients of GA in Minnesota were denied access to even the most meager health benefits.

So, why does hardly anyone care?

Perhaps, because people believe the lies perpetuated about poor people barely surviving on welfare and housing subsidies everyday. The lie that we are all substance users; that we are "lazy"; that we are criminals "cheating the system"; that Section 8 is free housing as opposed to "affordable based on your income; that welfare is "free money" as opposed to a loan, which we are expected to repay; or that we don't work hard at below minimum wage jobs, like cleaning the streets or cleaning buses.

Actually, welfare, Medi-Cal and Section 8 recipients are low-waged and no-waged laborers, unemployed construction workers, domestic workers, secretaries, waiters, dry cleaners, day laborers, artists, musicians, gardeners, child care workers, mothers, fathers, daughters and sons - as a matter of fact, we are you.

My mother and I barely survived on the little bit of nothing called welfare for much of my life. As an adult caring for my mama, an African, Puerto Rican, survivor of abusive, racist foster homes and orphanages, who struggled for years to get an education by any means necessary while working as a domestic laborer, until she became disabled and unable to work. After living outside and in our car throughout my childhood, and later incarcerated for that crime of poverty (it's illegal to be houseless in the US), I paid a portion of our rent with the meager $341.00 the welfare system loaned me. It kept me and my disabled mama housed for over a year before we were gentrified out of our low rent apartment.

I was told several times by two of my more abusive caseworkers while on welfare that I was a drain on society and not worth the ground on which I was standing. When the welfare (de)reform bills were signed and all welfare recipients began being fast-tracked into a job, any job, I was being illogical to conceptualize of myself as a journalist or writer, and needed to get enrolled in a 30-day janitorial or secretarial training programs.

With every threat by my welfare worker, my mother and I tried to work harder at our unlicensed, street-based, art micro-business to apply for endless loans we were turned down for, to work 12- and 18-hour days trying to sell products whether the market would bear or not. In the end, the adage that it takes money to make money is sooo true, we could never get ahead, much less fed, and we always ended up back on some type of welfare, hated, misunderstood and criminalized.

My mama is an indigenous Taina, a tribe of the Caribbean, thought like many tribes across the globe to be completely destroyed and annihilated, taken down by countless colonizers and empires, lands stolen, natural resources raped, and robbed of her ancestors until all that was left were a destroyed people, and her an unwanted, poor child of color.

Many of the folks who are facing cuts to meager benefit crumbs are indigenous people, people of diasporas, colonizers destruction and oppressors domination, war, globalization, racism, violence and the violence of poverty. Long ago, taken from their lands of origin, their cultures, their deep structures, their power, they are brought eagerly into the arms of the inhuman systems of capitalism and consumerism, where if you don't have some capital or capitalist in your corner, you quickly become the product, either of the nonprofit industrial complex (a client) or the prison industrial complex (an inmate)

The Scarcity Model

The history of welfare and housing subsidies in the US is a racist, classist tale of the deserving versus undeserving poor scarcity model. From the beginning, welfare and subsidized housing were only meant for some people, "the deserving poor" white, married women whose husbands were killed in the war. If you were anything outside of that racist norm, you were considered pathological, broken, aberrant.

Why was it important to set up the system like this? So an institutionally racist US corporate media could create a web of lies, and a racist US society would believe them, and then could look away when one fell through the cracks and became hungry, houseless or sick. The scarcity model is already set up to be cut/pulled/rescinded as it's based on how few people we can support, rather than who needs support.

"It's going to cost the City so much more to have all the people sick, and not be able to get treatment," Johnny Longtree, an indigenous poverty scholar and Poor News Network (PNN) reporter from Minnesota said, speaking with me about Minnesota's proposed cuts last year.

In every US city and state fighting these inhumane cuts, tireless advocates, researchers and lawyers for the poor present their meticulously gathered statistics on why acts of budget genocide to housing, welfare and services should never happen, how they will cost the cities and states so much more in lost revenue, overwhelm existent strapped services and cause the illness and death of thousands of people. National studies like Without Housing (Western Regional Advocacy Project 2010) directly correlates the connection between the increase of homelessness, criminalization and hunger with the drastic cuts to housing and social services budgets across the nation. And, yet, the deadly lie of the scarcity model prevails.

I say lie, because, contrary to corporate media perpetuated lies, there is enough money for everyone. It is more myth making to act like there is only a little bit to go around. It is a myth promoted by corporate government and corporate media, which have already stolen our collective resources, consistently silenced our voices and want to keep all of the stolen resources in exactly the unjust place they now exist, a few people's pockets.

Hoarding and Cluttering Capital

A capitalistic system leads to the obsessive hoarding of cash and resources, and as all people afflicted with hoarding and clutterering illness will attest to, once you begin hoarding, it's very hard to stop. Once the corporations, corporate governments and legislators begin collecting corporate kick-downs, they can't stop.

This inhuman system that encourages the obsessive hoarding and cluttering of resources seems insane to indigenous cultures like the Malawi people who believe that if I have met you once, you are related to me and I am responsible for your well-being. A culture rooted in interdependence and care giving views people who hoard resources as having something wrong with them, as they understand that sharing is key to the survival of all people, rather than just some people.

The lies and greedy agendas of capitalism have led myself and many of my fellow indigenous and poor revolutionaries to launch, "I am not the lie," a series of testimonies and first-person narratives, which will demystify the lies told about poor folks on welfare, low-wage and no-wage workers, immigrants, subsidized-housing residents, and many other communities consistently misunderstood and disrespected. As well, many indigenous-people-led organizations have begun to look into the roots of budget lies and decades and generations of resource theft of people and cities. From these historical to present investigations, several of us have begun to implement the UN declaration on Indigenous people, a powerful, pro-active document that frames the reclaiming of stolen resources and land to the colonization of people and land.

Many of the nationwide Take Back The Land advocates and actions by many grassroots organizations also act as resistance to the lies of the budget cuts, corporate loan scams, billion dollar bailouts (corporate welfare) and rampant real estate speculation. In the Bay Area, a group has just formed called Revenue for All, which is promoting a taxation movement for all.

So, as over 17,000 people face starvation and homelessness in Northern California and New York, and countless others across the nation affected by these acts of budget genocide, I wonder what it would mean if we began challenging the scarcity models presented as fact by our legislators and began to re-envision another type of budget based on sharing with all rather than sharing with a few; and I wonder what it mean if no one had a lie to lean on about why I don't need to care about my fellow human. Perhaps then, we as a capitalized, consumerist, self-centered culture would have to look at ourselves and our own greed, so we could all resist this lie called the budget cut and realize there is enough for all of us to not only survive, but to thrive.