Last month, Pew Charitable Trusts published Defaulting on the Dream: States Respond to America’s Foreclosure Crisis, the first comprehensive report on each state’s efforts to respond to the crisis. Based on statistics obtained from the Center for Responsible Lending, the report states that one in 33 current U.S. homeowners will end up on foreclosure. For California, the number is 1 in 20. Uniquely, the report offers sobering statistics with respect to the ripple effect of the crisis, such as the number of neighboring homes in each state projected to experience devaluation in 2008 and 2009 - over 7.5 million in California. In terms of fixes or responses, the states are all over the map, so to speak. For instance, while some states, like California and Pennsylvania, have foreclosure intervention laws and regulations, others, such as Illinois and Ohio, also have statewide counseling services and hotlines. Some states, including Washington, Oregon and Texas, have none of the above. As the report predicts that there will be 1 million foreclosures in 2009 if homes values continue to fall at the current pace, it urges states to act now with aggressive laws that protect homeowners at risk against scams, and laws that reform underwriting and income verification standards. Pew also has posted on its webpage related facts sheets for each state.
In recent weeks there have been a spate of articles about media-averse Justice Scalia’s voluntarily going before the news cameras, most notably to appear this evening on “60 Minutes,” in which Justice Scalia contends he is conservative but not biased. This transitory media exposure, of course, serves to promote his new book: Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges, available tomorrow.
What folks may miss (or may have forgotten) amid this display of public promotion by Justice Scalia is that his co-author Bryan Garner — perhaps best known among lawyers as the current editor of Black’s Law Dictionary — previously interviewed all the sitting justices on essentially the same point, i.e., effective advocacy before the Nation’s highest court. All of Garner’s Interviews of United Supreme Court Justices are available free as video downloads.
An interesting counterpoint to all this media blitz is the newly issued study An Empirical Analysis of the Confirmation Hearings of the Justices of the Rehnquist Natural Court, published in Constitutional Commentary. As noted in the New York Times editorial How to Judge a Would-Be Justice, this study “looked at how nine long-serving justices answered Senate questions, and how they then voted on the court. While it does not say that any nominee was intentionally misleading, it still found a wide gap.”
Like you need more bad news. Well, here it is anyway: The California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) has published its latest, fifth edition of its primer Snapshot: Health Care Costs 101 (2008 Edition). It’s a free download offering general background on U.S. medical spending, with some detail about California, specifically. Although hardly news, it is the latest in any number of public reports demonstrating how, “if unchecked, how health care spending is projected to represent a staggering 19.5% of the country’s GOP by 2017.”
In a a State-by-State Analysis of Income Trends, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute has found: "The gap between the richest and poorest families…grew significantly in most states over the past two decades…In fact, the nation’s longstanding trend of growing inequality accelerated since the late 1990s as incomes fell for poor families in a number of states." There are also state-by-state factsheets and tables.
Education and Training for TANF Recipients: Opportunities and Challenges under the Final Rule explains the changes in the new rules that affect recipients’ access to education and training, and the actions that states will need to take in order to take advantage of these changes.
The CLASP report, Tax Credits and Public Benefits: Complementary Approaches to Supporting Low-Income Families concludes that tax credits and public benefits are complementary approaches, and policy makers do not need to choose between them. A review of the advantages and disadvantages of both mechanisms.
The three leading presidential candidates are now on record with a public commitment to address poverty and opportunity in the United States. This is in concert with growing state efforts and signals a dramatic turnaround in tackling poverty. Seizing the Moment: State Governments and the New Commitment to Reduce Poverty In America outlines those efforts and provides charts detailing action by policy area.
Another Mathematica practice brief on TANF and disabilities, “Creating Work Opportunities.” Assisting TANF Recipients Living with Disabilities to Obtain and Maintain Employment profiles three programs that use difference approaches —unpaid work experience, subsidized employment, and unsubsidized transitional employment — to create work opportunities for TANF recipients with a disabilities who have not been successful in finding competitive employment.
All three programs used specialized and comprehensive assessments, support for specialized treatment, intensive personal and employment support, and flexible and progressive paths to employment. Two programs have not been "rigorously studied," but the one that was doesn’t give great hope. Although participants in the New York program were significantly more likely to participate in work experience and job search activities and to find paid competitive employment, over the two-year period, the majority of program participants never worked and only a small portion worked at any point in time. The average quarterly employment for those assigned to the program was only about 3% higher than those not assigned, but program participants were significantly more likely to be sanctioned (32% vs. 8%!).
Conducting In-Depth Assessments, Assisting TANF Recipients Living with Disabilities to Obtain and Maintain Employment takes a look at 6 different state approaches to in depth disability assessments. Not surprisingly, the conclusion is that well-implemented assessments provide TANF recipients and the staff greater insight into a recipient’s disability and its influence on their home and work life, information which assists in crafting an employment plan that is within reach of the recipient. Other related briefs are Creating TANF and Vocational Rehabilitation Agency Partnerships, and Providing Specialized Personal and Work Support.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) has issued an update to its Out of Reach report which provides detailed metro-area and county specific data (e.g., Sacramento County) to illustrate the difficulty of low income individuals and families to afford rental housing. Not suprising, exacerbated by the foreclosure crisis, appropriate affordable rental housing remains “out of reach” for more than half of all renters in the United States in 2007 - 2008.