Veterans’ Healthcare: A Workers’ Comp System That Actually Works [feedly]

Veterans' Healthcare: A Workers' Comp System That Actually Works
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2018/11/05/veterans-healthcare-a-workers-comp-system-that-actually-works/

Most American workers who get injured on the job or develop an occupational disease soon become familiar with the inadequacies and injustices of our fifty state system of workers' comp. Private employers fight their claims. Rehabilitation services are fragmented and managed by private insurers. If they're unable to work and lose their original job-based health coverage, even workers who've been  approved for treatment for specific work-related injuries or illnesses can't pay their other medical bills. .

The situation is very different for the nine million men and women who qualify for medical benefits from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). The VHA—much under attack these days by President Trump and Republicans in Congress–functions as a federal workers' comp system for former members of the military with service-related ailments. While vets' medical problems are not always recognized as quickly as they should be, once a vet is in the VHA system, any single malady of the mind or body makes them eligible for any other kind of treatment they need in the future–from hip replacements to cancer surgery or hospice care.

Eligible veterans end up on an island of socialized medicine within our larger for-profit healthcare industry. Like residents of the UK covered by the National Health Service, VHA patients gain access to an integrated network of public hospitals and clinics, employing doctors, nurses, and therapists who are salaried not paid on a "fee for service" basis. About a third of the VHA's 300,000 staff members are veterans themselves, which helps create a unique culture of solidarity between patients and providers that has no counter-part in U.S. private sector medicine.

The VHA has a predominantly poor and working-class patient population because that's who enlists in our professional armed forces these days. But military work also exposes non-combat veterans to injuries or illnesses like those suffered by millions of civilians in blue-collar jobs. As Rick Weidman from Vietnam Veterans of America explains, "the military is a collection of very dangerous occupations."

For example, the most common complaint of VHA patients is hearing loss and tinnitus. That's because almost every branch of the military exposes enlisted men and women to high levels of noise. In the Air Force and Navy, there's the constant roar of jet engines. In the Navy, there's the metallic clanking that rebounds through the echo chamber of a submarine or other naval vessel. You don't have to deployed to the Middle East to be deafened by explosions from improvised explosive devices (IED's) or the U.S. military's own ordinance. Just going through basic training can be enough to insure diminished hearing capacity later in life. Similarly, infantry training leads to musculoskeletal problemsbecause it involves hauling around 60- to 100-pound packs that place an excessive burdenon necks, shoulders, knees, backs and ankles.

Veterans also bring signature issues from particular eras. In Vietnam, draftees and enlisted men were exposed to Agent Orange. Other Cold-war era soldiers and sailors found themselves involved in chemical warfare agent experiments, nuclear weapons testing, and base cleanups with little personal protection. Troops sent to liberate Kuwait came back with symptoms of "Gulf War Syndrome." Veterans of multiple tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan were often exposed to lung damaging and cancer causing toxic burn pits. Insurgent use of IEDs in those two countries has led the VHA to become a leading center of research on and treatment of traumatic brain injuries suffered by thousands of troops (and professional football players as well, who now arrange to have their brains sent to the VHA for post-mortem verification of their condition).

Combat veterans often suffer from mental health issues, like PTSD. In researching a new book called Wounds of War, I spoke with men in their eighties or nineties whose searing memories of death and destruction in Germany, Japan, or Korea still disturbed their sleep at night. Veterans who suffer from mental and behavioral health problems—whether acquired in or exacerbated by military service— are more prone to substance abuse, particularly opioid use if chronic pain is involved. They also become a bigger suicide risk. An estimated 20 veterans a day kill themselves, although three-quarters of those have never been to the VHA for treatment. Between 2006 and 2015, the number of veteransreceiving specialized mental health care at the VHA rose from 900,000 annually to 1.6 million, a reflection of continuing collateral damage from open-ended foreign wars.

VHA caregivers are trained to identify and treat these very specific wounds of war.  Every VHA employee gets training in how to better recognize and assist patients who are suicidal. Thousands of VHA mental health providers are taught the latest evidence-based treatments for PTSD. (Outside the VHA, only 30% of private sector providers use such treatments).  And primary care providers and specialists alike recognize the kind of diseases produced by toxic exposures, such as Agent Orange related diabetes or burn-pit created respiratory problems.

The VHA ranks with Kaiser Permanente as one of the most heavily unionized health care systems in the country; the American Federation of Government Employees, National Nurses United, and the Service Employees International Union have more than 120,000 members serving veterans. Thanks to this union role, management pays more attention to the kinds of occupational hazards that are rampant in health care work generally, particularly in non-union hospitals. The VHA was the first – and may be one of the only U.S. healthcare systems – to install the kind of lift equipment that helps nursing staff avoid debilitating and often career ending back, neck and shoulder injuries.

Due to the mental health problems of some of its patients, the VHA goes to great lengths to insure a safe workplace for health care providers. In Northern California, VHA staff labor under the shadow of what happened at The Pathway Home, a private not-for-profit program housed at a state run veterans' facility in Yountville, last March. Three professional caregivers – one a current and another a former VHA employee –were shot and killed by a vet who then committed suicide.

The VHA is far from perfect. As even its defenders note, veterans' health care could be far more comprehensive and effective than it is. Unfortunately, both Congress and recent presidents have made it harder for VHA to care for veterans. Congress has allowed the Department of Defense to give hundreds of thousands of veterans other than honorable discharges, making them ineligible for VHA care. In some cases, soldiers have been discharged for active duty misconduct related to PTSD or brain injuries – yet they have a particular need for coverage.  Congress has also consistently underfunded and understaffed the Veterans Benefit Administration (VBA). This is the separate agency that determines whether a veteran has actually suffered from an occupational illness or injury—and to what degree of disability.  As a result, there are far too many eligibility determination delays before veterans become VHA patients.

Under the Trump administration, the VHA faces even greater challenges. Earlier this year, Congress – with the support of a majority of Democrats — passed the VA MISSION Act,which  will siphon billions of dollars away from the VHA's budget and direct that money toward private doctors and hospitals that are often ill-prepared to treat veterans.  As the VHA is starved of needed funding, health care providers will be laid off (there are already an estimated 49,000 existing staff vacancies) and facilities will close. That will undermine the quality of patient care, and Republicans (with support from the Koch-funded Concerned Veterans for America) and their Democratic Party enablers will use that to make the case for total privatization of the system.  Their aim is to starve the system so that care and services will decline even more. Those who oppose Medicare for All would then use the VHA as a poster child for the "failure" of single payer models, instead of a shining example of how they work better.

Fortunately, members of veterans' organizations, union-represented VHA staff, and community allies around the country are fighting vigorously against VHA privatization. And given voters' concerns about health care, Democrats could use the threat to the VHA as a "wedge issue" against the right wing. If more Democrats would embrace this cause, they might actually win back voters from military families who believed that Trump would defend veterans and their health care.  The fight to save the VHA from the profiteers will help protect a model of healthcare from which all Americans benefit.

Suzanne Gordon

Suzanne Gordon co-authored a 2017 report on veterans' health care for the American Legion called "A System Worth Saving."  She is the author, most recently, of Wounds of War: How The VA Delivers Health Healing, and Hope to the Nation's Veterans, from Cornell University Press. She will be speaking about the book around the country over the next month. She is also a Senior Policy Analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. She can be reached at sg@suzannegordon.com.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

How the Trump Enforcement Numbers Were Calculated [feedly]

In a kleptocracy, Justice is Reversed

How the Trump Enforcement Numbers Were Calculated
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/business/trump-corporate-penalties-methodology.html

The Times built a database of cases and tapped into academic research to compare corporate penalties during the Obama and Trump administrations.

VISIT WEBSITE
 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Weekend Reading: Robert Solow: A Theory Is a Sometime Thing [feedly]

Interesting excerpt from Solow's refutation of Friedman's "natural rate of unemployment". It turns out more likely that capitalism has NO NATURAL RATE OF UNEMPLOYMENT.

Weekend Reading: Robert Solow: A Theory Is a Sometime Thing
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/11/weekend-reading-robert-solow-a-theory-is-a-sometime-thing.html

Robert Solow: A theory Is a Sometime Thing: "Milton Friedman... aims to undermine the eclectic American Keynesianism of the 1950s and 1960s... goes after two... lines of thought. His first claim is that the central bank, the Fed, cannot 'peg' the real interest rate... to undermine the standard LM curve.... The Fed can peg the nominal federal funds rate, but not the real rate...

..."These… effects will reverse the initial downward pressure on interest rates fairly promptly, say, in something less than a year. Together they will tend, after a somewhat longer interval, say, a year or two, to return interest rates to the level they would otherwise have had" (Friedman 1968, p. 6). Now we know what 'peg' means.... The goal, remember, is to contradict the eclectic American Keynesian... which did not, after all, require the Fed to control real interest rates forever. If the Fed can have meaningful influence only for less than a year or two, then it is surely playing a losing game, especially in view of those 'long and variable lags.' Is that really so?...

After Paul Volcker's appointment... the real funds rate had been fluctuating around zero... rose sharply to about 5 percent and fluctuated around that level for the next six years.... This sustained 5 percentage point increase in the real funds rate was... a deliberate intervention, designed to end the 'double-digit' inflation of the early 1970s, and it did so, with real side-effects. This chain of events could not have worked through any 'misperception' mechanism; there was no secret about what the Volcker Fed was doing. So the Fed was in fact able to control ('peg') its real policy rate, not for a year or two but for at least six years, certainly long enough for the normal conduct of counter-cyclical monetary policy to be effective.... The difference between 'a year or two' and 'half a dozen years' is not a small matter. This part of Friedman's demolition project seems to have failed as pragmatic economics, although it may have succeeded in persuading the economics profession.

The second, and even more striking, contribution of the 1968 presidential address was Friedman's introduction of the 'natural rate of unemployment' along with the long-run vertical Phillips curve and its accelerationist implications.... I do not have to repeat Friedman's classic discussion of the consequences if the Fed (or anyone) attempts to push the actual unemployment rate below the natural rate: higher monetary growth, at first increased spending, output and employment, as prices adjust with a lag to the new state of demand. But eventually the rate of inflation, whatever it was before, increases and this gets built into expectations.... So the Fed has to create even faster monetary growth to sustain the lower unemployment rate, and you know the rest. Once again, we can imagine such a world; Friedman's claim is that we live in it.... For a brief period in the 1970s and early 1980s, this simple model seemed to do well: if you plot the change in the inflation rate against the unemployment rate (see Modigliani and Papademos 1975), you get a decent downward-sloping scatter that crosses the u-axis at a reasonably defined natural rate or NAIRU). At other times, not so much....

Olivier Blanchard (2016).... First, there is still a Phillips curve... Second, expectations of inflation have become more and more 'anchored'.... Third, the slope of the Phillips curve itself has been getting flatter, ever since the 1980s, and is now quite small. And last, the standard error around the Phillips curve is large; the relationship is not well defined in the data. Taken together, these last two findings imply that there is no well-defined natural rate of unemployment, either statistically or conceptually.... This is very different from the story told so confidently and fluently in the 1968 address.

My mind kept returning to a famous line of dramatic verse: was this the face that launched a thousand ships?... Milton Friedman's presidential address... may not have burnt the topless towers of Ilium, but it certainly helped lead macroeconomics to its current state of refined irrelevance. The financial crisis and the recession that followed it may have planted some second thoughts, but even that is not certain. A few major failures like those I have registered in this note may not be enough for a considered rejection of Friedman's doctrine and its various successors. But they are certainly enough to justify intense skepticism, especially among economists, for whom skepticism should be the default mental setting anyway. So why did those thousand ships sail for so long, why did those ideas float for so long, without much resistance? I don't have a settled answer.

One can speculate. Maybe a patchwork of ideas like eclectic American Keynesianism, held together partly by duct tape, is always at a disadvantage compared with a monolithic doctrine that has an answer for everything, and the same answer for everything. Maybe that same monolithic doctrine reinforced and was reinforced by the general shift of political and social preferences to the right that was taking place at about the same time. Maybe this bit of intellectual history was mainly an accidental concatenation of events, personalities, and dispositions. And maybe this is the sort of question that is better discussed while toasting marshmallows around a dying campfire.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Eight Lessons from History to Help Make Sense of Today’s Madness [feedly]

Eight Lessons from History to Help Make Sense of Today's Madness
http://dollarsandsense.org/blog/2018/11/eight-lessons-from-history-to-help-make-sense-of-todays-madness.html

By Abby Scher

I learned to peer beyond my political bubble in the early 1980s, first when Ronald Reagan was elected president and destroyed the New Deal coalition in which I was raised and then when Phyllis Schlafly's Stop ERA women indeed stopped the Equal Rights Amendment for women from becoming the law of the land by defeating those of us fighting to win its passage in the Illinois legislature. We needed one more state for the Constitutional Amendment to be enacted, and Illinois was one of three where we had a chance. On the steps of the Springfield, Illinois, capital were white women with lacquered hair wearing skirt suits and beige stockings carrying red Stop ERA signs. They seemed to have stepped out of the past, so how could they stop the forward march of history?

Well, they did. I found out later many were part of a resurging right-wing Christian movement. And I learned the hard way that you have to understand who your political opponents are and not take them for granted in your own righteousness. I ended up researching a doctoral dissertation about right-wing and liberal women in conflict over fundamental questions about U.S. life and governance during the conspiratorial red-baiting era after World War II and during McCarthyism in the 1950s.

McCarthyism took place during the Korean War when Democrat Harry Truman was president. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's fellow Republicans were happy to go along with his outrageous, made-up stories about subversives in the State Department or wherever to try to capture the power that they lost during the major political realignment of the New Deal in the 1930s—particularly the right-wing, isolationist Republicans led by Robert Taft who wanted to dismantle Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act and Keynesian management of the economy.  The moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower who generally accepted the New Deal and were relatively liberal on race may have won the presidency in 1954 within this cauldron, but they lost the party in the long run, as we have seen.

Here are eight lessons this history taught me in my struggle to understand my country now.

1. Movements do not always reveal all the roots of their positions when they are fighting their opponents, not the alt-Right nor the anti-communist movement I studied in the 1950s. That means we have to do our research. The women I studied did not foreground their anti-Semitic, right-wing Christian worldview until the conspiratorial bullying of Senator McCarthy lost some of its potency and their more secular-minded allies ran for cover. Many of those who claimed President Obama was an imposter, a secret Muslim born abroad, were racist right-wing Christians who saw him as the anti-Christ. The Tea Party's overlay with the Christian Right was often overlooked by secular reporters covering the movement who were tone-deaf to its underpinnings.
2. War abroad roils up right-wing sentiment, ethnocentrism, and male power at home. We take for granted the backdrop of the Korean War during McCarthyism and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars during our own period. But the blowback from war is hugely formative on the home front. Yes, war fans the flames of Islamophobia but it does more. I first glimpsed the "more" during the right-wing backlash to Barack Obama's first presidential campaign and after he was elected. That's when a new group, the Oath Keepers, composed of former military and police officers, rose up during the Tea Party movement to defend the white republic. Heavily armed militias and the fetish of male power in the barrel of a gun gained new force. And while Trump may have encouraged them, I would argue far right white nationalists began their latest killing spree in the Obama years with the 2009 killing at the U.S. Holocaust Museum.
3. Right-wing populism helps us understand racial scapegoating as immigrants, or blacks or Jews are blamed for economic failures that corporate management of the economy on behalf of the wealthiest create. Its adherents feel like victims, like they are losing power, whether we think so or not. Sometimes they are losing power. My former colleague Chip Berlet also argues that when right-wing populism nurtures conspiracies to explain capitalist failures, it does not grapple with those failures head on. Instead it creates arguments no more grounded in reality than Senator McCarthy's claim in 1950 that there were exactly 205 members of the Communist Party secretly subverting America in the U.S. State Department.
4. The far Right can be stopped when other parts of the Right or the demoralized center start opposing them. They should be encouraged to do so. Blacklists of course continued beyond McCarthy's fall and into Ike's presidency, but the senator's individual power was punctured in 1954 after he attacked the Army, and the Army's lawyer famously asked, after the senator smeared one of his young aides on national television, "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" So far Trump's corrosive bullying, dehumanization of migrants and people of color, and abuse of power and civic norms have not faced such a credible challenge from within his party.
5. The Far Right was actively made to be toxic and thrown out of polite company. While no moderate, William F. Buckley succeeded in sidelining virulent antisemitism on the Right in the 1950s to salvage conservatism as a force through his new National Review While anti-Semites did not have a platform in National Review, racists did and the magazine was vocally racist against African Americans and the rising civil rights movement until forced to use dog whistles by changing times to retain credibility. The rise of the internet and Fox News means the sidelining of the far Right by some conservative and more mainstream media is over.  Once again, we need to actively work to sideline Fox News and internet outlets that give a platform to the racist and conspiratorial right, whether through advertiser or vendor boycotts.
6. Virulent conspiratorial antisemitism of the type seen in the Pittsburgh massacre is rooted in a far right Christian view of Jews having demonic powers as the spawn of Satan. This can be secularized to Jews being the cause of all the crises dispossessing white people as they manipulate and control the world economy and fellow minorities in conspiracies that do not mention Satan. For white nationalists, we Jews are seen as the guiding power manipulating blacks, immigrants and the wave of Honduran migrants seek shelter in our country.
7. Popular-front politics bringing together unlikely allies are vital in standing up to and defeating the far right. The liberal-socialist-communist popular front of the 1930s was weakened by infighting as any cursory student of history knows. We have to set aside our snarkiness and learn to work in bigger coalitions without attacking those in the trenches with us. Maybe we will learn something. I discovered in my research the nonpartisan League of Women Voters and its Democratic and Republican women members was one of the few institutions to stand up to McCarthyism. Who are the unlikely allies of today?
8. We cannot take for granted that the democratic systems and norms we feel are insufficiently democratic will stand without our defense. When systems and governments don't work and lose legitimacy, strong-man, authoritarian solutions may seem attractive. Meanwhile, we activists get stuck in our trench warfare fighting to defend one single arena that is under siege. Or we don't even show up hoping the checks we send to support nonprofits or movements will be enough. Somehow, we need to fight on behalf of true democracy, economic, gender and racial justice for all, the climate and the common good all at the same time. We can do that by holding out our hands to all those in movement, creating the solidarity that both gives us hope and weaves together the future that will sustain us.

Abby Scher is a former co-editor of Dollars & Sense and a current board member. 

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Progress Radio:The FACES and PERSONALITIES OF the NAME IN PROGRESS Radio Program

John Case has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Progress Radio
Post: The FACES and PERSONALITIES OF the NAME IN PROGRESS Radio Program
Link: http://progress.enlightenradio.org/2018/11/the-faces-and-personalities-of-name-in.html

--
Powered by Blogger
https://www.blogger.com/

How the Economic Lives of the Middle Class Have Changed Since 2016, by the Numbers [feedly]

How the Economic Lives of the Middle Class Have Changed Since 2016, by the Numbers
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/upshot/how-the-economic-lives-of-the-middle-class-have-changed-since-2016-by-the-numbers.html

How the Economic Lives of the Middle Class Have Changed Since 2016, by the Numbers

Based on a simplified extrapolation, it works out to about $122 gained a month for a typical family — which for some would be wiped out by higher mortgage rates.

By Neil Irwin

Nov. 3, 2018

Groceries have not gotten much more expensive in the past two years, but carrying debt on a credit card has.CreditElise Amendola/Associated Press

The United States economy is the strongest it has been in ages. Growth has been robust, and the unemployment rate is at generational lows, as new data Friday affirmed.

Yet the Republican Party, which controls the White House and Congress, trails Democrats substantially in polling on which party is preferred.

It helps to look beyond the overall economic data to understand this disconnect. After all, you can't eat G.D.P., and good jobs numbers aren't the same as a place to live.

If you look instead at the actual financial lives of average middle-income families from 2016 — their incomes, spending, assets and debt — and how shifts since Election Day in 2016 would have been likely to affect them, you get a more mixed picture.

Wages haven't risen much. Inflation has been low, helping keep the price of most staple goods down, though with gasoline prices a costly exception. The tax cut has left more money in most middle-class families' pockets, but only a bit.

In terms of assets, the typical middle-income family has either zero or minimal holdings in the stock market, meaning the surge since November 2016 hasn't paid direct benefits. But a majority of households in this income bracket do carry some credit card debt, which has become more expensive amid rising interest rates.

And in terms of housing costs, rents haven't risen much — but a sharp rise in mortgage rates has made homes less affordable for anyone looking to buy.

Add it all up, and while the benefits of a surging economy, tax cuts and the rising stock market are real, they net out to a less favorable economic reality for a family in the middle of the income scale than the economic headlines might imply.

This math is oversimplified — it doesn't reflect how families may have changed their spending and saving patterns in the last two years, and conflates different definitions of middle income. But the back-of-the-envelope results are revealing:

If you take the benefits of higher wages and the lower taxes, subtracting higher costs for consumer goods and higher interest rates on credit card debt — it works out to a gain of $122 a month.

Slow wage growth, a boost from tax cuts, low inflation

A lower unemployment rate may benefit workers by making it easier for someone who loses a job to find a new one. But a defining feature of the expansion for years has been relatively tepid growth in wages.

The median pay for a full-time worker in the United States — now $893 a week — has risen enough since late 2016 to generate an extra $204 a month in pretax earnings for a household with a single earner, a 5.6 percent gain.

Subtract payroll taxes and federal income taxes on that raise, and that family is looking at $158 a month in additional earnings.

The tax cuts enacted at the start of 2018 should mean most middle-income Americans keep a bit more of their earnings. Analysis by the Tax Policy Center found that of the 91 percent of middle-income tax filers who received a tax cut, the reduction averages $910, or about $76 a month.

Wages may not be growing very fast for middle-income people, but the good news is that prices of most of the things they buy have been rising even more slowly.

The Consumer Price Index excluding housing costs is up only 3.2 percent since November 2016, adding about $101 to the monthly expenses of a family with spending patterns that match those of an average family in the middle 20 percent of the income distribution that year.


When you look at individual items that compose a large portion of family budgets, the relatively low inflation comes through.

Grocery prices — "food at home" in the Labor Department's terminology — are up only 1.1 percent in the nearly two years since November 2016, adding $3.33 to the monthly grocery bill for an average family in the middle 20 percent of income.

Outside of food, the pattern mostly recurs. Electricity bills are up 0.42 percent, a mere 50 cents a month of additional expense. Apparel is slightly less expensive than it was in November 2016, saving a middle-class family $1.22 a month. An 11 percent drop in the price of cellphone service saves that family $10.48 each month.

The big exception is gasoline; its price has been marching steadily higher since late 2016. The 23.5 percent run-up in the price of motor fuels adds $37.38 to the typical family's monthly expenses.


Fine time for renters, but higher rates hurt would-be buyers

When it comes to housing, it matters a lot whether you're renting and planning to continue renting; renting but seeking to buy a home; or already own one.

For renters who plan to stay renters, costs are rising modestly, just like overall inflation — 3 percent since November 2016, tacking an extra $26.54 onto monthly costs for the average renter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Homeowners typically have their monthly mortgage costs already set. Their wealth — the value of their home — has risen a bit in two years. The median sale price for a home in the United States was $214,000 in November 2016, according to data from Zillow, and the national appreciation rate since then implies such a house would now be worth $230,000.

Things are trickier for a renter looking to buy a home, because of rising mortgage rates. A side effect of the surging economy and deficit-increasing tax cuts has been higher rates, which means that even though home prices aren't up all that much in the last two years, the cost for a buyer needing credit is considerably higher.

The rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 3.5 percent at election time two years ago, and is now 4.83 percent. Combined with the rise in the price of the median home, a middle-income American family looking to buy with 20 percent down would be looking at a monthly mortgage payment that is $196 a month higher now than in November 2016, wiping out gains from higher wages and lower taxes.

A market boom for a few, and higher interest rates for others

The Trump administration has pointed to the booming stock market as evidence of success: The Standard & Poor's 500 index has returned about 29 percent, including reinvested dividends, since November 2016.

But middle-income families typically have minimal direct exposure to the stock market. Their financial holdings tend to be modest at best, meaning that rising stock prices create only a small wealth increase.

Among middle-income families in 2016, only 52 percent held stocks either directly or indirectly, such as through a mutual fund. And of those 52 percent, median stock holdings were only $15,000. (That would be up to around $19,000 now if they left the money in an S.&P. 500 index fund since then without making further contributions.)

Stock investments are much more a feature of upper-income brackets. The same survey showed that 94.7 percent of families in the top 10 percent of income held stocks, with a median value of $363,400.

ADVERTISEMENT

Many middle-income Americans, 84.3 percent of them, do tend to hold some form of debt. And rising interest rates in the Trump economy — a consequence of strong economic growth and Federal Reserve actions meant to prevent the economy from overheating — are making that debt more costly.

In 2016, 53 percent of middle-income households had credit card debt, with an average debt balance of $4,400. The average rate on such debt has risen to 16.5 percent today from 13.6 percent in November 2016, implying an extra $10.50 a month in interest cost for a family carrying that balance.

In other words, debtors — and the average middle-class American fits that description — are paying a price for the surging economy even as they enjoy the benefits of higher pay and low inflation.

Given the limitations in the data on which these calculations are based, it's best to think of this analysis as an impressionistic painting rather than a high-resolution photograph of the economic lives of the middle class.

But it is a telling one, and helps explains the limits of a political message built on what seems to be a booming economy. It booms for some people more than others.

How we did the math

To develop this portrait, we started with two government surveys from 2016: the Labor Department's Consumer Expenditure Survey, which provides details of household spending patterns broken down by income bracket, and the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, which details assets and debt.

Then, we simply extrapolated forward to the fall of 2018. If those patterns among middle-class families held steady as they were buffeted by economywide forces, would they be better or worse off in the days before the midterms?

This is assuming that they had no radical changes to their financial lives like getting a lucrative new job or winning the lottery, and that their wages, costs and investment performances plugged along at average rates over the last 23 months.

Because of limitations in the data available for the recent past, we had to combine data sources that aren't really meant to be combined. We had to switch between different definitions of middle income, and we made some simplifying assumptions. (For example, we calculated how higher gasoline prices would increase people's spending without adjusting for how they might react to higher prices by driving less.)

Neil Irwin is a senior economics correspondent for The Upshot. He previously wrote for The Washington Post and is the author of "The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire." @Neil_Irwin • Facebook -- via my feedly newsfeed

Economic Update - US "Sugar Arrangements” Industry [feedly]

Economic Update - US "Sugar Arrangements" Industry
https://economicupdate.podbean.com

 Updates on latest foreign and US elections, the CEA document against socialism, growing inequality of billionaires' wealth, army represses report on costs and errors of Iraq war, and expose of Maine's subsidy for corporations by helping indebted students. Interview with Dr. Harriet Fraad on the US "Sugar Arrangements" industry.

VISIT WEBSITE
 -- via my feedly newsfeed