What's Your Inequality Tax?

This article originally appeared on OtherWords.org

Who is the world’s richest country? 

That may seem like a simple question, but it’s not. According to the Global Wealth Report from banking giant Credit Suisse, it all depends on how we define “richest.”

If we mean the nation with the most total wealth, we have a clear No. 1: the United States. The 245 million U.S. adults hold a combined net worth of $106 trillion. 

No other nation comes close. China ranks a distant second, with a mere $64 trillion, Japan even further back at $25 trillion.

But if we mean the nation with the most wealth per person, top billing goes to Switzerland. The average Swiss adult is sitting on a $565,000 personal nest-egg. Americans average $432,000, only good enough for second place. 

So does Switzerland merit the title of the world’s wealthiest nation? Not necessarily. 

The Swiss may sport the world’s highest average wealth, but that doesn’t automatically mean that their nation has the world’s richest average people.

We’re not playing word games here. We’re talking about the important distinction that statisticians draw between mean and median. 

To calculate a national wealth mean — a simple average — researchers just divide total wealth by number of people. The problem? If some people have fantastically more wealth than other people, the resulting average will give a misleading picture about economic life as average people live it.

Medians can paint a more realistic picture. Statisticians calculate the median wealth of a nation by identifying the midpoint in the nation’s wealth distribution — that point at which half the nation’s population has more wealth and half less. 

Medians, in other words, can tell us how much wealth ordinary people hold.

By this median measure, Switzerland holds up as a strikingly wealthy nation. The United States does not. Typical Swiss adults turn out to hold $228,000 in net worth, the most in the world. Typical Americans hold personal fortunes worth just $66,000. 

Typical Canadians, with $107,000 per adult, have more wealth than that U.S. total. So do typical Taiwanese ($70,000), typical Brits ($97,000), and typical Australians ($181,000).

Overall, typical adults in 16 other developed nations have more wealth than we do here. Typical Japanese adults, for instance, hold $110,000 in personal wealth, a net worth considerably higher than the $66,000 Americans can claim.

Why do ordinary Americans have so little wealth when they live in a nation that has so much? In a word: inequality. Other nations have much more equal distributions of income and wealth than the United States. 

Japan in particular stands out here. The new Credit Suisse 2019 Global Wealth Report notes that Japan “has a more equal wealth distribution than any other major country.” Japan’s richest 10 percent holds less than half their nation’s wealth, just 48 percent. In the United States, the top 10 percent hold nearly 76 percent, over three-quarters of national wealth. 

How would typical Americans fare if we were as equal as Japan? If we succeeded at turning our economy around that way, the net worth of America’s most typical adults would triple, from $66,000 to $199,000.

In effect, the difference between those two totals amounts to an “inequality tax.” 

By letting our rich grab an oversized share of the wealth all of us help create, we are taxing ourselves into economic insecurity. Other nations don’t tolerate greed grabs. Why should we?

Sam Pizzigati co-edits Inequality.org for the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book is The Case for a Maximum Wage. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Wildfires Make Case for Public Utilities

This article originally appeared on OtherWords.org

Right now, thousands of Californians are fleeing raging wildfires, while millions sit in the dark. And for-profit utilities may be to blame.

Pacific Gas & Electric — a private, for-profit utility in the state — has admitted that its equipment likely caused 10 wildfires this year alone. To avoid further damage, the utility has been shutting off its customers’ power when weather conditions cause increased fire danger.

Will this lower the risk of wildfires? Maybe. It will also leave blacked out hospitals choosing whether to refrigerate their vaccines or keep their medical records online.

As Vox environmental reporter David Roberts put it, giving customers a choice between blackouts or fires is a failure.

A popular theory says that businesses must be “efficient” in order to survive in a competitive marketplace. By contrast, the government — without such market pressure — is naturally “inefficient.”

But even in the best cases, for-profit utilities with state-sanctioned monopolies are not functioning in a competitive marketplace. And unlike public utilities, which simply have to cover the costs of operating, privatized utilities must generate something else: profits.

How do they do this? By cutting costs — including employee salaries and benefits, customer services, and equipment upgrades. In the case of PG&E, it’s meant failing to upgrade and maintain their aging infrastructure.

It would be one thing if PG&E’s grid used all of the latest, most up-to-date technology. But that’s not the case. Instead of making their grid more resilient, now they simply shut it off when the weather gets bad — and it may still be causing fires.

And if customers don’t like that, too bad. It’s a monopoly.

Prices and service aren’t the only things at stake. We also need to get power from sources that are reliable, safe, and environmentally clean.

A corporation with a profit incentive, which needs to provide shareholders with growth each quarter, may not invest in that. Upgrading and maintaining infrastructure cuts into profits, giving them a reason to sacrifice safety and eco-friendliness to cut costs.

Imagine a circumstance in which most consumers and businesses get their power from clean, rooftop solar panels.

Sounds great, but there’s a big problem for for-profit utilities: After the initial manufacturing and installation, there’s no profit in people getting their power from the sun.

It’s clean, it’s technologically sound, and yet it’s not available to most people. As long as private, for-profit corporations provide our power, cleaner solutions like rooftop solar will remain out of reach to many.

But what if we had publicly owned utilities?

The wildfires — and the climate crisis that’s making them worse — are public problems. The reliability of our power grid is a public need.

When we privatize our utilities, we limit the solutions we can choose from to those that are profitable to a corporation. We risk situations like the one we are in now, in which the public is suffering the consequences of decisions a private entity made to maximize its own profits.

The public interest, not private profit, should be priority No. 1. If there’s a silver lining to this mess with PG&E, it’s that more people will demand that.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Mail and Medicaid

Return To Sender: A Single Undeliverable Letter Can Mean Losing Medicaid

Markian Hawryluk
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Forty-two boxes of returned mail lined a wall of the El Paso County Department of Human Services office on a recent fall morning. There used to be three times as many.
Every week, the U.S. Postal Service brings anywhere from four to 15 trays to the office, each containing more than 250 letters that it could not deliver to county residents enrolled in Medicaid or other public assistance programs. This plays out the same way in counties across the state. Colorado estimates about 15% of the 12 million letters from public assistance programs to 1.3 million members statewide are returned — some 1.8 million pieces of undelivered mail each year.
It falls on each county’s staff, in between fielding calls, to contact the individuals to confirm their correct address and their eligibility for Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for people with low incomes.
But last year, state officials decided that if caseworkers can’t reach recipients, they can close those cases and cut off health benefits after a single piece of returned mail.
[caption id="attachment_1013897" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Boxes of returned mail, originally sent to residents enrolled in Medicaid or other public assistance programs, line a wall of the El Paso County (Colo.) Department of Human Services office. Although Colorado has lowered the threshold to trigger an eligibility review from three pieces of returned mail to just one, El Paso County rarely closes cases based on a single piece of returned mail and opts not to act on addresses that are often used by those who are homeless.[/caption]
Medicaid, food stamps and other public benefit programs have avoided the march toward digital communication and continue to operate largely in a paper-based world. That essentially ties lifesaving benefits for some of the most vulnerable populations to the vagaries of the Postal Service.
As returned mail piles up, Colorado and other states take increasingly drastic measures to work through the cumbersome backlog, lowering the bar for canceling benefits on the basis of returned mail alone. Missouri, Oklahoma and Maryland are among those that have struggled with the volume. And when Arkansas implemented Medicaid work requirements, nearly half of the people who lost benefits had failed to respond to mailings or couldn’t be contacted.
At best, tightening returned mail policies could save states some money, and those cut from the benefits yet still eligible for them would experience only a temporary gap in their care. But even short delays can exacerbate some patients’ chronic health conditions or lead to expensive visits to the hospital.
And at worst, the returned mail may be contributing to a major drop in Medicaid enrollment and increased numbers of uninsured. Those dropped from the rolls rarely realize it until they seek care.
“There’s a lot of concern on this issue,” said Ian Hill, a health policy analyst at the Urban Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C. “Are they getting purged from the records unfairly and too quickly?”
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Taking Action
States have been walking a tightrope. While trying to aid their poorest residents, they also are grappling with budget-busting Medicaid costs and pressure from the Trump administration to ensure everyone on public assistance programs qualifies for the benefits.
Some states have sought “procedural denials because it kept their costs down,” said Cindy Mann, who ran the Medicaid program under the Obama administration.
“But we certainly don’t want to cut somebody off while they’re still eligible,” said Mann, who is now a partner with the law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips. “It’s penny-wise and pound-foolish.”
Low-income families who depend on public benefits tend to move often, leading to frequent errors in the addresses on file. But if a person moves out of state, the state-administered Medicaid benefit cannot move with them.
“States have always struggled with how to handle returned mail,” said Jennifer Wagner, a senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. “But we have more recently heard of states pushing a policy to be very aggressive about canceling clients when the state receives returned mail, and that has led to significant disenrollment.”
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In April 2018, Colorado lowered its recommended threshold for acting upon returned mail from three pieces of undeliverable mail to just one. From May 2017 to May 2019, enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program dropped 8.5% in the state — more than three times the national decline of 2.5%, according to the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, a congressional advisory panel.
It’s unclear how much of the drop was due to returned mail. The enrollment declines could also reflect some combination of a proposed federal rule to deny green cards to immigrants who use public benefits, cuts in federal funding for outreach to sign people up for health coverage or an improved economy.
Colorado has not set up a way of tracking how many people are losing benefits because of returned mail or what happens to those who do.
“We don’t have one data point that we can track,” said Marivel Klueckman, who oversees Medicaid eligibility functions for Colorado. “That is something we’re building into the future.”
Of the more than 131,000 Colorado households that have public benefit mail returned each year, the state estimates about 1 in 4 cannot be reached, resulting in the possible closure of nearly 33,000 cases.
People cut off from benefits may never learn why and may not seek to restore their benefits, which concerns Bethany Pray, health care program director at the Colorado Center on Law and Policy, a Denver-based legal aid group.
“You’re going to lose people who are truly eligible and should never have been taken off and who face barriers to re-enrollment,” Pray said.
[caption id="attachment_1013901" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Of the more than 131,000 Colorado households that have public benefit mail returned each year, the state estimates about 1 in 4 cannot be reached, resulting in the possible closure of nearly 33,000 cases.[/caption]
Mailing Woes
The lack of dependability of the Postal Service, particularly in rural areas of the state, adds to the concerns about relying on snail mail for important government correspondence.
Officials from the ski resort town of Snowmass Village, for example, complained last spring that they didn’t have any mail delivered for an entire week.
“We have received over 6 feet of snow in the last two weeks and we still get more complaints about postal delivery than snow removal,” town officials wrote in a March survey conducted by the Colorado Association of Ski Towns. “People aren’t getting bills, jury summons, medications, certified mail.”
In June, three members of Colorado’s congressional delegation sent a letter to the postmaster general, pressing her to address a range of postal issues including lost or returned mail.
There’s no question that cutting off people after one piece of paper mail is returned saves the state money in sending letters and processing undeliverable mail — though other costs may add up later. Colorado public assistance programs mail more than a million letters each month, at a cost of nearly $6 million annually. That is a small share of what is spent on the actual assistance, given that Colorado’s Medicaid program alone costs $9 billion a year.
Cutting off assistance after one piece of returned mail also helps the state avoid making monthly payments to regional health organizations for case management and dental services for those who no longer qualify for benefits.
However, Colorado Medicaid’s Klueckman said the state is primarily concerned with making sure eligible residents get their notifications and remain enrolled. The state moved eligibility determinations and renewals online and now offers a mobile app so residents also can receive notifications electronically.
Local Discretion
Colorado plans to open a consolidated returned mail center for the state as soon as July 2020. That could provide some economies of scale and consistency, but has the potential of increasing the number of people dropped, as local knowledge is replaced by automation.
Counties currently receive guidance from the state on how to process returned mail, but they have leeway to set their own procedures. El Paso County, for example, rarely closes cases based on a single piece of returned mail and opts not to act on addresses that are often used by those who are homeless, such as a shelter or post office.
“They’re the least likely for us to be able to have a phone number to call them,” said Karen Logan, economic and administrative services director for the county.
The county, Colorado’s second-largest, used grant money this year to pay staff overtime to whittle down its backlog of returned mail. That has helped the county process more than 48,000 pieces of returned mail in the past year, with more than a third prompting database changes. But officials could not say how many of those resulted in people losing benefits.
“We have some other things that are a little bit higher on the priority scale, so we don’t close as many cases as we probably could,” Logan said. “But I can tell you this: Closing a case and having a person have to reapply two months later takes significantly more work.”

How to Start and Run a Money-Making Blog

Yes, blogging is fun. Yes, it can earn you a little bit of money if you do it right.

But, can your blog become the primary means by which you earn an income?

I believe it can.

In fact, I know it can.

But, how do you do it? How do you make money with your blog?

Well, I don't have ALL the answers. No one does.

But, here is an amazing article about how you can start a blog and begin making money.

No, you won't be a millionaire next week. But these tips will set you on the right path to earning a living from your blog.

For more on how to make money blogging, follow @BlogBillions

Becoming a Full-Time Blogger

London Beauty Queen, a delightful beauty blogger, tells it like it is when it comes to full-time blogging.

Here's an excerpt I found particularly useful:

You Have To LOVE It I hear a lot of bloggers saying "I'd really like to run the site full time eventually," but to do it effectively you have to live and breathe your site. It's hard work, it's never ending and there's no such thing as a day off - but if you really, truly, 100% love your site and what you do then you'll inevitably make a huge success of it. However, if you're doing it just to get a few extra hours in bed because you hate Mondays, then you won't get very far. Success comes with dedication, blood, sweat and often tears - but I wouldn't change it for anything.

This is absolutely, positively, TRUE. If you don't love it and don't work it and don't put your time and heart and soul into it... you'll have a blog, but you won't have a business. And there IS a huge difference.

Here's more of what LBQ has to say about making a go of full-time blogging.

How I Made $4000 a Month from Blogging

How can you make $4000 a month from blogging? Sounds improbable, right? Well, it IS possible to make money blogging.

I'm sharing my story so those of you out there starting a blog or hoping to earn a decent living from your blogging pursuits can see one way to make it work. My way isn't the only way. In fact, I'll tell you as I go about how I'd prefer to make the money. But, right now, I'm earning $4000 as a direct result of my blogging efforts.

I've blogged pretty consistently since about 2005. When I started, I never thought about money. Blogging was a way to keep an online diary and to connect to other people with similar interests. I enjoyed the connections I made and still have some friends I made nearly 10 years ago when I first posted on a blog.

About two years ago, I became interested in the idea of earning some money from my blogging. I had two friends who wrote often on the same topic I write about. We all decided to combine our efforts into a specialized blog focused on our topic. After a month or two, we had decent traffic and I installed Google Adsense. That's probably the easiest ad platform to install and use.

At first, we didn't make much money. And by that I mean like three to five dollars a month. But, as we persisted, the revenue did increase. Now, two years in, I earn about $30-$50 a month from the specialized blog. Of course, that's not much. But, traffic has increased consistently and there is a strong following on Twitter. So, the revenue is growing. And now, I have coffee money.

But, how do I make $4000 a month from blogging? I first realized my blogging was helping me earn an income when I got a call just after the news blog started from a potential client. We signed a short-term contract and I earned a few thousand dollars from the work. How did this client find me? He had read a few of my articles on the blog.

Then, I got a message on Twitter. Which led to a phone call. Which led to a writing project for which I wrote about 6000 words and was paid $3000. That's 50 cents a word. Which is pretty good in the word busines. How'd this guy find me? From reading my blog.

Last week, I signed a one year contract with an organization. That contract pays me $4000 a month. And it all started because the people in the organization are regular readers of my blog.

Now, they are paying me to write articles just like the ones I write for my blog. Plus, they will be pushing my blog articles out to a larger group of people. Which means my ad revenue will increase as well. So, now I'm making $4000 a month as a direct result of my persistence in blogging. Ultimately, I'd like to see ad revenue near $4000 a month. That will take time. But this new contract will help spread the word and push my name and blog out to a larger audience.

So, here's what I've learned about blogging that has helped me get to the point where my writing is not just earning me coffee, it is paying the mortgage.

1) Treat your blog like a job. I work on my blog 6-8 hours a day. I treat it like a job. I research articles, conduct interviews, post, and interact with other bloggers and my readers. I want to earn a full-time living from blogging. That means I treate it like a full-time job.

2) Persistence pays. I could have quite when I was 3 months in and the revenue was about 4 dollars a month. But, I persisted. Continuing to provide a consistent source of news that was relevant to my audience paid off.

3) Quality counts. I got phone calls about doing freelance writing because people read and liked my work. I didn't just have one good piece, I had many pieces with my byline. The person on the other end already knew I would deliver a solid product because they had seen it consistently on my blog.

I'm hopeful that my blogging will continue to lead to new projects and new opportunities to make money. I'm also excited that new clients are emerging who are willing to give me money to write. Sure, $4000 a month is not a huge salary. But it does afford me the freedom to write for a living and focus on that as my primary source of income.

U2 To Unveil New Single on Tuesday?

That's the rumor circulating widely amid reports that U2 may perform their new single from the new album at Tuesday's Apple event unveiling the iPhone 6.

Supposedly, U2 has been shooting a video to coincide with the September 9th event and will unveil the band's new single on that day.

Will it happen? And if so, how soon will the entire album be out?

Will the new iPhone 6 include the full U2 album?

Stay tuned ...