For a mere $27,700, the 20% of New Yorkers who, says the Current Population Survey (CPS) live below the poverty line, can buy a black crocodile Fendi “B bag”—the world’s most expensive handbag. Sure, the official poverty rate for a mom with two kids is $15,735, but if she saves her pennies…
And yet, Recharger assumes (perhaps mistakenly) that the 1.5 million New Yorkers living in poverty—including 180,000 children—might spend that $15,735 on stupid stuff like food and rent.
Nourished, they might see that the report is bad news for Mayor Bloomberg’s rumored presidential run. Although urban areas always have more poor people, the city’s poverty rate is above the 10% national average. Worse, poverty is the same as it was right after September 11th. Part of the increase, the report speculates, is because of the minimum wage--the current $5.15 hourly minimum gives workers the lowest purchasing power in fifty years. The CPS also states that wages dropped twenty percent for workers without high school degrees, while wages for college graduates rose nineteen percent.
The Mayor (who earned $27,000 per hour at his other job) proposes giving tax credits worth up to $1000 for poor families, along with cash rewards to kids who stay in school.
Despite dark memories of his eighth-grade math, Reharger thinks the $1000 reward is a good idea if it helps minority math students (the poverty rate for Hispanics is 28.6 percent, for blacks, 21.4%) learn stuff like place value and powers of ten.
Then the students might ask, How come the gap between my income and that of Hedge-funder Edward S. Lampert of ESL Investments, who made $1.02 billion last year, is so damn huge? And how come the other nine names on the top hedge-fund earner’s list--James Simons of Renaissance Technologies made $670 million, Bruce Kovner of Caxton Associates made $550 million, Steven Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors, $450 million, David Tepper of Appaloosa Management, $420 million, George Soros of Soros Fund Management, $305 million, Paul Tudor Jones II of Tudor Investment Corp., $300 million, Kenneth Griffin of Citadel Investment Group, $240 million, Raymond Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, $225 million, Israel Englander of Millennium Partners, $205 million--make more in an hour than I’ll make in a liftetime?
If Lampert, for example, gave just half of that $1.2 billion to the 180,000 poor kids in NYC, then each one of them would have an extra $3,333--enough for a cheap Fendi.
-- Tesia George