Day: July 13, 2018

The White House released a report Thursday contending that the United States’ war on poverty — a drive that started over 50 years ago to improve the social safety net for the poorest citizens of the world’s largest economy — is “largely over and a success,” contrasting with other reports on the nation’s poor.

The report, authored by President Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, called for federal aid recipients to be pushed toward work requirements.

The report says poverty, when measured by consumption, has fallen by 90 percent since 1961. It also says that only 3 percent of Americans currently live under the poverty line.

“The timing is ideal for expanding work requirements among non-disabled working-age adults in social welfare programs,” according to the report. “Ultimately, expanded work requirements can improve the lives of current welfare recipients and at the same time respect the importance and dignity of work.”

U.N. report

The council’s report contrasts with a U.N. report on poverty in the U.S. that was released last month. That report said about 12 percent of the U.S. population lives in poverty, and that the U.S. “leads the developed world in income and wealth inequality.”

Phillip Alston, a U.N. adviser on extreme poverty and the author of the report, wrote in December 2017 that he believed Trump and his administration, along with U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, “will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes.”

In April, Trump signed an executive order outlining work mandates for low-income citizens on federal aid programs. These programs included Medicaid, which provides federal health insurance for low-income individuals, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides these low-income individuals with assistance in food purchasing.

Both programs were among those introduced in the 1960s, during the administration of then-President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat who coined the term “war on poverty” during his first State of the Union address.

Four state mandates

The Trump administration has already permitted four states — Kentucky, Indiana, Arkansas, and New Hampshire — to implement work requirement programs for Medicaid recipients, the first such restrictions enforced on the program. In June, however, a federal judge struck down Kentucky’s mandate, writing that the administration’s waiver “never adequately considered whether [the program] would in fact help the state furnish medical assistance to its citizens, a central objective of Medicaid.”

Anne Marie Regan, a senior staff attorney for the Kentucky Equal Justice Center, one of the organizations that successfully challenged the Kentucky waiver, told VOA that while she didn’t know the specifics of other states’ Medicare waivers, she thought similar challenges could be successful because of the administration’s insistence on work requirements.

Regan said her state’s proposal would have removed 95,000 people from health care coverage.

“The war on poverty is certainly not over,” Regan said. “There’s certainly still a great need for a safety net.”

In June, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed a farm bill that includes work requirements for some adults who receive food assistance benefits. Every Democrat, along with 20 Republicans, voted against the bill, which is not expected to pass the Senate.
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Failing to let girls finish their education could cost the world as much as $30 trillion in lost earnings and productivity, yet more than 130 million girls are out of school globally, the World Bank said Wednesday.

Women who have completed secondary education are more likely to work and earn on average nearly twice as much as those with no schooling, according to a report by the World Bank.

About 132 million girls worldwide aged 6 to 17 do not attend school, while fewer than two-thirds of those in low-income nations finish primary school, and only a third finish lower secondary school, the World Bank said.

If every girl in the world finished 12 years of quality education, lifetime earnings for women could increase by $15 trillion to $30 trillion, according to the report.

“Overall, the message is clear: Educating girls is not only the right thing to do,” the World Bank said in the report, “it also makes economic and strategic sense for countries to fulfill their development potential.”

Other positive impacts of completing secondary school education for girls include a reduction in child marriage, lower fertility rates in countries with high population growth, and reduced child mortality and malnutrition, the World Bank said.

“We cannot keep letting gender inequality get in the way of global progress,” Kristalina Georgieva, World Bank chief executive, said in a statement.

The benefits of educating girls are considerably higher at secondary school level in comparison to primary education, said Quentin Wodon, World Bank lead economist and main report author.

“While we do need to ensure that, of course, all girls complete primary school, that is not enough,” Wodon told Reuters.

Women who have completed secondary education are at lesser risk of suffering violence at the hands of their partners, and have children who are less likely to be malnourished and themselves are more likely to go to school, the report said.

“When 130 million girls are unable to become engineers or journalists or CEOs because education is out of their reach, our world misses out on trillions of dollars,” Malala Yousafzai, 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said in a statement.

“This report is more proof that we cannot afford to delay investing in girls,” said Yousafzai, an education activist who was shot in the head at the age of 15 by a Taliban gunman in 2012.

The report was published ahead of U.N. Malala Day on Thursday, which marks the birthday of the Pakistani activist.
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Uber’s business in Kenya said on Friday it will keep its fares unchanged for now, after associations representing taxi drivers in the country signed a deal giving guidelines for better fares and working conditions.

“As of today, we will not be adjusting our fares as we are busy completing a deeper study of driver economics in light of the concerns and feedback that we have received from drivers to ensure that fares are correctly priced,” a spokesperson for Uber Technologies said in an email to Reuters.

The Digital Taxi Association of Kenya, representing more than 2,000 ride-hailing taxi drivers, signed a deal on Wednesday meant to give drivers higher pay and better conditions.

The drivers told Reuters they thought the deal would cushion them in the event of falling fares arising from discounts companies offers to passengers. They had staged a nine-day strike seeking higher fares and better working conditions.

As in other markets, these ride-hailing services in Kenya initially faced opposition and sometimes hostility from other taxi drivers.

Kenya is Uber’s second-largest market in sub-Saharan Africa, after South Africa. It competes mostly against its local rival Taxify, which has gained popularity in Nairobi in the past year and a half, but does not disclose numbers of active riders and users.
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As farmer Brian Duncan gently brushes his hands over the rolling amber waves of grain in the fields behind his rural Illinois home, this picturesque and idyllic American scene belies the dramatic hardship he currently faces.

“We’re in trouble,” he told VOA.

Wheat is just one product that grows on Duncan’s diverse farm, also home to about 70,000 hogs annually, which Duncan said “were projected to be profitable this year.”

Were, but not anymore.

Pork is now subject to a 62 percent Chinese tariff, and demand is drying up in one of the world’s largest pork markets.

“Once that tariff went on, the pork stopped going into China. Not going to Taiwan, either. Not finding other routes. That market just disappeared,” said Duncan, who expected to see a $4 to $5 profit on each pig, then watched it become a $7 to $8 loss per head.

“The difference between making and losing money in the hog industry is exports,” said Duncan, acknowledging that for most hog farmers, exports are key to profits. A lack of competitive access to international markets could spell long-term financial hardship, particularly for independent pork producers like Duncan.

“The reality is 95 percent of the world population is outside these borders. We need them … as markets and trading partners,” Duncan said.

Tariffs begin to bite

U.S. farmers like Duncan are beginning to feel the effects of such tariffs imposed by China in retaliation for U.S. tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum.

As the trade dispute continues, Duncan, who also serves as vice president of the Illinois Farm Bureau, is losing money on virtually everything growing on his farm because of imposed or impending tariffs.

“Soybeans were a buck and a half higher than they are now,” he told VOA. “Corn was 50 to 70 cents higher than it is now. So, certainly the attitude has changed here in the last two to three weeks.”

So has Duncan’s mood.

“Frustrated. This was preventable. This was predictable — the outcome. There was a better way to go about this,” he said.

​Long-term loss of market

“Tariffs are kind of a last resort for a really specific instance or really serious breach of a contract and not something that you would lob out there to try to make progress in a trade agreement, and I think that’s what surprised farmers a bit,” said Tamara Nelsen, senior director of commodities with the Illinois Farm Bureau.

Nelsen said history shows the long-term impact of tariffs and trade embargoes is a loss of market access and competitiveness for U.S. products.

“In every event, we lost market share, or we encouraged production somewhere else of that same product. And it took U.S. agriculture 20, 30 years to get some of those markets back. And in some cases, we haven’t gotten those markets back.”

For Duncan, the long-term impact on the reputation of U.S. agricultural products is his biggest concern.

“How are we going to be seen? Is a country going to look at us and say, ‘Why would I sign an agreement with them, anyhow? If they don’t like something we do, are they just going to put a bunch of tariffs up and blow things up?’ How are we seen going forward in the next five, 10, 15, 20 years? For me, that is the biggest issue more than the here and now.”

Farm income at risk

But in the here and now is the difficult reality that farmers are also experiencing their fifth year of declining income.

“We’ve seen farm income cut in half in the last four years for various reasons. We could easily see it cut in half again if we lost all our export markets,” which Duncan said could increase dependence on government aid at a time when lawmakers in Washington debate new Farm Bill legislation that the agriculture industry needs to provide security.

All of the uncertainty has him evaluating his options the next time he heads to the ballot box.

“It’s the economy, stupid. My vote will depend an awful lot on the farm economy,” he said. That’s just the world I live in.”

A world that is now more connected — and dependent on international trade — than ever before.
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U.S. farmers are beginning to feel the effects of tariffs imposed by China in retaliation for U.S. tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum. As VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, while the short-term concern for farmers is the impact on profits this year, the bigger worry is the longer term consequences of the escalating trade dispute.
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China’s trade surplus with the United States swelled to a record in June as its overall exports grew at a solid pace, a result that could further inflame a bitter trade dispute with Washington.

But signs exporters were rushing shipments before tariffs went into effect in the first week of July suggest the spike in the surplus was a one-off, with analysts expecting a less favorable trade balance for China in coming months as duties on exports start to bite.

The data came after the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump raised the stakes in its trade row with China on Tuesday, saying it would slap 10 percent tariffs on an extra $200 billion worth of Chinese imports, including numerous consumer items.

US-China trade surplus

China’s trade surplus with the United States, which is at the center of the tariff tussle, widened to a record monthly high of $28.97 billion, up from $24.58 billion in May, according to Reuters calculations based on official data going back to 2008.

For January-June China’s trade surplus with the United States rose to $133.76 billion, compared with about $117.51 billion in the same period last year. China’s exports to the United States rose 13.6 percent in the first half of 2018 from a year earlier, while its imports from the U.S. rose 11.8 percent in the same period.

Trump, who has demanded Beijing cut the trade surplus, could use the latest result to further ratchet up pressure on China after both sides last week imposed tit-for-tat tariffs on $34 billion of each other’s goods. Washington has warned it may ultimately impose tariffs on more than $500 billion worth of Chinese goods, nearly the total amount of U.S. imports from China last year.

Markets jolted

The dispute has jolted global financial markets, raising worries a full-scale trade war could derail the world economy.

Chinese stocks fell into bear market territory and the yuan currency has skidded, though there have been signs in recent days its central bank is moving to slow the currency’s declines.

China’s June exports rose 11.3 percent from a year earlier, China General Administration of Customs reported, beating forecasts for a 10 percent increase according to the latest Reuters poll of 39 analysts, and down from a 12.6 percent gain in May.

After a strong start to the year, growth in China’s exports has moderated recently, and is expected to face more pressure from the initial round of U.S. tariffs. Both official and private business surveys reported softer export orders last month.

Imports grew 14.1 percent in June, customs said, missing analysts’ forecast of a 20.8 percent growth, and compared with a 26 percent rise in May.
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