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    A Year of Hardship, Helped and Hindered by Washington

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskNew Variants TrackerVaccine RolloutA Year of Hardship, Helped and Hindered by WashingtonFor Kathryn Stewart, a struggling single mother in Michigan, the past year showed how much safety net programs can help — and how the nation’s fickleness about them can add confusion and uncertainty to fear and worry.Credit…Supported byContinue reading the main storyFeb. 14, 2021Updated 2:57 p.m. ETWhen the coronavirus pandemic struck last March, Kathryn Stewart was working at a gas station in rural Michigan and living in her mother’s trailer with eight relatives, three dogs and a budget with no room for error. Her mother, who is disabled, soon urged her to quit to avoid bringing home the disease. Ms. Stewart reluctantly agreed, wondering how she would support herself and her 10-year-old son.An expanded safety net caught her, after being rushed into place by Congress last spring with rare bipartisan support.To her surprise, Ms. Stewart not only received unemployment insurance but a weekly bonus of $600 more than tripled her income. A stimulus check offered additional help, as did a modest food stamp increase. Despite opaque rules and confounding delays, the outpouring of government aid lifted her above the poverty line.Six months later, after temporary aid expired and deadlock in Washington returned, Ms. Stewart’s benefits fell to a trickle, and she was all but homeless after a family fight forced her from the trailer to a friend’s spare room. She skipped meals to feed her son, sold possessions to conjure cash and suffered anxiety attacks so severe they sometimes kept her in bed.Just as Ms. Stewart finally found a job, celebration turned to shock: The state demanded that she repay the jobless aid she had received, claiming she had been ineligible. That left her with an eye-popping debt of more than $12,000.“I spent the whole day just trying to breathe,” Ms. Stewart said the day the notice arrived. “I’m really confused about the whole thing. I’m trying not to panic.”At times during 2020, Kathryn Stewart was bringing in more money than ever because of government aid programs. At other times, when the aid dried up, she and her son went hungry.Credit…Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesIn the robust aid she received and its painful disappearance, Ms. Stewart’s experience captures both sides of the gyrating federal efforts to fortify the safety net in a crisis of historic proportions.As the virus ravaged jobs last spring, rapid federal action protected millions of people from hardship and showed that government can be a powerful force in reducing poverty.Yet the expiration of aid a few months later also underscored how vulnerable the needy are to partisan standoffs in an age of polarized government. Gaps in aid left families short on food and rent, uncertainty made it impossible to plan and confusion joined fear and worry.In his first weeks in office, President Biden appears to have both lessons in mind. A benefit extension passed in December expires next month, and he is urging Congress to spend big and move fast to keep 11 million workers from losing unemployment aid. Democrats are advancing his $1.9 trillion plan for stimulus and relief with a fast-track procedure that limits their policy options but increases the odds of avoiding more whipsaw delays.Critics of the spending warn it swells the national debt and erodes incentives to work. Supporters say the government’s impact has rarely seemed so direct: When help flowed at extraordinary levels, poverty fell. When it ended, poverty rose.“This could be a watershed moment,” said H. Luke Shaefer, who runs a poverty research center at the University of Michigan. “We showed how much government can do to mitigate hardship, even if the effort didn’t last.”Ms. Stewart and her son, Jack, had to rely at one point on a friend for housing.Credit…Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesWith millions still depending on government aid in a weak recovery, Ms. Stewart’s experience over the past 10 months highlights the stakes. As her complex life shows, the causes of poverty often run deep, and some lie beyond the reach of a government check. But the aid, while it lasted, broke her fall, and she is now back on her feet.In recent weeks, Ms. Stewart, 36, has been working at an Amazon warehouse and fighting Michigan’s efforts to recoup her unemployment benefits. She said she was “super happy” to no longer be at risk from another Washington impasse.An introspective woman, insightful about her hardships but distant from politics, she wonders how federal help has at once been so generous and so unsteady — a question that weighs on millions of Americans now waiting to see whether Congress moves quickly enough to sustain their benefits.“It made a huge difference in our lives,” Ms. Stewart said. “But it starts and stops and it’s really confusing. You feel helpless when you’re being helped by the government.”Should another crisis arise, she said, “I hope the government has a better plan.”Anxiety, Solitude and Then the PandemicMs. Stewart grew up accustomed to hardship and inventive in her responses. In a family too poor for vacations, she created her own by tagging along on her stepfather’s tractor-trailer runs. When he fought with her mother, she sheltered in closets. When he left, her mother tried to quell the family’s hunger with diet pills. Ms. Stewart was in grade school when panic attacks started, which she blamed on the conflict.An unsupervised adolescence followed in Grand Rapids, where Ms. Stewart slept in parks with runaways. She liked the literature of bohemians and rebels — Hunter S. Thompson and Oscar Wilde — but left school at 16 and lived in her car. Short on formal education, Ms. Stewart was long on curiosity and peripatetic instinct, which carried her from Ireland to California in between seasonal work at Michigan resorts. She dyed her hair unusual colors. She gave herself tattoos. She covered her walls with the surrealist works of Salvador Dalí, in shared faith that “you create your own reality.” Fearful of forgetting, Ms. Stewart kept a memory box, which included a middle-school note, a ukulele pick and clippings from her first mohawk.CreditMs. Stewart’s shift at an Amazon warehouse starts at 1:20 a.m. “I’m a number but a number with a paycheck,” she said.Credit…Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesIn her mid-20s, Ms. Stewart married and had a son, Jack, but her husband left and her anxiety grew. “Over the years I’ve gotten real anxious — almost afraid of people,” she said. “I’m an empath — if someone else feels bad, I feel bad.”Still, Ms. Stewart worked, most happily in solitude.By 2019, Ms. Stewart was a night janitor and living with her sister in Grand Rapids. Her sister fell behind on the rent and insisted they move in with their mother, five hours away in rural Ossineke. Ms. Stewart grudgingly succumbed. “We all rely on each other, which is good except for us not getting along,” she said.With four children and conflicting parenting styles, the trailer proved crowded and tense. When Ms. Stewart found work as a gas station cashier — $10 an hour, 20 hours a week — she welcomed the escape as much as the pay.A few weeks later, the coronavirus hit.Against All Odds, Help Was on the Way As the virus spread in early March, President Donald J. Trump insisted it posed no threat. “Jobs are booming, incomes are soaring,” he tweeted. By the next week, Disneyland and Broadway were padlocked and the stock market notched its worst daily loss in decades.While the need for Washington action was clear, the risks of an impasse were great. Liberal Democrats controlled the House, conservative Republicans held the Senate, and Mr. Trump derided the House speaker as “Crazy Nancy” Pelosi. Yet within a few weeks, they agreed on a $2.2 trillion plan.One surprise was how much it did for the poor, a class not known for political clout. Even the poorest families fully qualified for stimulus payments — $1,200 for adults, $500 for children (some Republicans had proposed giving them less) — and at the Democrats’ insistence, Congress greatly expanded jobless benefits.The existing program was filled with gaps: It covered only about a quarterof the jobless and replaced less than half their lost wages. Congress widened coverage, temporarily adding part-time workers, independent contractors and others typically excluded. And for four months it gave everyone on jobless aid a large bonus: $600 a week.The payments were more than many workers had earned on the job. Critics said the aid would discourage the jobless from seeking work, but urgency prevailed. “Gag and vote for it anyway,” the Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, advised fellow Republicans. The Senate vote was 96 to 0.Approving aid was one thing, delivering it another. Most stimulus checks arrived automatically and fast, though people who did not file tax returns had to contact the Internal Revenue Service — a procedural hurdle that kept payments from about eight million potentially eligible people, mostly low-income. Households with undocumented immigrants were barred from stimulus checks, which excluded about five million spouses and children who were citizens or legal residents.Unemployment insurance proved harder to get. With nearly 40 million claims in nine weeks, the state-run programs were overwhelmed. Computers crashed. Phone lines jammed. Governors called in the National Guard to process requests.Food shortages soared, especially among families with children as school closures deprived millions of meals. Lines outside food banks stretched for miles.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    Minimum Wage Hike Would Help Poverty but Cost Jobs, Budget Office Says

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMinimum Wage Hike Would Help Poverty but Cost Jobs, Budget Office SaysThe Congressional Budget Office said raising the federal minimum wage to $15 would also increase the deficit, potentially helping the proposal’s prospects of being included in relief legislation.Protesters in Chicago last month called for the minimum wage to be increased to $15 an hour. Congress last passed an increase in 2007. Credit…Scott Olson/Getty ImagesFeb. 8, 2021, 7:43 p.m. ETWASHINGTON — Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour — a proposal included in the package of relief measures being pushed by President Biden — would add $54 billion to the budget deficit over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office concluded on Monday.Normally, a prediction of increased debt might harm the plan’s political chances. But proponents of the wage hike seized on the forecast as evidence that the hotly contested proposal could survive a procedural challenge under the Senate’s arcane rules.Democrats are trying to add the measure to a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package that is advancing through a process called budget reconciliation, which requires a simple majority rather than the 60-vote margin to overcome a filibuster. But reconciliation is reserved for matters with a significant budgetary effect.Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, said the forecast of an increased deficit showed that the measure passed the test. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 “would have a direct and substantial impact on the federal budget,” he said in a statement. “What that means is we can clearly raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour under the rules.”Critics of the plan noted a different element of the report: its forecast that raising the minimum wage to $15 would eliminate 1.4 million jobs by the time the increase takes full effect.“Conservatives have been saying for a while that a recession is absolutely the wrong time to increase the minimum wage, even if it’s slowly phased in,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “The economy’s just too fragile.”He also contested Mr. Sanders’s argument that the study raised the odds that a wage increase could survive Senate rules. The study found the measure would affect private-sector wages much more than it would raise the deficit — $333 billion versus $54 billion — showing its effect on the deficit was incidental, Mr. Riedl said.“I doubt the parliamentarian will determine that this is primarily a budgetary reform rather than an economic reform with a secondary budget effect,” he said.The rules say the budgetary effects cannot be “merely incidental” but do not define the phrase. While Mr. Sanders called $54 billion substantial, Mr. Riedl said it was about half of 1 percent of the projected 10-year deficit.Congress last passed a minimum-wage increase in 2007. The current federal minimum, $7.25 an hour, is about 29 percent below its 1968 peak when adjusted for inflation, according to the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. David Cooper, an economic analyst at the institute, said 29 states and the District of Columbia have higher minimums, and seven states plus the District of Columbia were phasing in the $15-an-hour threshold.Progressives see the wage increase as a central weapon for fighting poverty and inequality, while conservatives often warn it will reduce jobs.The report in essence said both sides were right. It found a $15 minimum wage would offer raises to 27 million people and lift 900,000 people above the poverty line, but it would also cost 1.4 million jobs.Mr. Cooper disputed the jobs forecast, arguing that it was out of line with recent studies that showed increases in the minimum wage had produced little or no effect on employment. “C.B.O. seems to be going in the opposite direction,” he said.Progressives like Mr. Sanders have been arguing that an increased minimum wage would reduce federal spending because fewer people would need safety-net programs like food stamps or Medicaid. But the budget office warned that those savings would be more than offset by the higher costs of delivering services like medical care, as employers raised their workers’ pay — a finding Mr. Sanders continued to reject, citing other studies.On balance, the report said the changes would benefit labor over capital.“They assume that there is income transferred from workers at the top of the income distribution to workers at the bottom,” Mr. Cooper said. “Therefore, they implicitly say that the minimum wage is a tool for fighting inequality. That’s probably the most explicit they’ve ever been on that point.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Democrats to Unveil Up to $3,600 Child Tax Credit as Part of Stimulus Bill

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationCalifornia Anti-Vaccine ProtestsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDemocrats to Unveil Up to $3,600 Child Tax Credit as Part of Stimulus BillThe credit would send monthly payments to millions of Americans under certain income thresholds for a year starting in July.“This money is going to be the difference in a roof over someone’s head or food on their table,” said Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesEmily Cochrane and Feb. 7, 2021, 5:20 p.m. ETWASHINGTON —  Top House Democrats are preparing to unveil legislation that would send up to $3,600 per child to millions of Americans, as lawmakers aim to change the tax code to target child poverty rates as part of President Biden’s sweeping $1.9 trillion stimulus package.The proposal would expand the child tax credit to provide $3,600 per child younger than 6 and $3,000 per child up to 17 over the course of a year, phasing out the payments for Americans who make more than $75,000 and couples who make more than $150,000. The draft 22-page provision, reported earlier by The Washington Post and obtained by The New York Times, is expected to be formally introduced on Monday as lawmakers race to fill out the contours of Mr. Biden’s stimulus plan.“The pandemic is driving families deeper and deeper into poverty, and it’s devastating,” said Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and one of the champions of the provision. “This money is going to be the difference in a roof over someone’s head or food on their table. This is how the tax code is supposed to work for those who need it most.”The credits would be split into monthly payments from the Internal Revenue Service beginning in July, based on a person’s or family’s income in 2020. Although the proposed credit is only for a year, some Democrats said they would fight to make it permanent, a sweeping move that could reshape efforts to fight child poverty in America.The one-year credit appears likely to garner enough support to be included in the stimulus package, but it will also have to clear a series of tough parliamentary hurdles because of the procedural maneuvers Democrats are using to muscle the stimulus package through, potentially without Republican support.With House Democratic leadership aiming to have the stimulus legislation approved on the chamber floor by the end of the month, Congress moved last week to fast-track Mr. Biden’s stimulus plan even as details of the legislation are still being worked out. Buoyed by support from Democrats in both chambers and a lackluster January jobs report, Mr. Biden has warned that he plans to move ahead with his plan whether or not Republicans support it.Republicans, who have accused Mr. Biden of abandoning promises of bipartisanship and raised concerns about the nation’s debt, have largely balked at his plan because of its size and scope after Congress approved trillions of dollars in economic relief in 2020.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    Pandemic’s Toll on Housing: Falling Behind, Doubling Up

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPandemic’s Toll on Housing: Falling Behind, Doubling UpEviction moratoriums don’t keep arrears from piling up, and aid to renters may not reach the most vulnerable.Angelica Gabriel and Felix Cesario of Mountain View, Calif., moved out of the bedroom they shared with their two youngest children so they could rent it out. They now sleep in the living room.Credit…Sarahbeth Maney for The New York TimesFeb. 6, 2021Updated 2:54 p.m. ETAs the pandemic enters its second year, millions of renters are struggling with a loss of income and with the insecurity of not knowing how long they will have a home. Their savings depleted, they are running up credit card debt to make the rent, or accruing months of overdue payments. Families are moving in together, offsetting the cost of housing by finding others to share it.The nation has a plague of housing instability that was festering long before Covid-19, and the pandemic’s economic toll has only made it worse. Now the financial scars are deepening and the disruptions to family life growing more severe, leaving a legacy that will remain long after mass vaccinations.Even before last year, about 11 million households — one in four U.S. renters — were spending more than half their pretax income on housing, and overcrowding was on the rise. By one estimate, for every 100 very low-income households, only 36 affordable rentals are available.Now the pandemic is adding to the pressure. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia showed that tenants who lost jobs in the pandemic had amassed $11 billion in rental arrears, while a broader measure by Moody’s Analytics, which includes all delinquent renters, estimated that as of January they owed $53 billion in back rent, utilities and late fees. Other surveys show that families are increasingly pessimistic about making their next month’s rent, and are cutting back on food and other essentials to pay bills.On Friday, as monthly jobs data provided new evidence of a stalling recovery, President Biden underscored the housing insecurity faced by millions. The rental assistance in his $1.9 trillion relief plan, he said, is essential “to keep people in their homes rather than being thrown out in the street.”Bobbing above the surface of a missed payment, the most desperate are already improvising by moving into even more crowded homes, pairing up with friends and relatives, or taking in subtenants.That is the case with Angelica Gabriel and Felix Cesario, residents of a two-story apartment complex in Mountain View, Calif., largely inhabited by cooks and waitresses and maids and laborers — the kinds of workers hit hardest by the pandemic.With their incomes reduced, Ms. Gabriel, a fast-food worker, and her husband, a landscaper, recently moved out of the bedroom they shared with their two youngest children, 6 and 8. They now rent the bedroom to a friend of a friend, while the couple and the kids sleep on a mattress in the living room. (Two daughters, 14 and 20, continue to share the other bedroom.)The arrangement has kept them current by bringing in $850 toward the $2,675.37 monthly rent, which Ms. Gabriel reeled off to the penny.“We weren’t able to pay the rent by ourselves,” she said in Spanish. “Suddenly the hours fell. You couldn’t pay, buy food.”Such changes are not directly reflected in rent rolls or credit card bills, but various studies show that disrupted and overcrowded households have a host of knock-on effects, including poorer long-term health and a decline in educational attainment.Reflecting the broader economy, the pain in the U.S. housing market is most severe at the bottom. Surveys of large landlords whose units tend to be higher quality and more expensive have been remarkably resilient through the pandemic. Surveys of small landlords and low-income tenants show that late fees and debt are piling up.One measure of relief came when Mr. Biden extended — by two months — a federal eviction moratorium that was scheduled to expire at the end of January, as states and cities also moved to extend their own eviction moratoriums. In addition, $25 billion in federal rental aid approved in December is set to be distributed.But for every million or so households who are evicted in the United States each year, there are many more millions who move out before they miss a payment, who cut back on food and medicine to make rent, who take up informal housing arrangements that exist outside the traditional landlord-tenant relationship.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    H. Jack Geiger, Doctor Who Fought Social Ills, Dies at 95

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyH. Jack Geiger, Doctor Who Fought Social Ills, Dies at 95He used medicine to take on poverty, racism and the threat of nuclear destruction. Two groups he helped start won Nobel Peace Prizes.Dr. H. Jack Geiger in 2012. He believed doctors should use their expertise and moral authority to improve conditions like poverty, hunger, discrimination, joblessness and lack of education.Credit…Angel Franco/The New York TimesDec. 28, 2020, 3:17 p.m. ETDr. H. Jack Geiger, who ran away to Harlem as a teenager and emerged a lifelong civil rights activist, helping to bring medical care and services to impoverished regions and to start two antiwar doctors groups that shared in Nobel Peace Prizes, died on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 95.His death was confirmed by David Shadrack Smith, his stepson.Dr. Geiger was a leading proponent of “social medicine,” the idea that doctors should use their expertise and moral authority not just to treat illness but also to change the conditions that made people sick in the first place: poverty, hunger, discrimination, joblessness and lack of education.“Jack redefined what it meant to be a physician,” said Dr. Irwin Redlener, the founding director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University and the co-founder of the Children’s Health Fund. He added, by email, “He felt it was our right and responsibility as doctors to ‘treat’ hunger, poverty and disparities in health care, as directly and openly as we treat pneumonia or appendicitis.”The social order, not medical services, determines health, Dr. Geiger said in “Out in the Rural,” a short documentary film made in 1970 about the first community health center in Mississippi. “I’ve never seen any use in what I call the Schweitzer bit,” he added, referring to the humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer, “which is the idea that you stand around in whatever circumstances laying hands on people in the traditional medical way, waiting until they’re sick, curing them and then sending them back unchanged into an environment that overwhelmingly determines that they’re going to get sick.”In the 1960s, Dr. Geiger was a co-founder, with Dr. Count Gibson, of community health centers in South Boston and in Mound Bayou, in the Mississippi Delta. They provided desperately needed health care but also food, sanitation, education, jobs and social services — what Dr. Geiger called “a road out” of poverty. The centers inspired a national network of clinics that now number more than 1,300 and serve about 28 million low-income patients at more than 9,000 sites.“I don’t know if some of the Mississippi white power structure cares about dead Black babies or not,” Dr. Geiger said in the film, about the first center in Mississippi. “But if they don’t, even they can’t afford to say so publicly. We have been able to enter and to do things under the general umbrella of health that would have been much harder to do if we’d said we were here for economic development or for social change per se.”Dr. Geiger, second from left, treating a baby in Bolivar County, Miss., where he co-founded a community health center.Credit…Dan Bernstein, UNC Southern Historical CollectionDr. Geiger was a founding member of two advocacy groups, Physicians for Social Responsibility, which shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to end the nuclear arms race, and Physicians for Human Rights, which shared the 1997 prize for working to ban land mines.He rallied doctors in the Cold War era to speak out against what he saw as a myth being promoted by the government, that nuclear war could be survivable. On the contrary, he insisted, hospitals would be quickly overwhelmed, and even victims with treatable injuries would perish.Drawing physicians out of the clinic and into the political fray “was a really signal event,” said Dr. Robert Gould, a pathologist in San Francisco and president of the Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility.In an email for this obituary sent in 2012, Dr. Geiger said he was driven in part by an outrage over injustice.“I’ve been angry,” he wrote, “seeing terribly burned children in Iraq after the first Gulf war, or interviewing torture victims in the West Bank, or listening to Newt Gingrich say ghetto kids should learn to be part-time janitors and clean toilets (in another country, they called that Bantu Education). So anger doesn’t vanish, but is replaced by a determination to do something.”Home Was a Way StationHerman J. Geiger was born on Nov. 11, 1925, in Manhattan. (It was unclear what the J. stood for, but he was mostly called Jack throughout his life.) His father, Jacob, born in Vienna, was a physician; his mother, Virginia (Loewenstein) Geiger, who came from a village in central Germany, was a microbiologist. Both parents, who were Jewish, had emigrated to the United States as children. Mr. Geiger grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and their home was often a way station for relatives fleeing the Nazis.“The last to appear were some cousins from my mother’s birthplace, Kirtorf,” Dr. Geiger said in the email. “When they got their visas to come to the U.S., they said, the Nazi authorities were furious. On the night before their departure, the authorities ordered all their neighbors to go out at twilight and stone their house. The neighbors all dutifully gathered — and threw loaves of bread instead.”That story, Dr. Geiger said, taught him not to stereotype.He skipped so many grades in the city’s public schools that he graduated from Townsend Harris High School (then in Manhattan, now in Queens) at 14. Too young to start college, he learned typing and shorthand and went to work as a copy boy for The New York Times. He also began hanging out at jazz joints, listening to Billie Holiday, Art Tatum and Fats Waller. His parents were often beside themselves, waiting up for him and sometimes even calling the bars to ask if “Jackie” was there.Jack soon ran away from home and turned up, suitcase in hand, in Harlem’s Sugar Hill section on the doorstep of Canada Lee, a Black actor whom he had seen on Broadway and had gotten to know after talking his way backstage. Mr. Lee, once a teenage runaway himself, let young Jack sleep on the couch — after consulting with his parents — and though Jack sometimes returned home, he spent most of the next year in Harlem. The year was 1940, and Mr. Lee’s home was a hub for writers, actors and musicians — Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, Billy Strayhorn, William Saroyan. The Black guests told harrowing stories of racism, and Harlem was seething over the mistreatment of Black troops at military bases in the South. Jack Geiger took it all in.In 1941, with a loan from Mr. Lee, he began studying at the University of Wisconsin. He worked nights at a newspaper, The Madison Capitol Times. Because Madison had a curfew for anyone under 18, he said, “I am probably the only police reporter in history who had to get a special pass to be out at night.”In 1943, after meeting James Farmer, the founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, Mr. Geiger started a chapter of the group in Madison. It was the height of World War II, and after turning 18 that year he left school to enlist in the merchant marine, which he chose because it was not racially segregated.When Dr. Geiger arrived in the all-Black Mississippi Delta town of Mound Bayou in the 1960s, he found conditions there as desperate as those he had seen in the poorest areas of South Africa.Credit…Dan Bernstein, UNC Southern Historical CollectionRabble Rouser for JusticeDischarged in 1947, Dr. Geiger enrolled as a pre-med student at the University of Chicago. He discovered racial discrimination there — Black patients being excluded from certain hospitals, qualified Black students being rejected by the medical school. He fought the policies for three years and ultimately helped organize a 1,000-strong faculty and student protest strike — an activity virtually unheard of in that era.He paid a price for his rabble-rousing. The American Medical Association wrote to medical schools warning of his “extracurricular activities.” No school would take him. He had, in effect, been blackballed.Dr. Geiger went back to journalism for the next five years, as a science and medicine editor for the International News Service (later part of United Press International). It was, he said, “a gorgeous education” that let him read journals, attend conferences, interview researchers and, significantly, meet deans whom he could lobby to let him into medical school. In 1954, at 29, he was admitted to what is now Case Western Reserve University’s medical school in Cleveland.During his last year at Case Western, he traveled to South Africa and worked with two physicians who were setting up a health center in an impoverished, disease-ridden region of the country called Pholela, which was then a Zulu reserve. A key to the center’s success was that local people — its own patients — worked there and helped run it.For five months Dr. Geiger took care of patients, visiting thatch huts and cattle kraals, meeting traditional healers and seeing the huge improvements — pit latrines, vegetable gardens, children’s feeding programs — that the health center had brought to the region.“I learned a little Zulu, including the three oral clicks in that language, which always made me drool, to the hilarity of my African teachers,” he wrote in a chapter he contributed to the 2013 book “Comrades in Health.”Dr. Geiger’s time in Africa made him want a career in international health. He trained in internal medicine at Boston City Hospital and in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health.In the “freedom summer” of 1964, he traveled to Mississippi to help care for the civil rights workers who were pouring into the Deep South to campaign for voting rights. The next year, he organized medical care for the people who marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.“I took a long look around,” Dr. Geiger recalled of his first visit to Mississippi. He saw conditions much like those in South Africa: families living in shacks with no clean drinking water, toilets or sewers; sky-high rates of malnutrition, illness, infant death and illiteracy; few or no opportunities for residents to better themselves and escape. He did not have to travel to Africa to find people in trouble, he realized.Mound Bayou in the 1960s. Dr. Geiger originally traveled to Mississippi in 1964 to treat civil rights workers and realized he could do more.Credit…Dan Bernstein, UNC Southern Historical CollectionA Clinic in Mound BayouUnder President Lyndon B. Johnson, the war on poverty had begun, and the Office of Economic Opportunity had been created to pay for projects to help the poor. Sponsored by Tufts University and armed with grants from the opportunity office, Dr. Geiger, Dr. Gibson, Dr. John Hatch and others set up a health center in Mound Bayou, Miss., a poor, Black small town where most people were former cotton sharecroppers whose way of life had been wiped out by mechanization.The center was a copy of the Pholela project. The clinic, which opened in 1967, treated the sick but also used its grant money to dig wells and privies and set up a library, farm cooperative, office of education, high-school equivalency program and other social services.The clinic “prescribed” food for families with malnourished children — to be purchased from Black-owned groceries — and the bills were paid out of the center’s pharmacy budget.The governor complained, and a federal official was sent to Mound Bayou to scold Dr. Geiger for misusing pharmacy funds, which, the official said, were meant to cover drugs to treat disease.“Yeah,” Dr. Geiger replied, “well, the last time I looked in my medical textbooks, they said the specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”The official, he said, “shut up and went back to Washington.”Dr. Geiger in 1966 with Dr. John Hatch during construction of a community health center in Mound Bayou, Miss. They, along with Dr. Gibson, secured government grants and a sponsorship from Tufts University to bring more social services to the area.Credit…Jack Geiger, via Associated PressDr. Geiger helped found Physicians for Social Responsibility in 1961. The group argued that official predictions of the effects of nuclear war minimized the number of casualties and the extent of the destruction it would cause. At the group’s public meetings, Dr. Geiger’s job was “the bombing run” — offering a detailed account of what a one-megaton nuclear bomb would do to the city in which the meeting was being held.He had a resonant voice and a crisp, forceful delivery. His presentations left audiences stunned, according to a colleague in the group, Dr. Ira Helfand.Dr. Geiger was a co-author of one of the first articles to look at the medical costs of nuclear war. The article, in The New England Journal of Medicine, predicted the fate of Boston in a nuclear strike — 2 million dead, a half-million injured and fewer than 10,000 hospital beds left in the entire state of Massachusetts. Doctors must “explore a new area of preventive medicine, the prevention of thermonuclear war,” the article said.It was published in May 1962 — five months before the Cuban missile crisis, which took the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war.Dr. Geiger’s marriage in 1951 to Mary Battle, an administrator and executive assistant in health care, ended in divorce in 1968. They had no children. (Ms. Battle died in a car accident in 1977.) In 1982, he married Nicole Schupf, a neuroscientist, epidemiologist and professor at Columbia University.In addition to his wife and his stepson, Mr. Smith, Mr. Geiger is survived by two stepgrandsons. An older sister, Ruth Ann, a schoolteacher, died in 1986.In 1978, Dr. Geiger became a professor of community medicine at the City University of New York Medical School at City College of New York.In his final years, which were marked by bladder cancer, lung cancer and blindness from glaucoma, he continued to write book chapters, articles and editorials and to give talks.To the end he was an impassioned advocate for civil rights. In an essay published in 2016 by Physicians for Human Rights, he called for more action to fight the lead-poisoning of the water supply in Flint, Mich., and to hold accountable the officials responsible for it.With characteristic bluntness, he ascribed the contamination to “a contemptuous disregard for the health of people of color, especially if they are poor.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    What Happens to the Unemployed When the Checks Run Out

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat Happens to the Unemployed When the Checks Run OutMillions face a steep and immediate drop in spending power when federal jobless benefits end this month, with a sharp rise in the poverty rate.Volunteers distributed food donations last week in Newton Centre, Mass. Poverty declined in the first months of the pandemic, reflecting CARES Act relief, but has since surged.Credit…Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesDec. 14, 2020When jobless workers get their last unemployment check, the effect on spending is sharp and swift.Unemployed workers’ spending on food, clothes and other so-called nondurable goods immediately drops 12 percent, about twice as much as when they lost their job and went on unemployment insurance, University of Chicago researchers have found. Spending at drugstores falls 15 percent. Co-payments for visits to the doctor fall 14 percent. Spending on groceries falls 16 percent, or $46.30 a month, on average.Millions of Americans are less than two weeks from cutbacks like those. The last two federal emergency unemployment programs in the CARES Act, passed as the pandemic’s first wave surged in March, expire on Dec. 26.An analysis by the Century Foundation concluded that 12 million workers who rely on one or the other of these programs will lose them on that day. This will add to 4.4 million who will have already exhausted their federal unemployment benefits.It projected that fewer than three million of these workers will be eligible for what are known as extended benefits, which kick in when the unemployment rate in a state is exceptionally high and can last six to 20 weeks, depending on the state.If Congress and the administration are unable to hammer out a deal to provide additional relief, the others will be left with nothing.“It was obvious this would be totally inadequate,” said Stephen A. Wandner, an expert on unemployment insurance at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, who has argued for extending unemployment benefits for a longer period, especially at a time when jobs are so hard to come by.Mr. Wandner noted that unemployment benefits lasted up to 99 weeks — almost two years — as part of the recovery effort in the last recession. In 2003, when the nation was also recovering from recession, maximum benefits were extended as long as 72 weeks, or almost a year and a half.Joblessness will not only affect consumer spending. Nearly 12 million households fear they may not being able to meet their mortgage payments, according to a survey in October by Moody’s Analytics and Morning Consult. Millions of others can no longer afford their rent. And 37 percent of the unemployed said the coronavirus pandemic prevented them from looking for a job. “You are really putting coal in people’s stockings,” Mr. Wandner said.At the end of November, 16 million people reported they had not worked in the last seven days and were relying on unemployment insurance payments to make ends meet, according to a Census Bureau survey of Americans’ financial condition. Losing those checks will translate into immediate hardship. “Come Jan. 1, a lot of people are going to be on Defcon 1,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.The expiring programs are Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, created for gig workers and others not covered by regular unemployment insurance, and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, which extended benefits up to 13 weeks beyond their regular duration (from 12 to 30 weeks, depending on the state).The November Census survey found that about one in four people out of work was relying on savings or selling assets to meet spending needs. One-fifth said they were still using some of the so-called economic impact payment of $1,200 that most Americans got under the CARES Act in the spring. But that is running out fast. More than one in six said they were borrowing from friends and family.Pascal Noel, an economist at the University of Chicago, analyzed the consequences of expiring unemployment benefits with his colleague, Peter Ganong, in a study published last year. Mr. Noel noted that spending “falls substantially exactly in the month in which benefits expire, and it falls across the board.”And that kind of shock has consequences. Mark Aguiar of Princeton and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago have estimated that the drop in grocery spending that Professors Ganong and Noel associate with the end of unemployment benefits leads to a deterioration in diet quality: a significant decline in household consumption of fresh fruit and a jump in the consumption of hot dogs and processed lunch meat.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 15, 2020, 7:19 a.m. ETSolar energy had one of its best years in the U.S. despite the pandemic.U.S. stocks set to open higher as vaccine rollout outweighs virus restrictions.Millions are about to lose jobless benefits. Expect a sharp drop in spending.Jesse Rothstein of the University of California, Berkeley, and Robert Valletta of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco studied what happened when unemployment insurance ended for workers who lost their jobs during the recessions of 2001 or 2007-9. Household income declines $522 a month on average, they found.When unemployment checks run out, the poverty rate among families who received them rises from 20 percent to about one-third in the next six months, the researchers found. Other government programs, like food stamps, did not raise their income by much.The current crop of unemployed is already in bad shape. According to the Census Bureau, for instance, by the end of November, more than one person in 10 who had not worked in the past week was relying on federal nutrition assistance, also known as food stamps, to meet needs. That is up from one in 40 in mid-July, just before the expiration of another component of the CARES Act — a $600 weekly supplement to other unemployment benefits.Poverty, which actually declined in the first months of the pandemic — reflecting the extraordinary relief offered by the CARES Act through the spring and early summer — has snapped back with a vengeance. According to estimates by Bruce D. Meyer of the University of Chicago, James X. Sullivan of the University of Notre Dame and Jeehoon Han of Zhejiang University, 11.4 percent of Americans subsisted with incomes below the official poverty line by October, up from 9.3 percent in June.The checking accounts of the unemployed also reflect this reversal of fortunes since the early phases of CARES Act relief, according to an analysis by researchers at the JPMorgan Chase Institute and the University of Chicago. Their account balances more than doubled from January to July, helped by the supplemental unemployment payments and the economic impact check. In percentage terms, their gain was vastly greater even than for workers who kept their jobs. Their spending also surged, peaking in July.By the end of August, however, the last month in which the researchers tracked the finances of the unemployed, their median bank balances had shrunk by about a third since July, losing most of the cushion built up since March.“The typical family does still have somewhat of a cash buffer,” said Fiona Greig, co-president of the JPMorgan Chase Institute, “but it is declining precipitously.”Regular unemployment insurance in the United States remains among the least generous in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, typically falling to zero after six months, barring extraordinary legislation. In Denmark or Portugal, by contrast, unemployment benefits replace around 80 percent of the lost wages of workers even two years after they lose their jobs.In the United States, jobless benefits add up to about 20 percent of the median income for a family with two children, according to data from the O.E.C.D. In Germany and Ireland, they amount to over 50 percent.Emergency legislation like the CARES Act has provided an intermittent boost to unemployed American workers during crises. But barring new action by Congress in the coming days, the safety net will revert to its previous state. Millions will fall through the cracks.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More