“It’s not a fire sale yet,” she said. The implication was clear though—the future of affordable housing is hanging in the balance.

Seen by cultural historians as another way African-American youth culture has chosen to express its identity, the style is seen by others as being closely associated with criminal behavior. Civil liberties advocates see racial profiling in the bans.

Regardless of the style’s meaning, proponents of ordinances prohibiting sagging pants can expect to face a skeptical court when these laws are challenged on constitutional grounds.

Marjorie Esman, executive director of the Louisiana chapter of the American Civil Liberty Union, says, “These laws just don’t hold water. I don’t think any of these ordinances could stand any kind of scrutiny at the appellate level.”
The origins of the style are vague and steeped in mythology. A consensus has emerged however that wearing sagging, oversized pants originated from prison culture. Most say that prison-issued garb is many times ill-fitting and usually oversized. With the prohibition of belts to prevent hangings and beatings, the pants of inmates tended to sag below the waist—sometimes showing as much at four or five inches of underwear or more.

Grammy-award-winning rapper Killer Mike disputes these claims. In his 2006 song, “That’s Life,” Killer Mike raps, “we wear our mother f_____-ing pants big because our mother’s were too poor to buy our size . . . call it what it is n____, it’s poverty.”

Whatever its origin, hip-hop artists in the early 1990s, some who served time in jail, adopted the style as a signifier of street credibility. The style migrated from hip-hop culture in predominately African-American neighborhoods, to skateboard culture, to the suburbs and hallways of many high-schools.

Diana Baird N’Diaye, historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, D.C., says that individual expression, especially in dress, has always been an important part of the African-American experience. “In the 1930s we had zoot suits, in the 1970s there was the “Superfly” look with platform shoes and bell-bottoms—all outlaw looks that our parents’ hated.”

N’Diaye continues, “It’s also connected to the improvisation of dance and movement. If you think about the way people move, the pants become an accessory to the swagger. It changes the silhouette of the body.”
Zoot suits share much in common with the extra large, sagging pants favored by African-American males who want to suggest toughness and street credibility. Both can be seen as statements of defiance and both changed the shape of the body. In his biography, Malcolm X described the zoot suit as “a killer-diller coat with a drape shape, reet pleats and shoulders padded like a lunatic’s cell.”

Tom Rogers, historian of the African diaspora and assistant professor of Africana Studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, says that wearing pants that sag below the waist is a “symbol of opposition to the mainstream, a tiny f___- you to mainstream society.” Rogers says that any attempt to ban the style of dress is an attempt by town officials “to maintain existing power hierarchies.”

Despite the charges that the laws are racially motivated, many legal scholars oppose the ordinances on constitutional grounds. Most ordinances banning sagging pants do so citing obscenity laws. The U.S. Supreme Court has created very few categories of speech that are not protected—obscenity however, is one of them. If a town can assert that wearing sagging pants is obscene, it can legally ban them.

Esman of the ACLU dismisses the obscenity argument outright. “The problem is that obscenity is very narrowly defined legally. The law is clear that showing underwear is not obscene. What about plumbers, exotic dancers and jogging bras?” Esman argues that these ordinances would encompass a broad range of dress, criminalizing unintended forms of clothing and styles.

Ethan J. Leib, professor of law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco says that courts “aren’t too enthusiastic about these types of ordinances.” He calls most of the laws “overbroad and vague, and so trammel upon some pretty basic freedoms our constitution provides for.”

As for the laws’ racial implications, Leib says that “it isn’t obvious that any particular minority community is being intentionally discriminated against, as whites, blacks and Asians all wear the garb.”

The style remains popular in the predominantly African-American Roxbury neighborhood in Boston. Just a few blocks away from where Malcolm X spent several years as a young adult, Hector Fuentes works the counter of his family’s business, the  Fuentes Market and Liquor Store. He says he sees customers coming in and out of his store with sagging pants “every day all day.”

Fuentes, who says he has friends who wear their pants very low, is dressed in what could be considered baggy but not sagging jeans. “Some say it feels comfortable, I don’t think they know how dumb it looks. It’s just a style. From the rappers. But illegal? No. Why?”

Whether or not ordinances that ban sagging pants are discriminatory, irrelevant or an attempt to curb harmful activities related to the style of dress, Rogers of UNC, Charlotte says the whole idea of the laws is “absurd.”
He says, “The laws are ridiculous and hopelessly naïve because you can’t control meaning. What are you going to do, legislate all dissent from a culture? The historical record is pretty clear. It doesn’t work.”

This method of measuring poverty has its problems and is far from an accurate measurement. It excludes in-kind benefits when counting income, it ignores the associated costs of earning income (clothing, transportation, child-care) when calculating net income, it disregards regional variances in the cost of living, ignores tax payments, it ignores the effects of earned income tax credits, it ignores the value of health coverage in determining income and the costs of medical care when determining consumption needs, and it has never been updated to account for changing consumption patterns and expenses. All of these problems distort the numbers of people deemed to be in poverty by the federal government.

On the other hand, The European Union defines poverty as, “[the condition] of those whose resources (material, cultural, and social) are so limited as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life in the Member States in which they live”. This means essentially drawing the poverty line at a certain percentage of the national median income. The EU’s position on the measurement of poverty subscribes to the theory of relative poverty. Relative poverty refers to deprivation that is relative to the standard of living enjoyed by other members of society. Relative poverty can be understood as inequality in the distribution of income, goods, resources and opportunities in a given society.

The absolute approach to defining poverty is subject to the views of those charged with formulating the yardstick. The U.S. continues to use this method because if we too used the relative approach it would become clear that the richest country in the world ranks near or at the bottom of all six dimensions of child well-being as defined by UNICEF. The dominant economic and political structures would be unable to exist if suddenly the real numbers of those impoverished in this country were exposed.

In his film, SiCKO, Michael Moore spells it out for us: The United States is the only industrialized country in the world without a universal health care system. Forty-five million Americans do not have health insurance. More than nine million of those are children. A baby born in El Salvador has a better chance of surviving that one born in Detroit. Ninety percent of Americans believe the American health care system needs fundamental changes or needs to be completely rebuilt. Two-thirds of Americans believe the federal government should guarantee universal health care for all citizens.

In yet the richest country in the world refuses to care for its citizens. Michael Moore bluntly exposes the personal horrors our failed health care system has wrought. Mr. Moore, in all of his documentaries, has done an exceptional job in bringing pointy-headed liberal policy debates from the cerebral to the guttural—a task usually reserved for the more conservative political operatives among us. Mr. Moore’s film makes us sad, angry, jealous (of a European belief in universal health care), and alternately depressed and inspired.

The health care problem in the United States has become an increasingly partisan debate. A January, 2008 Pew Research Center Poll indicates that 65% of Democrats believe that insuring the uninsured should be a top priority of the administration. Only 27% of Republicans polled feel the same. What do conservatives stand to gain from an uninsured, debt-ridden class in our society?
In the film, Tony Benn, former member of British Parliament says that, “Democracy is the most revolutionary thing in the world”. He suggests that if you have political power you will use it to meet the needs of your community. In a functional Democracy, the vote moves the power from the wallet to the ballot.

The former MP goes on to explain how ours is not a functional Democracy. He says there are two ways people are controlled: fear (sound familiar?), and demoralization. Benn suggests that privatized health care ratchets up the intensity of fear and demoralization. A country where the uninsured sometimes choose to suffer, rather than go into debt over a medical bill suggests a country whose citizens are afraid. If they do choose health care they are racked with debt. Benn says that people in debt become hopeless, and hopeless people don’t vote. This is why our brand of Democracy is not revolutionary.

Some fault Mr. Moore for his manipulative style of filmmaking. Manipulative? Maybe. I would suggest though, that his manipulations are only more transparent than the manipulations of lobbyists, politicians and CEO’s whose best interests it is to see that there remains an uninsured, debt-ridden class in our society.

2. Social Security is a Women’s Issue. Often Social Security is the only income sourse keeping women from poverty. Women still only earn an average of 74% of what men do. Women leave the work-force for an average of 15% of their working careers to care for children, spouses, or parents. In addition women live an average of seven years longer than men. Social Security works for women because it is a program where every worker pays in and every retired worker receives a guaranteed benefit for life.

3. Social Security is particularly essential for minorities. Minorities rely on the program for more of their retirement income than whites. Social Security reduces minority poverty. The progressive nature of the Social Security tax is beneficial to minorities (and other low-wage earners). Minority retirees are less likely than others to have income from savings, stocks, bonds or other wealth generating assets. As a result, Social Security means more to them.

To the chagrin of conservative policy analysts, Social Security has taken on some of the characteristics of an income redistribution and/or public assistance program. Take for example the effects of the Social Security program on the lives of our nation’s elders. In 1969 before Social Security took cost-of-living adjustments into account the poverty rate for the elderly was double that of the general population (25% vs. 12%). In 2002 the poverty rate for the elderly was 10%. Without Social Security the poverty rate among the elderly would have been 52% in 1996. Again, to the dismay of conservatives, Social Security (a very successful and very popular program) has a strong redistributive effect, transferring resources from those with high life-time earnings to those with low life-time earnings.

It is helpful when examining the current presidential candidates’ positions on Social Security to understand the history and context surrounding the ongoing debate about the solvency of the program. Conservatives have successfully framed the debate around the presumption that Social Security is in crisis. Those on this side of the debate point to figures that suggest that by 2015, when many baby boomers begin to retire, OASDI benefit payments will begin to exceed taxes, and trust funds will be exhausted by 2042. The theoretical debate came to a head in 2005 when the Bush administration.

Those who oppose this viewpoint say that this crisis has been invented by fiscal and social conservatives intent on privatizing—some say undermining—all social programs. Economist and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, calls the so-called “crisis” a problem of modest size. Krugman points to a study done in 2004 by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities which finds that the Social Security trust fund will run out in 2052 but that 80% of benefits could be paid at that time. So, there is a long-term fiscal problem, not a crisis.

It seems that honest effort at solving a long-term policy problem has been pushed aside in favor of partisan spin. On the right, analysts have trumped up the fear factor (sound familiar?) in a rush to privatize—ideologue scare-mongering says Krugman. Left leaning analysts have been so busy defending FDR’s triumphant, cornerstone welfare policy and lionizing anyone who dares analyze its long-term solvency, that they seem unprepared to offer solutions. I suppose this is policy de jour in Washington. Only Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, seems to get it right: he says Social Security doesn’t need an overhaul but it will need bolstering.

You’ve heard of Fantasy Football. Now for some Fantasy Policy Advising! (It doesn’t have the same ring, does it?)

The first thing I would do as policy advisor to Senator Barack Obama on the issue of Social Security is to gather Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Senator Obama into the same room—let’s make that room the Publick House in Brookline, MA.

I want Senator Obama to pull from Krugman’s sharp critique of the Social Security doomsayers while learning from Reich’s even handed and practical policy prescriptions.

I would advise Obama to put the Social Security question in context. Obama should initiate plans that roll back Bush’s tax cuts, begin an orderly troop withdrawal from Iraq, and address the real fiscal crisis in America: healthcare costs. As Peter Orszag, the director of the Congressional Budget office, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007, “The long-term fiscal condition of the United States has been largely misdiagnosed. Despite all the attention paid to demographic challenges, such as the coming retirement of the baby-boom generation, our country’s financial health will in fact be determined primarily by the growth rate of per capita health care costs”.

As for the fixable Social Security problem, Obama should start by lifting the cap on the percent of income subject to Social Security Payroll taxes. Currently the cap is at about $102,000 which creates a regressive tax policy. This is not the original aim of Social Security. Robert Reich recommends lifting the cap to approximately $120,000—not revolutionary, just progressive. The revenue from rolling back Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest, reclaiming the costs of missed opportunities from the costs of war, halting and shrinking out-of-control health care costs and creating a progressive Social Security payroll tax would go a long way to creating solvency.

2004 saw a perfect storm of sorts for doomsayers of the social security program: baby boomers’ eminent retirements, a shrinking younger demographic paying into the program, a republican house, and republican senate, and a zealous administration intent on dismantling the welfare state. President Bush was eager to cash in on his self-proclaimed “political capital”. Were it not for a war and a lame-duck presidency, this debate may have played differently. Let’s hope President Obama heeds our advice.

” . . . And then he says to me . . . get this . . . Judas can’t bowl because I . . . ha ha.  This is off the record . . . can you top my drink off?”

So enter the Federal Reserve to bailout the failing financial institution. The threat of a larger economic meltdown is too great for inaction.

If you’ve been paying attention to the bailout of Bear Stearns, you may have heard the term moral hazard thrown around.

Moral hazard is an economic concept with its roots in the insurance business. The idea goes like this: If you protect someone too well against an unwanted outcome, that person may behave recklessly.

And behave recklessly they have. Financial institutions have not only been protected from taking the brunt of their own losses due to risky lending, they have been rewarded for the most risky behaviors.

No parent would think of letting their child ride off on a bicycle without a helmet, chalking the risk of head trauma up to a “lesson learned”. Nor, however, would you give him chocolate every time he refused to wear the helmet.

Read Robert Reich on moral hazard and Malcolm Gladwell on moral hazard in the health care debate.