From Graduate School to Welfare

Thoroughly depressing story at the Chronicle HERE. Some stats:

. . .the percentage of graduate-degree holders who receive food stamps or some other aid more than doubled between 2007 and 2010.

During that three-year period, the number of people with master's degrees who received food stamps and other aid climbed from 101,682 to 293,029, and the number of people with Ph.D.'s who received assistance rose from 9,776 to 33,655, according to tabulations of microdata done by Austin Nichols, a senior researcher with the Urban Institute. He drew on figures from the 2008 and 2011 Current Population Surveys done by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor.

Leaders of organizations that represent adjunct faculty members think that the number of people counted by the government does not represent the full picture of academics on welfare because many do not report their reliance on federal aid.

The story also notes that the number of non-tenure track faculty is now 70%.

The article also has statistics on the continued rise in foodstamp usage throught the population during the recession. What it doesn't say is that worsening of all of this is almost entirely the result of trickle down economics at the state level combined with Republican intransigence at the federal level. Early in the recession, Republican legislatures continued to cut taxes on the wealthy and then after OWS made that harder, did the equivalent by giving out targeted tax rebates to connnected constituencies. All the while public employees were fired to make up the difference.

Here in Louisiana, the past five years has been an orgy of tax cutting and targeted tax rebates to the point where the total  amount of targeted tax cuts and rebates is seven and a half billion dollars a year (this is over a fourth of the entire tax receipts). During the same time state funding for higher education has fallen off of a cliff.

Nationally, the resulting loss of six million public sector jobs has had a huge ripple effect because of goods and services the newly impoverished can no longer afford.

It's deeply irrational. This is just highschool economics. I mean, no educated person of good will disagrees about any of this.