As Cerner and other businesses use TIF to ensure their growth, Kansas and Missouri keep squeezing their poorest citizens
Editor’s note: KCPT Channel 19’s September 4 episode of Kansas City Week in Review focuses on corporate welfare and the fraying social safety net. On the program, the Hale Center for Journalism’s Mike McGraw and The Pitch‘s Steve Vockrodt discuss their reporting in the stories here (which also appear together at flatlandkc.org).
CERNER’S TIF TRANSPLANT
By Steve Vockrodt
Neal Patterson personifies 21st-century Kansas City entrepreneurialism.
He is his generation’s Henry Bloch or Joyce Hall, the head of a company he started from nothing — Cerner Corporation — and made KC’s most prosperous business.
Cerner, a health-information technology firm, makes more than $3 billion a year. The company’s market capitalization — the value of its outstanding shares — is $22 billion. And it has made a significant imprint on the skylines of North Kansas City; Kansas City, Kansas; and Kansas City, Missouri.
As Bloch’s H&R Block and the Hall family’s namesake greeting-card company have fallen on hard times in recent years after decades of flourishing, Cerner has only continued to grow. In July, the company secured an $11 billion contract with the U.S. Department of Defense.
Patterson has been richly rewarded for his work. His net worth, estimated by Forbes magazine, reached $1.9 billion in 2015. That makes him one of the 1,000 richest people in the world and the third richest in Kansas City, behind Garmin co-founders Min Kao and Gary Burrell. Patterson’s partner from the outset, Cliff Illig, has a $1.2 billion net worth.
Patterson also embodies another element of Kansas City’s corporate reality: the use of public funds to ensure his company’s continued success.
Cerner has embarked on redeveloping south Kansas City’s former Bannister Mall site into a $4.3 billion office complex. Through a maze of public incentives, 40 percent of the project’s cost — about $1.7 billion — will be covered by taxpayer sources.
City officials are keen on leveraging two forms of tax-increment financing — a heavily used development tool in Kansas City (see “TIF Explained” below) — to secure what Cerner says will be an additional 15,000–16,000 jobs in one of the metro’s most moribund zip codes. And Cerner, of course, is keen to write off close to $2 billion in project costs.
Cerner officials say the company would lose money without the incentives. Even with the incentives, they claim, the campus is a “break-even” proposition.
“It turns out to be break-even for us,” says Mike Nill, chief operating officer for Cerner. “For us, it’s not a real-estate investment transaction. It’s a transaction to provide office space and develop a part of the city.”
The dead zone that once housed Bannister Mall was at one time slated to become the site of a new soccer stadium for what was then the Kansas City Wizards, a team owned by OnGoal LLC, a partnership involving Patterson, Illig and others. Corporate entities, some tied to the Cerner co-founders, spent $30 million buying up 200 acres in and around the Bannister Mall site. But the Wizards were lured to Kansas City, Kansas, by a flotilla of state and local incentives there. The entities that had picked up the Bannister Mall property sold it to Cerner for less than the appraised value, as determined by an independent study, opening the door for Cerner to seek TIF.
Greg LeRoy, executive director of the corporate-subsidy research organization Good Jobs First, says Cerner’s TIF deal is the largest of its kind. Anywhere. “Head and shoulders, it’s the biggest,” he tells The Pitch.
It’s also the largest economic-development project ever undertaken in Missouri.
Ed Ford served on the City Council and was chairman of the influential Planning, Zoning & Economic Development Committee when the Cerner TIF was passed. He says the Cerner proposal goes beyond typical new class-A office space.
That’s the idea, Nill says.
“Inside the buildings, we’re going to have a lot of great amenities for our associates,” Nill tells The Pitch. “Cerner is obviously very focused on health — the health of our associates and the care aspect as well. There will be a fitness center. It will feel like a healthy environment when you drive onto the campus.”
The project will be built in 16 phases over 10 years, resulting in 4.7 million square feet of new development, giving Kansas City, Missouri, its long-sought Corporate Woods–scale project. (That Overland Park office park is now on the market and expected to fetch as much as $350 million, a considerable profit above its most recent sale price of $290 million in 2006.)
“To attract the type of employees they believe they’re going to need to make this work, they really have a Taj Mahal office complex going on,” Ford says. “And is it reasonable to expect taxpayers to pay for that increase?”
Ford and the rest of the City Council were unanimous in answering that rhetorical question: Yes.
Update: The vote was not unanimous. Councilman Russ Johnson was the sole vote against the Cerner TIF, citing its excessive use of Super TIF and the “car-centric” nature of the plan.
“I guess my answer was, in that particular case, given the circumstances, the number of jobs, the fact that it was the old Bannister Mall site, the opportunity to take what I think is blight that might not develop for years — if ever — and replace it with an office complex that employs tens of thousands of folks, I think that instance you weigh everything,” Ford tells The Pitch. “You say, ‘I prefer not to go that high, but this is really a transformational project for south Kansas City.'”
The lure of jobs, new businesses and reshaped skylines is all but impossible for politicians to turn down. Developers understand this — especially here, where TIF is rubber-stamped almost every time it’s requested.
TIF deserves credit for refashioning downtown Kansas City. A similar sprucing up is under way now on the Bannister Mall site, with cranes positioned to start work on the first two buildings of the Cerner campus (where 3,500 employees will work).
The Cerner TIF directs all new taxes — property and economic-activity — in the Bannister Mall development area back to the company to assist with costs.
But the tool has also had the tendency to not perform to expectations. More often used in tonier enclaves of Kansas City than in poorer ones, it can divert millions from school districts, libraries and municipal budgets.
As California’s population and economy surged in the early 1950s, housing needed to keep pace. In this climate, TIF was born.
The idea was simple: Cities and counties, anticipating future tax revenue from a development project, offered to temporarily forgo that revenue and instead redirect it back into that project. Developers who might not otherwise consider redeveloping blighted areas now had an incentive to build in what before had been risky areas.
The idea worked well enough to spread across the United States, landing in Missouri in 1982. At one point, all but one state — Arizona — had TIF laws on their books.
And then the idea worked too well — for developers. In 2012, California abolished TIF after it had ballooned into an $8 billion business.
In Missouri, attempts in the past few years to curtail TIF have fizzled out in the Missouri General Assembly. For lawmakers, TIF’s appeal to developers as a means to finance large-scale projects outweighs its effect on schools and other tax-funded public concerns.
In Kansas City, where there are 66 active TIF projects, $35 million in tax revenues will bypass city coffers on its way back to developers. That’s more than the city’s most recent budgets for neighborhood and housing services ($32.1 million), public health and medical care ($30.3 million) and street maintenance ($13.6 million).
City leaders cite the promise of jobs as a key justification for TIF projects. But TIFs don’t always yield the number of jobs that developers promise.
According to a Missouri Department of Revenue annual report for TIF in 2013, all of Kansas City’s TIF projects combined should have resulted in 20,581 jobs. But the report shows that 15,971 were realized. (TIF fares better at retaining jobs, keeping 11,572 within Kansas City. But those same TIF projects were supposed to retain 12,025.)
Downtown Kansas City is a tapestry of TIF projects. City leaders lavished the tool on the south loop and the Crossroads Arts District in the late 1990s and early 2000s, hoping to reverse decades of urban-core decline. Today, almost all of the south loop — notably the Power & Light District — is within a TIF district. The improvements are undeniable, but so is the ongoing cost. Taxpayers give up $12 million-$15 million a year to finance the city’s P&L debt, and downtown lost 16,000 jobs from 2001 through 2011.
Across Missouri, 185,136 jobs were anticipated over the years among the 451 TIF districts that reported to the Department of Revenue. As of February 2, 2014, 67,627 had been created. In all, nearly $5 billion in TIF-reimbursable project costs were listed among the $24 billion in development.
TIF’s purpose is to spur development in blighted areas where a developer couldn’t otherwise attract enough private capital to make a financial pro forma add up. In Kansas City, however, TIF projects often overlook the most troubled census tracts in favor of already attractive ones. In 2007, University of Missouri–Kansas City economics professor Michael Kelsay found that 88 percent of KC’s TIFs were concentrated in four of the city’s six council districts. The two council districts left out, the 3rd and the 5th, sit predominantly on the East Side, where poverty and unemployment are prevalent.
Little has changed since then. The Brywood Centre is an example of a rare East Side TIF. Located at 63rd Street and Blue Ridge Cutoff, the small strip mall is home to an assortment of stores. One of them is a payday-loan business, an enterprise that’s notorious for exploiting poor people. Despite the help that TIF provided, the project defaulted on its bonds in 2013.
Much of the Country Club Plaza is within a TIF district. One such project helped along by TIF was the development of the Plaza Colonnade, which includes the Plaza Branch of the Kansas City Public Library and an office tower. That tower brought jobs, most of them from law firm Husch Blackwell; however, most weren’t new jobs but instead workers from the firm’s former location in Crown Center.
Another TIF project on the Plaza: Kirkwood, a luxury condominium tower. That $17 million project was able to leverage $12 million from TIF.
TIF has been a useful tool in redeveloping languishing parts of Kansas City’s urban core.
The Midtown TIF, for example, replaced dilapidated, crime-ridden housing along Main Street and Linwood Boulevard with a suburban-type shopping district anchored by Costco and Home Depot. (The TIF also includes the Sun Fresh-anchored shopping center in Westport.) The TIF cleared truly blighted property, provided employment opportunities for inner city job seekers, and developed or rehabbed single-family housing nearby.
It’s one of former Kansas City Councilman Jim Glover’s favorite topics.
“The idea was, we use TIF to create housing in the area so more people would shop at the shopping center,” he tells The Pitch. “More people would use the Home Depot, and more people would use the Sun Fresh. The market is constantly rebuilding itself. There are more people living in midtown because of the housing program off the shopping center than ever before. That means the sales [at the shopping center] are higher.”
Other TIFs, particularly Northland projects like the Shoal Creek TIF and the Kansas City International Airport Corridor TIF, count as successes. But some that haven’t panned out are noteworthy for adding expense atop failure.
The Prospect North TIF, an 80-acre mixed-use development proposed in Clay County, never got off the ground. Eventually, the developer sued Kansas City, which agreed to settle the case for $6 million.
Kansas City also settled a lawsuit over a failed TIF project at 63rd Street and Prospect, the infamous Citadel project. That settlement was for $15 million, though the TIF Commission took title to the property.
Steven Potter, the director of the Mid-Continent Public Library, says he spends too much time dealing with TIF.
Potter represents his library district in TIF Commission meetings, not only in Kansas City but also in any other city within Mid-Continent’s boundaries that administers the incentive.
A TIF commission — an 11-member board in any city that offers TIF — vets developers’ proposals and then makes recommendations to the city council, which has final say. The boards all share a built-in imbalance: Six of the members are appointed by the mayor of the city, whereas school districts and counties have two members each. A last member represents libraries and other smaller taxing jurisdictions.
Potter voted on the Bannister Mall redevelopment three separate times. He says he voted in favor of the Cerner redevelopment because it included what’s called a Super TIF, a financing arrangement that redirects not only 100 percent of property taxes but also 100 percent of economic-activity taxes to a project rather than just 50 percent. Under Super TIF, cities have more at stake because more of their revenue goes into a project.
“The thing that made me feel good about this — if you can feel good — is everyone was all in because it was a Super TIF,” Potter says. He adds that the aggregate effect of TIF on Mid-Continent means that about $3 million in tax revenue which would go to his library district gets redirected to development projects. For a library, $3 million isn’t insignificant.
“Frankly, money like that would probably allow us to operate longer, would have allowed us to give our employees pay raises over the last couple of years, let us look at approving our buildings without taking out bonds,” he says.
Taxing jurisdictions such as libraries and schools exist in constant tension with TIF. Dennis Carpenter, superintendent of the Hickman Mills School District, said on an episode of KCPT Channel 19’s Kansas City Week In Review earlier this year that economic development was one of the bigger ongoing challenges facing his school district. With respect to the Bannister Mall redevelopment, he said: “We’re excited to have Cerner as a neighbor, and they are going to do great things for our students with partnerships and the like. But at the end of the day, we’re a school district with $66 million in deferred maintenance that’s out there. And Cerner — over the life of the TIF, conservative numbers tell us they’re going to abate $400 million in taxes.”
Cerner says it’s mindful of this effect. To assuage concerns, the company has earmarked $8 million for a community-improvement fund, $6 million of which would go to Hickman Mills for general use and for career-preparation programs.
Potter says discussions have taken place in recent years to determine whether there’s a way to make TIF more equitable between cities and other taxing jurisdictions. A working group during the past two years floated the idea that taxing jurisdictions would get to start with a 50 percent diversion of their future tax revenues instead of the full 100 percent. That would make things relatively equal with cities.
Potter says Kansas City representatives stood in the way.
“The most interesting thing that happened when we proposed that was one of the representatives from the city said, ‘We can’t do that. We’re putting our money at risk,'” Potter recalls. “I said, ‘Welcome to the party, pal. That’s what we’ve been living with for 30 years.'”
TIF Explained
Politicians and economic-development professionals like to say the public doesn’t understand tax-increment financing. But it’s a pretty simple concept to grasp.
Let’s say you own an undeveloped parcel of land in midtown Kansas City, one that is assessed $10,000 in property tax. Your $10,000 property-tax bill breaks down like this (and for the sake of simplicity, we’re ignoring replacement taxes, community-improvement districts, etc., and focusing on major taxing jurisdictions):
• $6,164 to Kansas City Public Schools
• $1,990 to Kansas City, Missouri
• $640 to Jackson County
• $623 to the Kansas City Public Library
• $296 to Metropolitan Community College
• $152 to the mental-health levy
• $94 to the Board of Disabled Services
• $38 to the blind pension fund
Your property is zoned for commercial use, and you’d like to develop it into a shopping district. So you request and receive TIF. Within a year, your lot that’s full of weeds becomes a gleaming new development. Jackson County looks at what’s there now and decides that the property is worth $100,000 in taxes. But because you used TIF to develop the property, your tax disbursements broken out above remain the same for the next 23 years.
If you’d built your development without TIF, then the school district would receive $61,640 from taxes assessed on your property. But because you used TIF, the district receives the old amount: $6,164. That’s because TIF captures 100 percent of new property taxes in a TIF district and redirects the proceeds to the development itself.
In this case, you subtract $6,164 from the $61,640, which gives you $55,476. That’s the amount of “new taxes” that your development created, which you can use to pay off eligible costs on your project.
Repeat the same scenario with all the taxing jurisdictions and you end up with $96,137 in TIF that you can use each year to fund certain project costs.
Now, your new development has created jobs. Let’s say 50 people work there, each with an average salary of $50,000. TIF captures half of the economic-activity taxes (EATs) generated by a TIF project and redirects the funds back to the development. Kansas City’s 1 percent earnings tax counts as an EAT. So one employee making $50,000 generates $500 in earnings taxes. Multiply that by the number of employees (50) and you get $25,000 in earnings taxes generated by your project. Because you have TIF, half of that ($12,500) goes back to your project each year, and the other half goes to City Hall.
Sales taxes are EATs, too. If your project generates $50,000 in nonstate sales taxes each year, the same amount as your earnings taxes ($12,500) goes back to your project.
So in all, your development generates an annual $146,137 to pay off your project over 23 years (in a wildly simplistic scenario where wages and employees and sales taxes never change). Pretty favorable for you.
BITTER HARVEST
By Mike McGraw
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback this past Sunday renewed his call for other states to follow Kansas’ lead and adopt sweeping welfare reforms.
He and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez signed a Washington Times op-ed urging fellow governors to reinstate work requirements — widely relaxed during the recession — for low-income families seeking food assistance.
The Sunflower State’s march to “end government dependency” has been under way for some time. In April this year, Brownback signed one of the most restrictive welfare-reform bills in the nation. And he called on other states to follow suit and “promote self-reliance,” in part by barring welfare recipients from spending on such things as ocean cruises and lingerie.
Missouri and 24 other states were already making similar efforts, using similar tactics.
But while lawmakers made a very public display of barring welfare-funded purchases at Victoria’s Secret, a torrent of tax breaks and government subsidies was quietly flowing to wealthy businesses and farmers — including more than $1 million to Brownback and his family since 1995.
Those payments get a fraction of the rigorous oversight that Kansas and Missouri politicians have devoted recently to a few welfare cheats, says Philip Mattera. He’s research director for Good Jobs First, a policy think tank that, according to its website, compiles data “promoting corporate and government accountability in economic development.”
“It’s been a perennial issue and a matter of concern,” Mattera says.
That’s not to say big money doesn’t leak from the multibillion-dollar welfare pipeline. Fraud, waste and mismanagement have always plagued the system. Many on welfare acknowledge that they cheat or know someone who does. Some who cheat are simply playing the system; others say their benefits are so low that they have no choice.
That’s why advocates have long pushed to reboot America’s outdated approach to poverty, with its flawed assumptions and antiquated data. The income guideline defining poverty in the United States dates back to the 1940s, and many services for the poor are still based on multiples of that guideline.
For example, free legal services are available in Missouri to those making up to 125 percent of the poverty limit. For a family of three, that limit is a gross annual income of $20,090, or $1,674 a month, to house, feed and clothe three persons. Someone wanting legal assistance in, say, a landlord dispute, could make no more than $2,092 a month.
“It is ridiculous to believe someone making more than that can actually afford to pay a lawyer out of their own pocket,” says Janice Franklin, who retired recently as the managing attorney at Legal Aid of Western Missouri’s Joplin office.
But the Show-Me and Sunflower states don’t have legal aid in mind when they crack down on the poor. Lawmakers instead insist that welfare recipients are blowing their state dollars on booze and other verboten purchases — and they’re determined to put a stop to it.
To accomplish this, legislators in both states have targeted beneficiaries of one of the best-known poverty programs: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. It helps support about 1.6 million families nationwide, the vast majority of them headed by single mothers. Its benefits are usually less than $400 a month and are available only to the poorest of the poor — people with earnings far below the poverty cutoff line. In Kansas, a single mother with two children cannot qualify for TANF if she makes more than $518 a month. In Missouri, the cutoff is $540.
You’d think that the fuss over TANF would be related to rampant fraud or an overcrowded roster of recipients. But, thanks in part to ever-tightening eligibility guidelines, TANF spending on cash assistance to families with children is actually way down nationwide, including around here. In 2005, the average monthly number of Kansas TANF recipients (total persons, not families) was 44,681. By this year, that number had dropped to about 15,000. Kansas-administered TANF now helps support fewer than 6,000 families (including 10,000 children and 3,300 adults), a 20-year low. There are 25,000 TANF households in Missouri (about 42,000 children and 18,000 adults).
The lower numbers have, in fact, created a sort of windfall for states like Kansas and Missouri.
Because federal block grants have remained steady, even as fewer families have qualified for TANF, states have been diverting up to two-thirds of their TANF grants to other noncash state programs meant to help the poor, such as child care and child welfare.
This could potentially free up state dollars for other purposes, such as filling huge gaps in state budgets. Indeed, federal auditors say TANF has evolved into a “flexible funding stream” that has outrun their ability to adequately monitor how states use all those federal dollars.
What’s more, federal rules allow states like Kansas and Missouri — states with fewer TANF recipients — to spend less money overall on welfare-to-work programs.
In 2001, Kansas spent 5 percent of its federal TANF money on work-related activities, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research group working to reduce poverty. (Missouri’s spending on those activities fell from 12 percent in 2001 to 4 percent in 2013.) According to the center’s analysis, which uses the states’ own data, total work-related spending on Kansas TANF recipients dropped to just 3 percent in 2013.
That makes Kansas one of just 14 states spending less than 5 percent of its federal TANF block grant on putting welfare recipients to work — the very reason that legislators say they passed reform efforts in the first place.
Kansas officials slice that pie a little differently, however. A spokeswoman for the Kansas Department for Children and Families says the agency is actually spending 45 percent “more per client” on work-related activities than it did in 2006.
Both statements are probably true, says Liz Schott, a senior fellow with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Welfare Reform and Income Support Division. But she adds that Kansas officials are “carefully picking their facts here.” Schott asks what happened to all those former TANF beneficiaries who are no longer eligible. She wonders if they got jobs or if they’re now getting by with neither jobs nor TANF payments.
Kansas officials counter that they helped more than 6,000 welfare recipients get back to work last year.
The new Kansas TANF restrictions were codified this spring in what state Republicans call the HOPE Act (Hope, Opportunity and Prosperity for Everyone), which Brownback signed in April.
One provision — since dropped because it went awry of federal rules — would have barred TANF recipients from withdrawing more than $25 at a time using their electronic benefit cards.
As Kansas author Sarah Smarsh notes in a July post on The New Yorker website, that in turn would have enriched a private company that charges Kansas welfare recipients up to $1 for each transaction (plus ATM fees that average another $3). “It’s hard to think of a more twisted irony than a corporate welfare recipient being paid by state government to oversee a single mother’s access to public assistance funds,” Smarsh writes.
Still in place in the HOPE Act reforms is a long list of prohibited purchases that includes gambling, guns, dirty movies (and sexually oriented adult materials), alcohol, cigarettes, vapor cigarettes, lottery tickets, concert tickets, fortune-telling, sporting events, ocean cruises, bail bonds, tattoos, massages and piercings. Kansans can’t spend their TANF money at nail salons, spas, lingerie stores, video arcades, swimming pools or theme parks, either. A survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures shows that the Kansas list of no-nos is longer by far than any other state’s.
Some state restrictions passed in Kansas and elsewhere were already prohibited under 2012 federal rules, raising the question of whether state legislatures have been more interested in political posturing than guarding against cheating.
“No one disagrees that fraud is a bad thing,” says Patti Prunhuber, a staff lawyer at the Public Interest Law Project, “but barring cruises and swimming seems to me like a rhetorical solution in search of a problem.”
The really important and unfortunate part of the HOPE Act, she adds, is that it reduces TANF eligibility to three years.
As for fraud, it has plummeted alongside the free fall in total number of recipients. The state data that spurred Kansas lawmakers to act in the first place— analyzed and published by a conservative watchdog group — show that only 3 percent of all transactions over a three-month period in 2012 went for “potentially” questionable purchases. That’s about $45,000 out of $1.5 million.
The flagged transactions included a dubious $203 transaction at Johnny’s Tavern, in the Power & Light District. Also counted as questionable, however, was $8,578 in withdrawals from cash-advance and payday-loan operations — places where the state should expect to find people down on their luck.
Two years ago, the U.S. congressional delegations from Missouri and Kansas helped lead a charge to cut spending for another federally funded welfare program: SNAP (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), commonly referred to as food stamps. SNAP numbers were swelling, and anecdotal stories about food-stamp recipients dining on steak and lobster abounded.
At $75 billion–$80 billion a year, SNAP eats up the largest portion of the $100 billion-a-year Farm Bill. Much of the rest goes to farmers, such as those in the Brownback clan, in the form of crop subsidies and insurance.
But in Midwestern states such as Missouri — and, especially, Kansas — the arithmetic gets turned on its head. That’s because both states have relatively few SNAP recipients compared with the number of farmers.
Kansas ranks 36th among states for food-stamp expenditures, about $395 million in fiscal year 2014, but sixth in the amount of federal subsidies paid annually to farmers — nearly $1 billion.
Since 1995, Brownback — as both a U.S. senator and now a governor — has collected about $50,000 in sorghum, wheat and conservation subsidies for his farm in Linn County.
His father and a brother have received a total of $605,000 over the same period.
His office did not return an e-mail asking for Brownback’s opinion as to whether farm and corporate subsidies get adequate oversight compared with welfare payments.
No one knows for sure how much fraud there is in either program. But some research suggests that fraud in farm subsidies and subsidized crop insurance far outpaces food-stamp fraud.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, wonders how farm subsidies are still justified when net farm income recently hit a 40-year high. “The biggest scandal with farm subsidies is that they exist at all,” reads a 2009 Cato report.
Farmers, however, are pikers compared with corporate subsidies and tax breaks handed out in Missouri and Kansas.
From 2010 to 2014, for example, Kansas issued $370 million in state grants that allow employers who create new jobs to keep as much as 95 percent of their workers’ state income taxes for up to 10 years. Wichita-based Koch Industries — whose chief owners, David and Charles Koch, backed corporate tax breaks that have left Kansas with a $700 million budget deficit — also has a prominent place at the corporate trough. Data and published reports show that, over the past 15 years, Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have benefited from more than $166 million in tax breaks and subsidies.
Getting a real count on the additional jobs that those subsidies helped create is another matter. But that doesn’t appear to have gotten anywhere near the scrutiny that has surrounded food stamps and cash assistance in recent years.
“The poor could certainly avoid some of their problems with more sacrificial conduct, like avoiding cigarettes and beer,” says one advocate, a lawyer who represents poor clients. “But until you’ve been there, until you’ve been side by side with it, it’s hard to say. Given the graft and corruption among the wealthy, who am I to say?”
