Tag Archives: poverty

Meet Alice

I have a friend who owns a major company, and I periodically receive his company newsletter. He’s a truly good person, philanthropic and civic-minded, so I was startled to read what was surely a throwaway line in the most recent newsletter, in which he wrote that his company had experienced a good year, despite the national administration’s policies favoring “lazy” Americans.

Shades of Mike Pence’s “ennobling” and Mitt Romney’s 47%!

These attitudes toward “the least of us” have long been an indelible part of American culture. When I was doing research for my book God and Country, I traced several ostensibly secular policy preferences back to their religious roots. In the case of poverty policies, I concluded that attitudes toward the poor (beginning with 15th Century English poor laws that forbid giving “alms to the sturdy beggar”) are rooted in a simplified Calvinism: worldly success signals God’s approval; poverty is evidence of moral defect. Originally doctrinal, these attitudes have been absorbed into the popular culture.

The problem is, this easy dismissal of struggling Americans is at odds with reality.

Recently, the United Ways of Indiana took a hard look at “Alice.” Alice is an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed; it applies to households with income above the federal poverty level, but below the actual, basic cost of living. The report is eye-opening.

Here are some “highlights” (highlights being something of a misnomer here):

  • More than one in three Hoosier households cannot afford the basics of housing, food, health care and transportation, despite working hard.
  • In Indiana, 37% of households live below the Alice threshold, with some 14% below the poverty level and another 23% above poverty but below the cost of living.
  • These families and individuals have jobs, and many do not qualify for social services or support.
  • The jobs they are filling are critically important to Hoosier communities. These are our child care workers, laborers, movers, home health aides, heavy truck drivers, store clerks, repair workers and office assistants—yet they are unsure if they’ll be able to put dinner on the table each night.

For families living on the edge, families struggling just to put that dinner on the table, saving money is a pipe dream. There is nothing left to save. So these families are vulnerable to any unexpected expense—a car repair, an uninsured illness, even an unexpectedly high utility bill can be enough to plunge them into debt or worse.

The United Way report (which is available online) is intended as an educational tool. Its data rebuts the thoughtless but ingrained caricature so skillfully deployed by President Ronald Reagan: that of the “welfare queen.” Built into that dismissive shorthand is the assumption that poor Americans “play the system,” refuse to work, and spend their days taking advantage of hard-working taxpayers.

A few such people undoubtedly exist, but so do the “captains of industry” who “play the system” by lobbying for subsidies and favorable tax treatment, and companies like Walmart that protect their hefty profits by using the taxpayer-provided safety net to supplement their payment of poverty wages.

Most businesses aren’t like Walmart; most owners are hardworking and honest, just as most Americans who fall below the Alice threshold are hardworking and honest.

As the Executive Director of the Jennings County Economic Development Commission wrote in the introduction to the report:

Alice is the family in Elkhart whose car breaks down, which takes the grocery money, which sends the family to the food pantry. Alice is the family in Terre Haute whose entire economic life comes undone when the breadwinner breaks a leg and loses three weeks wages. Alice is the family in Marion whose 11-year-old watches the 5-year-old because they can’t afford afterschool programs despite both parents working full-time.

Dismissing Alice as lazy is lazy thinking.

Comments

What Color is the Sky in Your Universe?

It has been obvious for quite a while that Americans occupy different and incommensurate realities. But in the midst of the partisan and religious vitriol (often fed by an appalling lack of basic constitutional, economic and scientific knowledge), there is some evidence of–dare I say it–a creeping rationality.

 As millions of Americans continue to struggle in a sluggish economy, a growing portion of the country says that poverty is caused by circumstances beyond individual control, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

The poll shows a significant shift in American opinion on the causes of poverty since the last time the question was asked, nearly 20 years ago. In 1995, in the midst of a raging political debate about welfare and poverty, less than a third of poll respondents said people were in poverty because of issues beyond their control. At that time, a majority said that poverty was caused by “people not doing enough.” Now, nearly half of respondents, 47 percent, attribute poverty to factors other than individual initiative.

America’s porous social-safety net is largely attributable to a stubborn belief in individual responsibility for social mobility and a corresponding insistence that only lazy people or those who are somehow morally deficient find themselves at the bottom of the economic heap.

Rooted in Calvinism (earthly success as a sign of divine favor) it is a worldview that conveniently overlooks all the ways in which government helps the middle and upper classes and focuses opprobrium on anything that could be labeled “welfare.” (Corporate subsidies are economic development; Social Security and Medicare are insurance programs, etc.).

As a country and society, we perversely refuse to recognize the systemic and institutional causes of economic disadvantage until the pain is widely enough shared and its roots impossible to miss. It wasn’t until the Great Depression that people were willing to recognize the need for even a minimal social safety net. The NBC poll is just one data point. But there are others.

Sane Republicans are speaking out about climate change. Dick Cheney is increasingly seen as the bad joke he has always been. Young people are demonstrably more inclusive than their elders. Same-sex marriages are close to being fait accompli everywhere. There are more tolerant Americans than there are Theocratic Christians, and the ranks of the former are growing while those of the latter are declining.

Although Obama’s election unleashed a depressing torrent of hitherto suppressed racism, the fact remains that we did elect an African-American President. Twice.

There are signs that it’s getting better. If we can just survive the Crazy…

Comments

It Isn’t Only About the Money

One of the most time-honored adages in political life is “follow the money.” And for many issues that policymakers debate, that’s good advice. Self-interest often explains positions that are otherwise inexplicable.

Sometimes, however, a cynical approach to the political process can blind us to cultural assumptions and ideological commitments that have significant explanatory power. That’s particularly true of American debates about social programs, poverty and inequality; I would argue that some of the most passionate advocates of “market-based healthcare,” and “personal responsibility” are unaware of the roots of their perspectives on these issues.

Representative Paul Ryan is a handy example of what I’ve come to call “economic self-delusion.” Ryan is a favorite of self-styled “fiscal conservatives” who see him (as he clearly sees himself) as a hard-headed advocate of economically-responsible policies. The problem is, the anti-safety-net policies he defends as fiscally responsible tend to be more costly to taxpayers than he and his partisans are willing to admit—and often more costly than the programs he would gut.

A couple of recent studies of homelessness highlight the phenomenon.

Typically, liberal arguments for providing homeless folks with permanent housing center on morality and compassion, allowing conservatives (like Ryan) to respond that such an approach is far too costly (and somehow un-American).

The Central Florida Commission on Homelessness provides a fiscal argument as well. “The numbers are stunning,” Andrae Bailey, the organization’s CEO told the Orlando Sentinel. “Our community will spend nearly half a billion dollars [on the chronically homeless], and at the end of the decade, these people will still be homeless.”

Bailey was referring to a study by Creative Housing Solutions, which tracked public expenditures on local homeless people in the Central Florida region. That analysis calculated the costs of frequent emergency room visits, hospital admissions and repeated arrests for homeless-related crimes, and estimated that each homeless person cost taxpayers $31,065 each year. Providing the chronically homeless with permanent housing and case managers to supervise them would cost about $10,000 per person each year.

Homelessness is hardly the only area where American society is stubbornly “penny wise and pound foolish.” From early childhood education to health care, research supports the cost savings of early interventions via a strong social-safety net.

Why are so many elected officials—and the constituents who elect them—absolutely convinced that social programs are simply costly incubators of dependency? Why are they unwilling to believe credible research that dispels stereotypes like those of the “Welfare Queen” and the lazy “inner-city” social parasite?

If we really want to understand where these attitudes come from, we need to revisit some historic attitudes about poverty. In a very real sense, proponents and critics of social welfare programs are still arguing about policies dating to 1349, when England enacted the Statute of Laborers; that Statute prohibited people from giving alms, or charity, to “sturdy beggars,” that is, those who had the ability to work.

The Elizabethan Poor Law incorporated a distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor that would be carried to the colonies and reproduced in the laws of most states. It was the model that settlers brought to the New World; it was the approach adopted by the original thirteen colonies, and as people moved west, it was the approach incorporated in the Ordinance of 1787, which prescribed rules for governing the Northwest Territory.

To a significant extent, the distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor and the emphasis upon work have remained the primary framework through which Americans view social welfare and poverty issues.

That distinction was further reinforced by religion, especially Calvinism.

The belief that poverty is evidence of divine disapproval—that virtue is rewarded by material success—was held by a number of the early Protestants who settled the colonies, and that belief has continued to influence American law and culture. In the early 1900s, moral disapproval of the poor found an ally in science, and poverty issues were caught up in a national debate between Social Darwinists like William Graham Summer and their critics.

In language eerily reminiscent of earlier admonitions against rewarding “sturdy beggars,” Sumner wrote: “But the weak who constantly arouse the pity of humanitarians and philanthropists are the shiftless, the imprudent, the negligent, the impractical, and the inefficient, or they are the idle, the intemperate, the extravagant and the vicious. Now the troubles of these persons are constantly forced upon public attention, as if they and their interests deserved especial consideration, and a great portion of all organized and unorganized effort for the common welfare consists in attempts to relieve these classes of people….”

It wasn’t until the Great Depression that American lawmakers acknowledged the need for some sort of social safety net. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the dislocations of the 1930’s or the passage of New Deal legislation changed Americans’ deeply-rooted beliefs about the relationship between poverty and moral defect.

We see the influence of Social Darwinism and echoes of Sumner in today’s “makers and takers” meme, in the arguments that welfare creates “dependency” (in the poor, but evidently not among recipients of corporate welfare) and in Paul Ryan’s proposed budget.

Research dispelling the mythology is important, but it isn’t enough. Somehow, we need to change the cultural assumptions that produce punitive policies.

We need a new Social Gospel.

Comments

About Those “Takers”

For the past three years or so, I’ve had my house cleaned once a month–an indulgence I justify to myself on the grounds that it frees up time I can use to write and teach. The woman who does the cleaning lives on a farm in Johnson County; most months, she brings her two teenagers with her. She has been utterly dependable, and has a key to the house; on “cleaning days,” I generally leave her money on the dining room table and go about my business.

Last Friday, I came home while the “crew” was still here. The teens were working, but their mom was sitting in her car in front of the house. The boy explained that his mother had had a heart attack that Monday.

I was appalled. Why on earth didn’t she postpone? Why was she driving? The son agreed. Looking concerned, he explained that she was worried about losing me (and others) as a client if she wasn’t dependable–and that he and his sister can’t drive.  I went to talk to her–to reassure her that I would have been fine with a postponement, that her health should come first–and I asked her about health insurance. She had Medicaid, she said, but “that doesn’t pay the light bill or put food on the table.” She assured me that she’d “be fine.”

Tell me again about Paul Ryan’s description of the “lazy” poor, and the “substandard” work ethic nurtured by their “culture.” Tell me again about Mitt Romney’s disdain for the 47% of Americans who just want to live off the “makers.” Tell me again about those constant Fox News’ stories about people who “rip off” taxpayers and live high on that generous social safety net we provide.

How many of the self-satisfied assholes who look down their noses at the growing numbers of struggling Americans would get out of their beds three days after a heart attack and go to work?

And how can the richest country in the world justify a system in which that’s necessary?

Comments

About that “Culture of Dependency”

There’s been a lot of discussion about Paul Ryan’s racially-tinged dismissal of inner-city poverty as evidence of a cultural deficit. As Timothy Egan’s recent column in the New York Times reminds us, there’s a particular irony in Ryan’s appropriation of an argument that used to be mounted against his own Irish forebears.

“We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.

Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.

You never hear Ryan make character judgments about generations of wealthy who live off their inheritance, or farmers who get paid not to grow anything. Nor, for that matter, does he target plutocrats like Romney who might be lulled into not taking risks because they pay an absurdly low tax rate simply by moving money around. Dependency is all one-way.

We humans evidently have a deep-seated need to distinguish the virtuous “us” from the undeserving “them.” As Egan demonstrates, however, the identity of “us” and “them” is anything but static. Many upstanding Americans can trace their roots back to a once-despised “them.”

Accordingly, a bit of humility might be in order.

Comments