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One reason the government has spent nearly half a century fighting, and losing, the war on poverty, is that it doesn’t know where to draw the battle line.
The Center for American Progress recently analyzed the inadequacy of the official poverty line as a gauge for who is really poor in America. Among the biggest problems:

• The thresholds are low…. The poverty line represented nearly 50 percent of median income for a family of four in the early 1960s, but now represents only about 28 percent of median income. So the level at which a family is considered poor has fallen further and further outside the mainstream.
• The thresholds are essentially arbitrary because they simply represent a number calculated more than 40 years ago and then adjusted for inflation, and they no longer represent anything in relation to family incomes or costs.
• The resource-counting rules both understate and overstate resources. They fail to reflect the effects of policies such as refundable tax credits, near-cash benefits such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps) or subsidized housing assistance. At the same time, they also do not consider the impact for family budgets of tax liabilities, work expenses, or health care costs.
• The rules make no adjustment for geographical variation despite the large variations in costs across areas and regions of the country.
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Blacks and immigrants: from ‘either-or’ to ‘both-and’

While tea-baggers dominated the headlines over the past few weeks, another movement was quietly working to weave together communities that some want to see pitted against each other. The Black Immigration Network, a coalition led by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration; Which Way Forward; and the Third World Coalition of the American Friends Service Committee, recently announced itself as “the first national network concerned about immigration issues and racial equity issues surrounding both African Americans and immigrants of African descent.”
By bringing visibility to the shared interests of “native born” Black Americans and Blacks as immigrants, the Network counters the factionalism that have stymied strategic alliances in the past. The mission statement of Which Way Forward, a project of the Chicago-based Center for New Community, declares:

“While we recognize that throughout the history of the United States there have existed tensions between the African American community and immigrant communities, Which Way Forward rejects that any past, present or future frictions between ‘Blacks and Latinos’ or ‘Blacks and immigrants’ grant permission to ignore our responsibility in building an America free from political, economic and social discrimination based on race.”
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Southend Press needs help, ladies and gents. Lets buy some books or join their Community Supported Publishing at $20 a month (and get a free book every month) They need 1200 subscribers to CSP. They are majority women, majority POC and they publish excellent work. Let not allow them to go down.

Please spread the word around?

Race, Poverty and Obama

Democrats and Healthcare

Talks Ernest Madu: Bringing world-class health care to the poorest

Paul Collier: 4 ways to improve the lives of the "bottom billion"

TEDTalks: Cameron Sinclair on Open Source Architecture

Who Robbed You Most Recently...Trying to imagine how someone could steal, cheat and swindle their way into poverty, trying to come up with examples, I can’t come up with anything. I can tell you of people who, as a result of getting caught and imprisoned, went from middle class to a lower economic status but their fall resulted from them being caught and punished. They almost always couldn’t afford the best lawyers. Of course, once you lift the rug the crimes of the rich get swept under every day, you can name lots of people who have joined the elite through theft. And there are many among the stinkin’ rich who have never been anything but crooks. If you need an example of flourishing by grand larceny - at taxpayer’s expense, even - you have no farther to look than the First Family.

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Considering their lack of success as thieves and swindlers, you’d think people wouldn’t be so worried about poor people in that way. Even with their huge numbers they steal a tiny fraction of what just those at the heads of the banking and insurance industries do. And they get punished for it when they get caught in ways the rich almost never are.

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In the community of people dedicated to analyzing poverty, one of the sharpest debates is over why some poor people act in ways that ensure their continued indigence. Compared with the middle class or the wealthy, the poor are disproportionately likely to drop out of school, to have children while in their teens, to abuse drugs, to commit crimes, to not save when extra money comes their way, to not work.

To an economist, this is irrational behavior. It might make sense for a wealthy person to quit his job, or to eschew education or develop a costly drug habit. But a poor person, having little money, would seem to have the strongest incentive to subscribe to the Puritan work ethic, since each dollar earned would be worth more to him than to someone higher on the income scale.

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Which leads us to this article referenced above.
The Sting of Poverty...Karelis, a professor at George Washington University, has a simpler but far more radical argument to make: traditional economics just doesn't apply to the poor. When we're poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

Poverty and wealth, by this logic, don't just fall along a continuum the way hot and cold or short and tall do. They are instead fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way. At some point between the two, people stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences. Perhaps because economists, by and large, are well-off, he suggests, they've failed to see the shift at all.
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Karelis argues that being poor is defined by having to deal with a multitude of problems: One doesn't have enough money to pay rent or car insurance or credit card bills or day care or sometimes even food. Even if one works hard enough to pay off half of those costs, some fairly imposing ones still remain, which creates a large disincentive to bestir oneself to work at all.

My take: Cool theories worth looking into, but needs to take into account the intersectionalities of race and gender as well.

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Entries tagged with poverty

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February 2020

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