What is child poverty, anyway?
I blogged yesterday about how bothered I was by the meme pumped out by Newt Gingrich, and taken up by some conservatives, that receiving food stamps are a sign of being a parasite. To me, this is unconscionable, given the depth and length of this depression. To be fair, it’s worth considering just what we mean by poverty, especially childhood poverty. A few weeks ago, I blogged about a conversation I’d had with a public school teacher who works in another parish, who told me that almost all of her students are on free or reduced lunches, consistent with their parents’ poverty, but many of them also have the latest smart phones, new and expensive sneakers, and other costly gewgaws.
Peter Hitchens, writing from the UK, explores this apparent paradox. Excerpt:
Now here we have an attempt to claim that the government’s rather modest and uninteresting welfare reforms, which deliberately avoid all the real most pressing problems, will create ‘child poverty’.
I think this is just emotionalism. As I so often say, there is no real, absolute material poverty in this country. Look at the living conditions portrayed in the TV series ‘Call the Midwife’, or those described in Somerset Maugham’s novel ‘Liza of Lambeth’ – or indeed the factual reports of poverty in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and you will see what the word really means – unavoidable squalor caused by the simple lack of plumbing and sanitation, desperate overcrowding, real, gut-grinding hunger, untreated disease. You can find such things, as well, right now, in modern Bombay (those who wish to call it ‘Mumbai’ might like to check the Index item on this stupid, mistaken renaming by people who think they are being ‘progressive’), in Burma and in many African countries. I have seen it there. One of the striking things about it is that those who endure it are often even so unbroken, but dignified, self-disciplined, hard-working, house-proud, and send their children, in crisp uniforms, shining with cleanliness, off to school each morning. It is very moving.
It is also quite unlike the world of the British dependent population, who have all the material basics, but live amidst terrible state-encouraged moral squalor. In many cases, people resist this, and their struggles to maintain respectability and order in their lives area is as moving as anything in Africa. But in many cases they are corrupted by it, and the results are tragic and appalling.
What these people need is an organised and systematic moral rescue which, alas, Iain Duncan Smith is not ready to attempt. Even so, it is surely too much to ask struggling families who earn their bread and pay their debts, to subsidise others who don’t, at the sort of levels now seen.
I agree with this, in general, but I do wonder what “an organized and systematic moral rescue” would entail. How does a state do that without a massive exertion of coercive powers?
Both of my parents were raised in rural poverty. Growing up in the Great Depression, with his father away from home for much of that time because he had to work to support the family, my dad and his brother had to hunt in the woods behind their house to put meat on the table. If they didn’t kill squirrels or other animals, there would be nothing but cornbread and greens for dinner. My mother was born in 1943, but she was so poor as a child she may as well have been living in the Depression. Her stories of walking to school winter mornings in a thin dress, because her family was too poor to buy her a coat, bring tears to my eyes. Aside from the physical suffering — enduring the cold — there is the humiliation that poverty inflicted on that child. My mother is in her late 60s today, and I can’t detect any effects from the cold, but I can still see the effects of that humiliation. When she told me what it was like to be poor as a child, I finally understood why she was so strangely generous to the children who rode the school bus she drove for many years. Every holiday, she would give each child a bag of candy as he or she exited the bus for the school break. She told me later that knowing many of these children were poor, she didn’t want them to do without something special, no matter how small.
So there’s that. I remember from my childhood that there was a distinct cultural element to the kind of poverty we saw in our parish (just so you know, in Louisiana, parish = county). It was common to see black folks living in tarpaper shacks, but with expensive cars, sometimes luxury brands, parked out front. You never saw that with poor whites back then. Many years later, I read sociological research exploring the culturally determined ways people spent their money. If memory serves, poor blacks had the habit of spending their extra money on cars, clothing, and consumer items that quickly depreciated in value — this, as opposed to spending it on improving their housing, saving for education, and so forth. I remember that it was a constant source of low-level grumbling among whites around here: the idea that people depending on public assistance somehow found the cash to spend on automobiles more luxurious than those owned by working people who paid taxes, and who did not drive fancy cars. This was not a myth; it really did happen.
I also seem to recall — and again, forgive me if my memory is faulty — that when satellite television became available to consumers, you’d drive around and see expensive satellite dishes in the yard outside of ratty, falling-apart mobile homes. The folks who lived there were often white.
Now, what middle-class person, black or white, really wants to begrudge people who live in such dire housing a little something special to brighten their lives — satellite TV, a nice car, etc.? Who would want to trade places with them? Not me. Not you. And yet, if you’re seeing a kid with a pair of $150 sneakers, and a $400 smartphone, standing in line every day to get his government-subsidized lunch, something inside you is going to protest. And why not? A generation or two ago, that would have been seen as a source of personal shame, at least in the culture in which I was raised. It would not have been done, at least not among respectable people. Today? I wonder.
What we call “poverty” in this country is not what poverty was a generation or two ago. The deepest poverty is not material, but moral, and social. How do you address that? What do we do with that information? As with the school choice debate, one gets the idea that this discussion takes place between and among elites who have no direct experience with the poor, and who either sentimentally valorize them, or demonize them.
“an organized and systematic moral rescue” would not be done by the state. It would involve changing people’s attitudes towards re-stigmatizing and not excusing bad behavior.
Yes, poverty in America is phony, like so many other things. The point is mostly to create and foster a dependent underclass. Anyone with any moral fiber should be ashamed by using food stamps. Pride goeth before the fall, and one must eat, but not earning your own way ought to carry a very large and humiliating stigma.
And don’t get me started on people who smoke 2 packe per day (which in some states can be over$400/month) yet still get housing and food stamp assistance.
Rod, it’s funny that you’ve written this right now, because poverty is something I’ve been wrestling a lot with lately.
What I see in the Pacific NW is homelessness. A TON of it. In Seattle, you can’t walk a block without someone begging for change, and often it’s a more than once. Then you get on a bus or the LINK, and there’s more of them.
Now, that’s poverty on anybody’s metric. But it’s also stressful and frustrating to everyone else, who want them problem to go away. Giving them a dollar is charitable, but you’d go broke if you did it every time, and it will never help them get off drugs, get mental treatment or build their lives back up. It will have to take welfare programs on the scale only government can provide.
But here’s the rub – any LOCAL welfare program is bound to backfire. The more a local program gives help, the more homeless people it will attract from out of state or city. Think about that: local communities are completely incapable of helping out their own. The old-timey community poorhouse model simply will not work when homeless people have email addresses and can move across country with ease. Where does that leave us?
It requires a federal program to treat drug addiction and mental illness, and to provide enough money for a person to find shelter, food and clothing. That’s hard enough to fund even when we aren’t giving billionaires tax breaks on their capital gains. But because an agency that fails even one of those factors completely fails to address the problem, any program will need to be well-funded to succeed. Hence, any conservative “bootstraps” ideologue cutting money to the program is actually killing it, slowly. We see that the program exists, and we see that it doesn’t work, so therefore we assume the program can never work, and therefore we cut more.
And now here we are. Surrounded by homeless drug addicts and the insane, screeching at nobody on downtown city streets, constantly harassing people for change, and in some cases, committing violent crimes, with our only option trying to round them up and ship them to some other state.
There is a solution that doesn’t require buying big cars for black people.
a nice bit of anecdotal information feeding into existing memes on the lazy parasites lounging around on the goverment ticket. I suggest that a quick glance at the number of people using food stamps, going bankrupt due to medical bills etc etc might be a corrective.
There are a large number of both working poor (try supporting a family of four on the govt poverty level of ~$22k/year!) and unemployed for whom government safety net programs are the only things between them and utter destitution.
Equating the minimal societal safety nets in the US with any sort of moral rescue by the goverment is nonsense.
I am always sorry to see such merciless and unchristian charity from the modern conservative (and so-call christian!) members of contemporary US society towards those less fortunate than themselves. No doubt lunch ladies have a keen eye for local socieo-economic issues, but their anectodotal evidence supporting the prejudices of the better off is not what i would call a tool for rigorous policy guidance!
I can’t help but thinking that the real welfare recipients here are the corporations running the industrial food system. Because that is where much of the food stocking the food pantries and school lunch programs is coming from. In the same way that those who are really benefitting from farm subsidies are not really the farmers but the big agricultural corporations the farmers are paying for their seeds and mortgages and implements and such. In both cases, the folks in need are just avenues for laundering the government’s transfer payments to the corporations.
One good thing about SNAP benefits that has developed recently is allowing their use at farmers’ markets. That really does help both the poor and the farmers directly and healthfully.
“If memory serves, poor blacks had the habit of spending their extra money on cars, clothing, and consumer items that quickly depreciated in value — this, as opposed to spending it on improving their housing, saving for education, and so forth. ”
You realize there’s a very concrete, safety-related reason for that, don’t you?
“A generation or two ago, that would have been seen as a source of personal shame, at least in the culture in which I was raised. It would not have been done…”
But didn’t you say it was done? With the fancy cars outside the tarpaper shacks?
Also, these are simply the most outwardly recognizable aspects of this phenomenon. Seems to me like middle and upper-middle class people have LOTS of gew-gaws. But that’s where we spend huge chunks of government money for medicare to take care of grandma and federal mortgage tax deductions and subsidized college.
What I mean is, respectable people do, in fact, do these things. And always have. it’s just easier to notice a poor mexican kid wearing $150 sneakers than it is to see the family with the mortgage deduction spending a week at the lake every summer.
Why won’t the mexican family give up the $150 sneakers? Same reason the middle class family wont give up the vacation.
Because they like free stuff.
The death of shame has not only taken place among the lower classes. It is prevalent also at the top, and, I suspect, in the middle as well. The Profumo Affair seems so very, very long ago, doesn’t it? To choose an example near and dear to me, the people who agitated for the Iraq War, who lowballed costs and said we would be greeted with flowers and chocolates, have for the most part suffered no repercussions. I would prefer to think that, in a stern republic, at least some of these people would have fallen on their swords.
The rot is not only amongst the poor.
Real poverty in modern America tends to be rural, not urban.
Take the colonias in South Texas, which don’t even have real plumbing or water supplies. It may not be Mumbai, but it is an embarrassment to this state that never seems to be resolved.
http://www.sos.state.tx.us/border/colonias/faqs.shtml
The invocation of the Depression/WW2 as a defining influence on your perception of poverty is something I’ve reflected about myself. Even though I’m living a couple generations after that period, I still grew up with a number of stories and practices that reflect the experiences of my grandparents. I’m frugal because my father is frugal, and his frugality is directly borrowed from his father, who was the eldest son in a fatherless family of eight. My father’s mother also had stories of struggling against poverty that came to define her decisions as a household manager. Both of them consistently lived in a fear of the return of the Depression even as they became wealthy, and lived as though they were still obligated to scrimp and save.
I grew up with that mindset. Spending money on anything that isn’t of necessity is something that forces a period of extended deliberation on me. Even if I yield to the temptation of spending, I’m left with residual guilt. I inherited that guilt. It’s not born of my own experiences, but from my desire to emulate my elders, the people I admire most.
That might be a missing component of this analysis. People who live in well-connected and healthy family units tend to respect their ancestors, and have transmitted that inheritance of being frugal-minded savers. People in communities where families are broken, and where (sometimes absent) parental figures are seen as less worthy of respect, have lost that transmission of values. They’ve grown up in a world of perpetual national prosperity, and this is the first experience of something other than a very temporary period of recession.
The culture has lost the institutional memory of how to survive a downturn or crisis, except in the few traditionalist enclaves where familial values are efficiently being passed along. It’s not just skills like raising chickens in your back yard or mending your own clothing that have been lost. It’s the whole idea of being able to shift into a lifestyle where luxuries are abandoned. Most of us don’t have the imagination to conceive of that transition.
I’m less capable than my grandparents’ generation, certainly, but I think I still have a lot of advantages over my younger siblings in this respect. I grew up before my parents caved and purchased a television (a primary source of “you deserve this luxury now” messages!) and I had far more contact with my grandparents, and their oral tradition of poverty-experience in a pre-welfare state world that mandated frugality. This has created a situation in which I simultaneously live the most ascetic lifestyle of any of us, and yet I have the most personal wealth. Their spending decisions don’t make sense to me, and my spending decisions don’t make sense to them. The “food stamps for kids with $100 shoes” conflicts are just the national-scale version of the same confusion.
I’d almost rather starve than accept help from the government. I certainly couldn’t live with myself if I accepted a government check in the same year I bought a new recreational electronic gizmo. And so seeing the world around me move into a mode where that’s just normal behavior is disorienting to me. I’m trying not to let it turn me bitter, or hateful, or contemptuous of the poor. But I can’t feel indifferent to it, either, since it looks so wrong to me.
Mother Theresa visited Dallas many years ago. While there she asked to be taken to see the poor. Once “there,” she again asked “can you take me to see your poor.” While not everyone on food stamps and/or other forms of welfare are parasitic, most are. Again, most are (there are always exceptions to the rule). Rod, you used to live in Dallas. If ever there again, I ask you to drive to Half Price Books on North West Highway (I’m sure you know the one), park, get out and begin walking down/stopping into stores along Shady Brook Lane to Park Lane, and finish your stroll by popping in to the Fina station (get a taco while you’re there, they’re fantastic). Oh, and do this on a weekday afternoon. Tell me what you see transpiring. If you don’t think “ah, parasitic,” I’ll be shocked. After all of that, in case you need further convincing, go to nearly any neighborhood deemed “poor” and see if the same doesn’t apply. Again, this is a generalization, there are always those truly in need of assistance. Assistance from his or her fellow man, not the government. Just look to the Austin Street Shelter in Dallas to see how things actually get done. Just because Gingrich’s language sounds a bit strong, doesn’t mean its message isn’t true.
But didn’t you say it was done? With the fancy cars outside the tarpaper shacks?
Sorry, I should have been more specific. It wouldn’t have been done by “respectable” people. In other words, there was a powerful stigma against it.
Remember last year’s London riots? There was a lot of good commentary out of the UK condemning the loss of shame, and how people just didn’t care anymore how they got their wealth and consumer goods, as long as they had them. There were condemnations too of bankers and the wealthy who also profited parasitically from the system, and who didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed by it.
A similar comment has been made about trailer parks; the only difference between a trailer park and a lower middle class neighborhood is that the trailer park has nicer cars. The housing bust took care of quite a few people claiming what an infinitely wiser decision it was to invest in a house. As for the cars, almost every comment is about trucks (depending on the geography) or SUVs. Yes, they are more expensive, but they have advantages. They tend to last a lot longer. They are less likely to be totaled in an accident. They are a lot easier to perform maintenance upon so you don’t have to spend all your money on tools or finding a shop. They are tend to have utility for those doing manual labor, although admittedly that isn’t why an Escalade is purchased.
On another note, people tend to make a lot of presumptions about income. I remember talking to one woman. She took her 5 young girls to the grocery store. An older woman came up to her and scolded her for having so many kids so that she could get welfare. She was not on welfare. Her husband made around 6 figures. She was while and living in a rural area, but the same applies in the ghetto. There are a lot of people in the ghetto who make pretty decent money.
Finally, from my experience driving cab in Milwaukee, a lot of urban poor people do not have a driver’s license or a car. That person you see wherever may just be riding with a relative or friend or borrowing someone else’s vehicle. Yes, there are people probably undeserving and there better things some money could be spent upon, but I think any real analysis is going to find that there is no painless money tree to shake in order to achieve savings. BTW, having seen a number of people on permanent disability, disability ain’t no pot of gold. The thing most people are jealous of is the time people on permanent disability have. Needless to say, the people on disability don’t see all that time as a blessing.
One Lazy Dog: I am always sorry to see such merciless and unchristian charity from the modern conservative (and so-call christian!) members of contemporary US society towards those less fortunate than themselves.
It’s this kind of crap that makes a discussion of the reality of poverty impossible. From this point of view, there is no legitimate criticism that can ever be made of the poor and their behavior. On the opposite extreme, the poor are always and everywhere to be blamed for their condition, and never deserve a break. People only believe what suits them. I posted a few weeks ago something a doctor practicing at a big charity hospital in Louisiana said about welfare fraud among the patients he sees, and how frustrating he finds it. Several people came out to denounce this doctor for having the audacity to make empirical observations, analyze them, and come up with a conclusion that they disliked.
Rod, that thing you described with the cars certainly happens in Dallas, too. (“Cadillac Heights” is a lead-poisoned neighborhood with a meat-packing plant next door, not an enclave of the Park Cities. And yes, they really had Cadillacs there in the driveways, last I checked.)
But on your last thread about this, someone made a great comment to this point: You can buy your kids fancy sneakers and a great phone for less than $1000. Or you can spend that $1K on… 1/12 of a year of private high school tuition? 1/20th maybe of a year of college tuition? That’s not going to help enough to do any good, and I can see why someone would want to go ahead and give their child something nice now. It’s not like that was the only thing keeping their kid from a good education.
Also, I think probably in 1943, your mom didn’t have TV, so she wasn’t seeing all the wonderful things everyone else had. In this culture, where it’s hard to avoid seeing the ads or movies showing us all the great things “everyone else” has, there’s more shame around not having cool things.
Good points, Martha. The poor who are guilty of this sort of thing are only taking lessons from the overculture, and the media culture, in which one’s moral worth is determined by the possessions one has.
In the Netherlands, it is considered a social taboo to flaunt one’s income by conspicuous consumption. Even the Queen, who is far richer than the Queen of England, observes this social convention. Interesting.
Information and education is the only capital that fixes anything. If you build a fool a house, he will destroy it again with his foolishness. We have a whole generation that thinks that credit and payment plans offered by stores and banks are an opportunity and signs of financial trustworthiness. This is true of people on food stamps, and of people who are a few months of unemployment away from food stamps. We are a nation of financial dimwits who can’t even live out the wisdom of The Ant and The Grasshopper, let alone create a heritage of wealth for the future.
Unfortunately, there is not enough consensus on what is wise, related to finances, sexuality, or anything else, to hope that anyone will be taught with confidence about anything via public channels. Thank God for churches (and that includes megachurches… it’s STAGGERING what they get involved in and accomplish with the assets a large congregation can provide).
M.Z., I hear you about the disability. I ran into a friend of mine last week who had to take disability because of a crippling injury. She said those days at home are so long, and so difficult. She would give anything to be back at work. This is no vacation for her; it’s a trial.
“What we call “poverty” in this country is not what poverty was a generation or two ago. The deepest poverty is not material, but moral, and social.” How true.
This is a country where the poor of Central America out work and outperform our poor as a way of life. I daily encounter Mexicans with two or three jobs sending money home while native Blacks claim that there are no jobs to be had. There are genuinely poor, tough luck cases, but then, there are all the rest.
Knowing that I will provoke stereotypical lectures about my unchristian heartlessness, I will most certainly begrudge the welfare class their satellite-connected flatscreens and be-rimmed Escalades so long as I am in effect subsidizing those luxuries by working 50+ hours per week. If one eats frugally, it is possible to feed one’s family for what it costs to own and operate an SUV and satellite television every month–and probably less. I know this because my household’s own food costs are typically less than the gas, insurance, maintenance, and other payments necessary to keep our econoboxes (purchased used) on the road, not to mention the cost to pipe internet into the house.
True material poverty exists in the United States, but not in the ghettos and trailer parks, where government subsidies only exacerbate the problem by incentivizing dependency. As Rod notes, the sort of poverty in these places is moral and spiritual, crises for which the government is ill-equipped. “Only a god can save us” in this case, to borrow from Heidegger. Those who are truly materially impoverished are generally mentally/psychologically handicapped and/or substance-addicted, and the last thing these folks need is EBT cards and welfare checks. Park Hyun, if I am reading him correctly, hints at the sort of government assistance that is necessary here, and most of us won’t like it: a return to some kind of (therapeutic) institutionalization, etc.
In the meantime, I will continue to begrudge the “poor” both their food stamps and their Escalades. Miserere mei, Christu, I guess…
And of course, I meant “Jesu.”
Of course the poor now are not like the poor during the depression. The middle class now are not like the middle class were during the depression, so why should we assume the poor also don’t adjust over time. For that matter, the poor in the U.S. are not like the poor (or even middle-class) in Africa. We don’t want the slums of Lusaka in our modern cities, nor do we want the bush of Gabon in our rural lives.
America is a wealthy country. The poor, relatively, are wealthy in comparison. They may be hungry, but they may also have a cell phone. People in the bush in Africa have cell phones, so do people living in the slums of Mumbai. Phone communication is a vital technology, even when you are poor or even homeless, and cell phones make more sense than a landline.
In my work with the poor, I’ve seen plenty of poor people with nicer cars than me and better cable service. More common, however, are people who have significantly less than I do with significantly fewer options. Basing norms and assumptions on outliers is intellectually dishonest. The question remains, however, not about my outrage about outliers but my concern and compassion for those who truly have less.
Consider that the poor are constantly hectored to be more like the rich. “If you acted like us you’d be like us…”
Moral decay starts at the top, just looks different, that’s all.
As for fancy cars and tarpaper shacks, consider the milieu. Public assistance programs examine the assets one has in considering eligibility. So a savings account, a house, etc. are all supposed to be gone before you can qualify. The automobile was an exception, the State could not consider the family car as an asset. Thus putting one’s wealth into a car made sense, it was the only thing the State would not require you to get rid of before qualifying for assistance.
This article by Megan McArdle at The Atlantic is relevant, I think.
Moral decay starts at the top, just looks different, that’s all.
Actually, wasn’t a study cited on this very blog very recently observing that various indicators of robust “social capital”–stable marriages, legitimate pregnancies, etc.–are strongest among the upper classes? Unless you’re suggesting that the (morally) poor are seeking to imitate the dysfunctions depicted in People magazine, whose subjects are a microscopic slice of the uber-upper-class (“the aristocrats!”), you’re simply incorrect.
I think to avoid lionizing or vilifying the poor, it helps to know them. Two women who’ve I’ve known up close and personal have really informed my opinion of food stamps and its problems.
One was a mother of five who lives in a rural part of a rural state. Each of her children is born to a different father. By the time each child was born, the woman had “broken up” with their father. She lives on property own by her parents in a pre-fab house purchased by them. It is falling apart due to neglect. She has not worked in 10 years and employment was spotty before that. All of her children were eligible for free breakfast and lunch through school. What child support and food stamps doesn’t cover, her parents supply for her children. At this point she has been out of the workforce for so long and in her mid 40s, I fear that she will never really be employed again. As the kids grow up and out, government assistance and child support will cease. It is a slow decline into a dreadful future. She is a stereo-typical “welfare queen” I suppose.
The other woman was a decade-long drug addict and alcoholic who decided to leave her boyfriend and get sober. She moved out of the French Quarter and into her mother’s home in the burbs, despite the fact that her mother had drinking problems of her own. She had massive amounts of educational debt in default that had kept her “off the grid” for many years financially. She was terrified and felt guilty to go on food stamps but at the encouragement of friends, she did. The food stamps enabled her to get a legit job, get clean and sober, and get a fresh start. Within two years she was off public assistance entirely despite losing everything she owned in Katrina. She resolved her financial issues, and is now a school teacher , artist and waitress. I am convinced that those years on food stamps were fundamental in her ability to redirect her life. By her example alone, the remainder of her family of origin has also stopped abusing drugs and alcohol and are functional members of society.
Neither of these women are the “deserving poor.” They didn’t come to poverty from a medical bankruptcy or a tragic unforeseen event. They each made poor choice, after poor choice that resulted in their poverty. But if it weren’t for food stamps, five children would have been hungry and one very good teacher wouldn’t be alive right now. The price for this? The first woman, the rural mother, is “rewarded” for her bad behavior and probably will always be on some sort of public assistance.
Consumption is not the only cue offered by the overculture. We’re often told of the “digital divide,” where a poor person will have no chance to escape their relative poverty in the US without access to some form of high-speed internet, whatever other economic, cultural, and personal-responsibility matters are at play. I’m not sure this is true, but it’s far easier to search “help wanted” online. I remember reading that poor people use phones for primary internet access far more than others, because it can be prepaid as part of the rest of a phone plan, and it’s obviously more useful than having a home phone line, a $400 computer, and dialup. Here’s a WSJ article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903327904576526732908837822.html
The other thing is – OK, so they buy a used Honda Civic with a high-interest loan instead of a Cadillac with a high-interest loan, they don’t buy the single items like sneakers and phones – they still have to play all their cards just right to escape the bottom rung; there’s very little room for error, and it requires a great deal of luck. The argument for the social safety nets is that you want personal responsibility to have a real, demonstrable effect when applied. There’s no cause for hope if a single, ordinary mistake undoes the positive effects of months’ worth of diligent living.
Rob:
Those who are truly materially impoverished are generally mentally/psychologically handicapped and/or substance-addicted, and the last thing these folks need is EBT cards and welfare checks. Park Hyun, if I am reading him correctly, hints at the sort of government assistance that is necessary here, and most of us won’t like it: a return to some kind of (therapeutic) institutionalization, etc.
Rob, my wife’s mentally handicapped brother lives with us. His Social Security disability check and EBT card helps ease the financial burdens associated with that.
You really think it would be better if he were institutionalized?
If so, why?
There really isn’t any monolithic “poverty.” There’s a lot of disparate types of it, almost too many to count.
1. Poverty due to mental illness. Huge. When the states started closing mental hospiltals, a lot of people who desperately needed to be in there, living assisted, were turned out. That’s a large part of the homeless, and “cat food” poverty-deprivation.
2. Off the grid poverty. This includes the rural poor as well as the “RV” people. Go around your city sometime and look for RVs. Or people sleeping in their cars. I think the main problem with this is that rent as a percent of income has skyrocketed in many cities.
3. Neglect poverty. Take the kids away from the parents or foster parents. Counsel the parents and maybe even make them wards of the state. I don’t know.
I think people need to agree on what the problems are first, then we can go about fixing them. People don’t want to take hard steps, so they just rely on government to throw money at it. I don’t think that will work, and I think as a country we need to really have a long discussion about what we want the good life to be, and how much we need to invest in people to produce or aid in producing it. It sucks because it’s really easy to fall into cynicism or despair, or the opposite trap of making it a Utopian idea rather than a practical plan.
Susan Mc, your stories pretty much encapsulate why I don’t spend any time worrying about people getting food stamps. The day might come when I need them to feed my family, and I don’t want to be judged harshly by my neighbors for my poverty. I would not stay on them one moment longer than I absolutely needed to, but who knows what my circumstances might be? If people are cheating the government, and the taxpayer, by getting food that they don’t strictly need, well, it’s wrong, but I’m way more worried about corporate welfare, defense contracting fraud, and things like that.
But the comparative scale of the problems doesn’t mean there is nothing ever wrong with food stamp dependency. It’s a difficult moral question, or set of questions.
A generation or two ago, that would have been seen as a source of personal shame, at least in the culture in which I was raised. It would not have been done, at least not among respectable people. Today? I wonder.
People are merely doing what it takes to be deemed competent (cooperative, competitive, and comfortable enough, but also marked with its particular stigmata and totems and aspirational symbols) within their social group and peer group. Which they hold no hope of climbing out of, only fear of falling further down the ladder. This wasn’t true of your parents.
From my experience in ghettos, you can’t be a respectable poor child without those ostentatious sneakers and electronic gadgets or at least trying for them. If you don’t have them, you lose status. Because you and your family unit are probably incompetent at the class-specific vital skill of cajoling these goods out of other elements of society who can afford them. Or you/yours are unwilling to do this cajoling out of pride, which means you/yours don’t share in the group’s expectations- you don’t share their variety of despair at becoming competent and therefore don’t share their need to imitate competence with tokens.
Owning/using gadgets that signify competence and mainstream participation and higher status isn’t the same thing as being competent in American society at large. But it substitutes and comforts somewhat. It says the owner/user aspires to competence and acceptance, even though s/he is not necessarily sure what that is like.
I’m struck by how this meshes or conflicts with your notion of Louisiana, Rod. Which you pronounced a wonderful place to live based on how appealing or satisfying the abundant locally supplied substitutes for competence and relevance are to you. The many social and physical comforts people provide each other (music, food, drink, parades, formal community, solidarities), the pleasant kinds of diversity and distractions and selfcongratulatory distinctions that people absorb themselves with, the value given to performing rituals well, the local mythologies and extensive religiosity that buffer unkind realities and challenges. This is the way most people have lived during most of human history, though with plenty of wars to break up the boredom.
It’s a haven for raising your children, away from the painful measurements and harsh competitions and skepticism that the ‘liberal elites’ put their children through. But it comes at a substantial price in perceived authenticity and deep selfconfidence, doesn’t it?
Another thing about the Cadillacs – I think part of it is that they seem like “good cars” that will be dependable for a long time. It might even make some twisted sense if a car payment is affordable as part of a month-to-month budget but if buying a used car would still require a monthly car payment and maintenance would be unaffordable on top of it, or just as much per month as the more expensive “good car.”
Until we figure out some way of creating an economy that doesn’t regularly through mass numbers of people out of work, I’m not going to pass judgement on anyone who figures out a way of surviving.
Furthermore, if we want these so-called parasites to work, then we should figure out some way of helping them find and keep jobs that will support a family.
My aunt used to work for our state’s Department of Labor, and she constantly complained about how poorly employers (the same people who say they can’t find good help) treated the poor. For instance, part of my aunt’s job was to help single mothers find work. A good deal of these women had little in the way of skills, and therefore could only find jobs in the hospitality industry. Not only do these type of jobs not pay well, but the work is often sporadic and fixed schedules are unheard of. As you can imagine, these two factors combined make it all but impossible for someone with children to keep one of the jobs.
“While not everyone on food stamps and/or other forms of welfare are parasitic, most are.” One question, one comment:
The question: As parasitic as, say, Romney living off coupons “earned” by manipulation of our financial system and tax policies and ruthless indifference to its consequences for thousands less well off – or as parasitic as oil company subsidies?
The comment: For every one gaming the system in ways so many people here find offensive, I guarantee that there are three who need help but can’t or don’t get it at all. Yes, many of the poor need better parenting, role models, values. But here’s one more thing they need: more money. That this is not obvious says something about OUR values.
I think it’s paranoid and bizarre to worry about whether or not a poor kid has expensive sneakers (urban stereotype) or an ATV (rural stereotype) at the same time that his family is getting food stamps. I’m sure there are cheaters (there are in every strata of society) but I honestly take it on faith that most people who use food stamps do so because they really really need to. My guess is that it’s not fun to use food stamps. And also that, likely, the parents are making poor decisions at that point, not the kid. If my tax money goes to getting that kid dinner, I am so OK with that. And I know Rod doesn’t like this kind of rhetoric but if I hear another person who professes in other aspects of his life to be “pro-children” and “pro-life” complain about “welfare queens having more babies than they can afford,” I think I’m going to explode. If there isn’t a huge moral failing in that sentiment–i.e. castigating women for “having more kids than they can afford” I guess I don’t know what “moral” means anymore.
But I agree that there’s a need for some kind of “moral” teaching, that if there’s any chance of pulling rural and urban poor areas up to middle class status, it *must* involve changing the patterns established by the parents (and perhaps their parents). Sure, part of such an education would be about the benefit of saving money rather than spending it on designer jeans (urban stereotype) or guns (rural stereotype). But don’t you think that it would have to start with letting kids know that if they work hard, save for what they want, are persistent in their pursuits, if they are respectful toward others and offer care and support to their friends and families, that they will have a fair shot to have a job that pays the bills, and a stable, rewarding life? And how can we teach kids that, when it’s no longer true in this country?
Turmarion:
“This article by Megan McArdle at The Atlantic is relevant, I think.”
I remember this McArdle article, and it reminds me of these more “piquant” articles from cracked.com; one from this summer and one from a few days ago:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-nobody-tells-you-about-being-poor/
http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor/
They’re definitely “grain of salt” territory, and not nearly as smart as Megan’s article, but it’s not bad to hear the opinion of someone who saw it first hand and made it out.
John E.:
I obviously don’t favor institutionalization at the tax-payer’s expense for your relative. Bless your family for expressing the charity that obligatory of all families. But many developmentally disabled and mentally handicapped individuals (who are almost of necessity impoverished) have no families, either literally or effectually because their living relatives don’t care. In the latter case, perhaps the living relatives should be legally penalized. But in the former case? There are agencies like my wife’s who help those who are only mildly disabled to live “independently” in the community (but not mildly enough to be eligible for gainful employment) by balancing checkbooks, cleaning house, and, yes, ensuring that EBT cards are used responsibly. But for the many who are not mildly handicapped, it’s either the street or the jail. In fact, American jails are serving as de facto mental institutions in the wake of the wave of well-intentioned but poorly-conceived de-instituitonalization of the 1980′s. Again, food stamps and checks aren’t helping these folks, and, as many of us here have noted, those who do receive and “benefit” from such handouts are often using them improperly.
Another thing about the Cadillacs – I think part of it is that they seem like “good cars” that will be dependable for a long time.
LOL, no.
You don’t have to have a 20-year backlog of Consumer Reports to know that Toyota and Honda are reliability kings and cost a whole helluva lot less.
Try another rationalization.
Consider that the poor are constantly hectored to be more like the rich. “If you acted like us you’d be like us…”
Most of us are more interested in getting them to act like the Middle Class, which means picking up your yard, marrying your kids mom, and not getting over your head in debt getting crap from Rent-A-Center.
[quote]One was a mother of five who lives in a rural part of a rural state. Each of her children is born to a different father. By the time each child was born, the woman had “broken up” with their father.[/quote]
Is there a secular reason why this woman shouldn’t have had further benefits contingent on a tubal ligation after sh***ing out kid number two (if not earlier)? I know it “eugenicist” and, errrr…HITLER!!!! But why should we have to devote government resources to this person’s irresponsibility. It’s not just money for food stamps, either. The odds are, we’re going to have imprison 60% of her brood in the coming decades.
Can any liberal lay out a serious non-religious reason why such permanent dependents should not be sterilized as a condition for further government support?
Sheldon: I guess you don’t understand what “While not everyone” means? Or my repeated qualifier stating to the effect that there are people truly in need of assistance? Or even what a generalization is? The thread pertains to whether child poverty, or more to the point, American poverty, is actually poverty–in the majority of cases (note the “majority,” Sheldon). To bring in Romney (or John Kerry, or our President, or any other national politician for that matter) and the oil bogeyman and your “facts” on how monies are earned is not relevant here. That’s for another thread. If you want to disagree with my statements, wonderful, I welcome it. But please don’t play shell games., Shel(don). By the by, if the supposed poor have money for smart phones -which cost a lot of money per month to operate, as most of us know- and whatnot, and they are chronically unemployed, what evidence is there that additional money will be put to good use? I could go on for days here, but I’m not. You seem to have your heart in the right place, for certain; but I think you have an unrealistic view of poverty in this country. And to preemptively address your question: My income is barely above the poverty line. I live in a part of town that is considered “rough” by most, and have so for most of my life. So I know a bit about what I speak.
Rod,
what do you think would have happened if those poor black people you member from growing up had foregone the cars and instead tried to walk into the bank and apply for a mortgage? or tried to buy a house in the nicest (read white) part of town after saving for years? Did redlining not exist in your part of the south? Maybe the reason they bought nice cars is that they weren’t allowed to buy nice houses. Do you really mean to say that generations of segregation and deliberate underfunding of education played no role? it seems a hole in your argument wide enough to drive a Cadillac through.
with that said certainly individual responsibility plays a role in poverty, but so does the society around it. if all you know if poverty, it can be hard to imagine that there is a way out. another quibble, those 400$ phones you mention can be used as computers for almost every application. would you bring up as an issue a poor family for making sure their children had access to a computer?
Interesting to note the contrast that classic, WASP-y fashion and tendencies are very unassuming – buying plain clothes that look nice, are of good quality and are very inauspicious – think Land’s End, LL Bean and even Brooks Brothers.
I despise Hitchens’ glib and misanthropic denial of the conditions of the working poor just because they’ve dragged together enough for one-time expenses.
When I was very young, and my mom was in school and dad lost his job, they had no savings or cushion left and got by on what they could scrape together or borrow from their own parents, who in turn had to delay retirement. Often my parents ate Cheerios 3 meals a day. I’m sure it was much harder on my older sister than on me.
But yeah, they had a TV and a telephone and indoor plumbing, thus inviting some pundit con artist to sneer at how they owned ssomething that Emperor Constantine didn’t own so shut up and stop complaining, right?
I’d call it “class warfare,” but it’s more like a class massacre.
“Sorry, I should have been more specific. It wouldn’t have been done by “respectable” people. In other words, there was a powerful stigma against it.”
Is this really accurate? I think a lot of the black people in those tarpaper shacks were probably respectable. In fact, go to a predomnantly black community today. Even in poor ones, it is quite common to see African-Americans dressed to the nines in fine hats, new suits, etc. My very conservative, very white and (I think) very respectable mum would APPLAUD vast expenditures on clothing and shoes for church. Especially compared to the middle-class rabble she complains about in our church. Jeans!
As for cars, perhaps you weren’t actually going through black neighborhoods when you saw the crappy houses with fancy cars. Here is Tom Wolfe on car culture in the South, in 1965. He mentions the tarpaper. But the houses were occupied by Good Old Boys, not black people.
http://www.esquire.com/features/life-of-junior-johnson-tom-wolfe-0365
“In the hollows, sometimes one would come upon the most incredible tar-paper hovels, down near the stream, and out front would be an incredible automobile creation, a late-model car with aerials, continental kit overhangs in the back, mudguards studded with reflectors, fender skirts, spotlights, God knows what all, with a girl and perhaps a couple of good old boys communing over it and giving you rotten looks as you drive by. … After the war there was a great deal of stout-burgher talk about people who lived in hovels and bought big-yacht cars to park out front. This was one of the symbols of a new, spendthrift age. But there was a great deal of unconscious resentment buried in the talk. It was resentment against (a) the fact that the good old boy had his money at all and (b) the fact that the car symbolized freedom, a slightly wild, careening emancipation from the old social order.”
I could be wrong on this one, but it seems to me that the poor of the depression were different from today’s poor in that they had skills that have been lost in this sanitary modern day. For example, my grandfather who was born in 1928 left elementary school to help his family survive. One of 11 children in a family of white sharecroppers. One of his sisters apparently died of starvation. (I only heard my grandfather talk about that once, so I can’t be certain of the validity.) But his mother could do things I highly doubt many women could do today. She wasn’t afraid to walk into a hen house to kill and clean a chicken herself. My grandfather and his siblings would go out at dawn and pick pecans until dark. A 5 gallon bucket was worth approximately 5 cents. You didn’t pick your share and you got your butt tore up. To this day, I have never seen anyone pick pecans faster than his sister, God rest her soul. To me, this is what is lost among the impoverished today.
One Lazy Dog: “I am always sorry to see such merciless and unchristian charity from the modern conservative (and so-call christian!) members of contemporary US society towards those less fortunate than themselves. No doubt lunch ladies have a keen eye for local socieo-economic issues, but their anectodotal evidence supporting the prejudices of the better off is not what i would call a tool for rigorous policy guidance!”
Amen, and don’t get me started on the single parent issue. I am a single parent and never took 1 dime of government money, whether it was food stamps, WIC, welfare, etc. Not begruding those that need it, mind you. I was fortunate to have a decent education & job, & it is a long story how I wound up as a single parent, as it is for many of us. It certainly wasn’t what I wanted! I scrimped & saved & made sure all these years that my son has had a good education, usually sending him to good private schools across town where the rich kids went.
And yet I received & still receive precious little atta-boys or encouragement from these unchristian church people, who constantly preach about “broken families”. Very little moral encouragement, offers to provide male mentors for my son, or whatever. And I wasn’t even looking for monetary handouts, just a little moral support & some mentoring time for my son. One reason single parent families remain “unchurched”, which is of course another reason for these holier than thou types to look down their noses at “broken families”. Every time I pick up a conservative publication (& yes I am a conservative) I read about how bad “broken families” are for the kids. Today it was articles in the Wall Street Journal & Christianity Today. Never anything about how well certain single parent families are doing despite the odds. I mean, there are so many “real” 2-parent families that provide an unstable, abusive and/or undisciplined home, but these are never mentioned.
I am the first to admit that overall a traditional 2-parent family provides a better, more stable and wealthier home for the kids involved. But there are many of us single parents out there who ARE taking our families to church, ARE trying to pay our bills, ARE making sure that are kids have moral values, ARE making sure that our kids have a good education. And single parents have been around a long time anyway, I mean what happened when a mother died in childbirth, a man got killed in a war? You church people need to get a reality check and start REALLY practicing what Jesus taught. Read Matthew 25:31-46 for a start.
There are a lot of assumptions and beliefs about what it means to be chronically poor. Those assumptions and beliefs may be more important to us than facts. Especially when facts frustrate the natural human desire to impose a narrative on them.
I would say that, from my years of work for the Society of St Vincent de Paul, it’s important to cultivate detachment from such assumptions and beliefs, and learn to each person individually. This kind of thing is the kind of thing that defeats the aspirations of essayists and journalists.
Rob, okay, thanks – and good on your wife for doing that work.
I know that the agency that helps us out also has group homes for folks who don’t live with family. Does your wife’s agency do that too or work with those?
Okay. I’ll play. Where is virtue when it comes to money? Does hard work sanctify it in some way that entitlement does not? And what about entitlements? Why are public entitlements (food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, etc.) consisdered less worthy that financial entitlement that comes from mere ownership of property?
What is the difference (other than amounts) between Mitt Romney’s income last year and any given food stamp recipient’s? According to Mitt’s tax returns, his income didn’t involve any work. That said, any given food stamp recipient worked a great deal more than Mitt for a great deal less. Yet on one begrudges Mr. Romney what he has . . . at least not here.
Wealth has a way of sanitizing its acquisition. Children and grandchildren of the carpetbaggers in the South became the leading citizens of Southern towns. Grandchildren of bootleggers of the 1920′s live in Palm Beach. The Robber Barons, some of whom made Dickensian villains look like saints, bequethed great fortunes made from the sweat and blood of their fellow Americans so that their grandchildren and great grandchildren can live in idle ease without the scorn that attaches to the children of the poor and near-poor.
It’s not that I have any set idea on how to correct this . . . or even if there is any possible correction in a society like the one we’ve inherited. But I will note that part of that inheritance includes Huey Long, he of “Share Our Wealth” and “Every Man a King.” Said Huey, no man can honestly earn a million dollars a year nor fairly inherit ten million. Perhaps Huey was on to something.
Randall, when someone writes that MOST people on food stamps or welfare are parasites, I don’t think I need to justify anything I wrote. And trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to get into an argument with me about the realities of poverty in this country. Small example: “According to the USDA, an estimated 16.7 million children lived in food-insecure households in 2008. A frightening 14% of U.S. households experienced food insecurity during 2008, an increase from 11% the year before. 49.1 million people lived in food-insecure households — including children, WORKING ADULTS, and seniors.” I don’t think things have improved since then – and I won’t bore you with statistics on access to medical care. Your argument that the poor really do have enough money really is absurd. But I was also responding to the general tenor of most of the comments here, not just to you personally.
I see people complaining that our poor aren’t on the ragged edge of utter degradation, like the poor in Haiti, etc. Well yes- precisely because we have a saftey net. Those programs work!
And if someone wants to live in an America where the poor do live as they do in Haiti, etc. then I really do not want you in the same country as the rest of us, any more than those evil-hearterd people wanting to see America run like Stalin’s Russia, or black folk back in chains.
By the way I’m not sure that the Great Depression taught everyone to be miserly. My father came of age in the 30s and he was anything but a skinflint. He was rather a very generous man, and he did not fret much about money. For example, although he had excellent car mechanic skills (he was in fact exactly that in the army in WWII), he almost always took the car to a garage to be worked on, even for things like oil changes. For him that was part of what it meant to be middle class: you could afford to do that sort of thing.
To be sure, my father’s family came through the Depression with no real grief from it: my grandfather reputedly even helped out neighbors fallen on hard times (again, generosity run in my paternal lineage). I am thriftier than my father was, a trait I probably owe to my step-mother’s influence (whose family did not have an easy time in the Depression). Though I too like giving gifts, and consider being able to write checks to charities to be a sign that I am successful.
Liam: I would say that, from my years of work for the Society of St Vincent de Paul, it’s important to cultivate detachment from such assumptions and beliefs, and learn to each person individually. This kind of thing is the kind of thing that defeats the aspirations of essayists and journalists.
I credit you that, Liam. I would rather listen to people like you, Dr. Anthony Daniels, that anonymous physician who works at the charity hospital, and other people who have actual experience, both good and bad, with the poor than listen to people like myself who only know what we know secondhand.
It’s no doubt as hard to generalize about the poor as it is to generalize about the rich, or the middle class. I know a family that has more money than I could ever dream about, yet who has seen it as a blessing, and has used it to bless others in ways that, again, I could hardly dream about. They defy every stereotype of the wealthy that you could imagine. Therefore, to some, they must not be allowed to exist.
I know middle-class people who are generous to a fault. I just heard an hour ago a story about a man from this town, now dead, who used to go to the bank to take out loans to help others who had no money, but who had need. The man didn’t have enough cash to help them himself, but he got it from the bank, putting his own property up for collateral. Nobody knew this about him but his banker, until after he died. This man was not rich, nor was he poor. He was middle class. I know other middle class people who would be ruined by great wealth or great poverty. I think I’m probably one of them, weak as I am. It’s just real hard to say.
My very conservative, very white and (I think) very respectable mum would APPLAUD vast expenditures on clothing and shoes for church. Especially compared to the middle-class rabble she complains about in our church. Jeans!
C’mon, Sam. You can buy a presentable suit at a discount store like Kohl’s or JC Penney for around $75, and there are other places that run even cheaper: Ross, Marshall’s and TJ Maxx come to mind. They’re not Armani or Brooks Brothers, but they’re fine. and, hey, not only can you wear them to church, but they come in real handy for this thing called a “job interview.” Women’s clothes sometimes run a bit higher, but not by that much.
Look there’s a lot of excuse making for what are stupid decisions. I think some shame should be brought to bear on people who waste money and still rely on the government. If they’re buying a nice ride, they’re not plunking down cash for a one-time purchase. I can tell you that. They’re financing it, and I doubt their credit lets them get the best rate, and they’re probably not getting safe driver discounts on their full coverage. That is F***ING STUPID. Such people need to be told that they are STUPID, and they’re leeches, too, if they’re living on the government’s tab. Mutatis mutando, you can apply this to a lot of similar decisions.
Let me again bring up the fecundity issue again. If you need Uncle Sucker to make ends meet: you should not have kids. Please don’t tell me these people need intensive years of sex ed to figure out how to work a rubber onto the unmentionable thing. They can navigate iPhone menus, they can figure out a condom. The fact is, they don’t care to use it, so we shouldn’t have to pay for their offspring. You want money for the rugrat, get your tubes tied or your hoses snipped (depending on gender).
Rod
I should add I have family skin in the game, as it were: a sibling who has an array of organic and behavioral issues that underlay long-term unemployment. Severe ADHD, inability to process things in a way that works in standard office environments, physical injuries from doing years of landscaping work, and a 33 year old severely autistic son who has been living in group homes or institutions for all but 5 of his years. Monumental stuff.
And yet.
This sibling has a terrible rage against the world for it not being the way it ought to be. Life is just a series of battles, and battles are seen automatically. Et cet. With this comes an insiduous underlay of entitlement (which really arises from a sense that the world ought to be just – a subjunctive sense that is widespread among human beings). My elderly parents support this sibling and, of course, that will end. Who will support her after that? Her siblings are not lining up for this; indeed, one major consequence of my downshifting to work for myself (with much less income and more risk) is that this sibling realized there was no longer a Deputy Dad in waiting…. I could not live with this sibling, because I am emotional sponge (a person gifted in psychic perception once commented that I absorbed all the negative energy in a room and made other people feel better; there’s something to this – the problem is I’ve never figured out where to let that energy loose, as it were) and the sibling is the emotional equivalent of the tapioca pudding in Woody Allen’s sleeper – aggressively spilling over and over and over anything in its path.
Also, in my work with SVdP, I say no almost as often as I say yes. Working with the poor involves a lot of No and Yes But. Anyone who wants to work for the poor imagining he can be Lord Bountiful is on an ego trip of sorts. Part of the Vincentian way is to avoid giving chronic assistance that could enable disabling dependence. It’s not always obvious what the right answers are, and they shift over time. You have to be willing to be wrong and be accountable for that. In a radically personal way.
All that said, when I step back and look at this country’s relationship with its poor at a meta level, this is what I see:
1. We avert our eyes from the chronic poor, especially those who Don’t Look Like One Of Us. We make them Other.
2. We have a powerful residue of low-rent Calvinism in our civil religion: chronic poverty is a sign of negative election.
3. And that’s how the Other makes us feel better about ourselves.
4. So, in the end, so much of this is about our own ego needs.
“I think to avoid lionizing or vilifying the poor, it helps to know them.”
“I would say that, from my years of work for the Society of St Vincent de Paul, it’s important to cultivate detachment from such assumptions and beliefs, and learn to each person individually.”
Seriously, these are about the wisest comments in this thread.
A great many poor people aren’t particularly sympathetic when you get to know them.
But the notion that we don’t have “real” poverty in the West only rings true precisely because we have school-lunch programs, food stamps, welfare, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, and Social Security — along with various medical-care programs that keep people from dying of easily treated illnesses.
No, we don’t cure all the behaviors that make and keep some people poor. Does that mean we should let more of them live under bridges for their own good?
I would echo the sentiment that to avoid demonizing the poor, it helps to get to know them, even if superficially. You don’t need to be BFF’s to walk a bit with the truly poor. Here are my experiences.
When my daughter was 14, I chaperoned the youth mission trip to an agricultural community that relied on immigrant labor. The local school district set up a summer school and a headstart/daycare program to pull children from 3-14 out of the fields and provide education, meals and social activities. The program was really good and word was out in the migrant community that Lynden, WA offered these services. You have to understand that giving up the labor of these kids represented a real sacrifice to the families. The program didn’t take kids under 3, so care still had to be arranged for infants and toddlers. Ordinarily that was provided by older kids.Anybody over 12 could pick, so if the parents elected to let the 12-14 year olds go to school, they sacrificed some income.
In my (limited) experience, the Hispanic farm workers sacrificed both income and convenience to make sure their kids could be part of the summer education program. They were loving and responsible parents who worked hard and provided for their children. What blew me back was the genuine but misguided respect they had for “technology.” Somehow they felt that providing their kids with a PS2 or a Gameboy would contribute to upward mobility. When we, the staff, said books and math workbooks they were polite, but didn’t grok. Understand these are responsible, devoted parents who will go without new clothes or recreation so as to provide their children with gameboys.
Re: If you need Uncle Sucker to make ends meet: you should not have kids
While I rather agree with this statement, let’s remember that a great many people fall in poverty after they have had children, and in the Great Recession that has been true in spades.
Somehow they felt that providing their kids with a PS2 or a Gameboy would contribute to upward mobility. When we, the staff, said books and math workbooks they were polite, but didn’t grok. Understand these are responsible, devoted parents who will go without new clothes or recreation so as to provide their children with gameboys.
Great! Let’s import yet more of them!
“They can navigate iPhone menus, they can figure out a condom. The fact is, they don’t care to use it, so we shouldn’t have to pay for their offspring. You want money for the rugrat, get your tubes tied or your hoses snipped (depending on gender).”
Yow. Two things:
1) Whether or not they care to use contraception has nothing to do with the justice of welfare for children – “their offspring” had no choice of where they were born.
2) You’re proposing a state-sponsored sterilization program in the wake of some weeks of conservative backlash against making contraception free. I think you’re going to get as much resistance from conservatives as liberals on this matter. I don’t know about your beliefs (so I apologize in advance if I’ve misread you), but if you would be for a state-sponsored sterilization program but against a state-sponsored contraception program, it sounds to me as though you just want to ensure the poor who receive assistance live in the maximum state of misery and minimum state of liberty we can possibly inflict, and you’re saying it with all the glibness you might say “let’s spay and neuter the strays.” I might suggest that if your goals are both to reduce the number of people on assistance and to minimize the dignity of those same individuals, your goals are at odds. Suffering is not ennobling.
One of the lasting side effects of poverty is the idea that money is perishable and must be spent before it spoils.
Regarding poor blacks with fancy cars, it’s worth noting that blacks have historically had difficulty securing mortgages to purchase nice homes in nice neighborhoods. But anyone can get a car loan.