As I mentioned in my previous
post, we've been living in a poorer are of Kansas City while also trying to restart our careers/finances after moving back home from our 18 months in Europe. It's been a bit of a challenge, but with Erin accepting a full-time teaching position at Dawson's school, things are starting to stabilize.
Due to both living in the Northeast and struggling to make much money, I've gained some serious insight into what it's like to be poor. I'm not ready to go into all the details yet, but I will eventually share my first hand experiences with "poor shaming" and heartless and immovable bureaucracy from the past few months. In the meantime, though I will share some hightlights from a book I recently finsihed,
"The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives." I found myself agreeing often with the books author, either because I've observed what he's describing first hand or have actually experienced it myself. Here are some quotes from the book.
pg. 5
[There is a] sheer loneliness of poverty, the fact that profound economic
hardship pushes people to the psychological and physical margins of society –
isolated from friends and relatives; shunted into dilapidated trailer parks,
shanties, or ghettoized public housing; and removed from banks and stores,
transit systems and cultural institutions.
The poor live on society’s scraps –a few dollars in government
assistance or charity, donated food, thrift-store clothes. They can afford neither transport to venture
out of their communities nor simple luxuries such as movies or a cup of coffee
with friends in a café. They cannot
afford to vary the routines of their daily lives. Embarrassed by their poverty, worried about
being judged failures in life, and humiliated by that judgment, many told me
that they have essentially withdrawn from all but the most necessary,
unavoidable social interaction.
The second that that one realizes in telling this story is the diversity, the
complexity, of poverty. Its causes, and
therefore its potential solutions, cannot meaningfully be reduced to a pat list
of features. There are people with no
high school education who are poor, but there are also university graduates on
food bank lines. There are people who
are poor because they have made bad choices, gotten addicted to drugs, burned
bridges with friends and family – and then there are people who have never
taken a drug in their lives, who have huge social networks, and who still can’t
make ends meet. There are people who
have never held down a job, and others who hold down multiple, but always
low-paying, jobs, frequently for some of the most powerful corporations on
earth. There are people who have never
had a bank account and use payday loans and other predatory lending sources
whenever they need access to extra cash, and there are others who, during more
flush times, owned huge suburban houses and expensive cars. There are children whose only hot meals are
what they are given at school, and young adults who have nothing now and never
really had anything earlier in life either.
There are military veterans who have struggled to find a place in civilian
life, middle-aged and once-middle-class people falling down the economic ladder
as the recession fails to fully lift, and elderly people cascading into
destitution as savings evaporate and expected equity in their homes fails to
materialize.
Poverty is, in other words, as diverse as the United States itself. What the poor have in common, however, is an
increasingly precarious existence in a country seemingly unable – or at least
unwilling – to come to grips with their collective despair.
Pg. 7
Were we as a society able to implement [a plan to deal with poverty] in
affordable and equitable ways, the result would be a fundamental reimagining of
the American economic landscape. We can
use four major revenue sources: 1) a public works fund to protect against mass
unemployment; 2) a new educational opportunity fund to dramatically expand
access to, and affordability of, higher education; 3) a poverty mitigation fund
built up from the introduction of a financial transaction tax and energy profit
taxes; and 4) money to stabilize Social Security and start reducing the
national deficit, made available from higher taxes on capital gains, high-end
inheritances, and the income of the most affluent wage earners…. If we used
these revenue sources, we could change both our expectations of society and our
long-term financial calculus in a way beneficial to tens of millions of
people.
Pg. 34
We will get far further in understanding twenty-first century American poverty
if we consider how entrenched the new plutocracy, and its economic agenda, has
become than if we look solely for explanations regarding the purported
intellectual, economic, and cultural inadequacies of the poor. It is, after all, surely no coincidence that
the United States, the country with the wealthiest elite in the Western world, and
an economy that has averaged 2.2 percent productivity gains each year since
1947, also has vastly higher poverty rates than its peer nations.
Shortly after the financial crisis hit, the OECD published a table on income
distribution: Even after government benefits were factored in, more than 11
percent of the American population had incomes of only 40 percent of the median
income in the country. In Great Britain, that number was only a little above 6
percent; Germany’s number was a little more than 4 percent. In Sweden it was 3.8 percent; and in the
Netherlands, 2.7 percent. Even Greece
and Ireland, two countries tottering toward bankruptcy, had a far lower
percentage of their population living significantly below the poverty line than
did the United States.
“What’s most striking in the past few years is the absolute absence of
discussions of poverty on the public agenda,” noted University of California at
Santa Barbara historian Alice O’Connor, who has built her career studying
Americans’ shifting attitudes toward poverty over the centuries. “It’s just not there. The great shift is that we’ve come to accept
very high levels of poverty as either inevitable or the way things should
be.” For O’Connor, the callous approach
to poverty wasn’t unprecedented in American history, but it was something that found equivalents
only distantly back in time. “You’d have
to cycle back to the Gilded Age,” in the latter decades of the nineteenth
century, “to find a similarly untroubled acceptance of mass poverty,” she
believed. These days, says O’Connor,
politics has become increasingly reliant on the big-dollar contributions, and
in so becoming has lost touch with the expectations of the vast majority of
Americans who cannot afford to buy access to the political process. “The narrow politics of winning elections,
“she averred, “has less and less to do with connecting with what people really
care about, and more to do with raising money and buying media and these kinds
of things.”
Pg. 51
In the same way that our political culture lacks the language to adequately
confront poverty, so too in recent years it has lacked a vocabulary to explain why rampant inequality is a
problem. As that inequality grows, and
as the political rhetoric is skewed toward meeting the requirements of the
country’s new elites, so public infrastructure becomes ever more fragile. An anti-tax, anti-government movement, using
the language of populism, and turbocharged in the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling,
which allowed outside interest groups to spend freely on attack ads and
“independent expenditure” campaigns, claims to represent the little man against
Big Brother. In reality, however it has
created a public sector defined by squalor and an insecure citizenry unable to
define itself by commonly accessed, and accessible, institutions.
The method is simple: defund public services, ensure that the government only
delivers second-rate goods, convince the electorate that long-term societal
investments such as Social Security and Medicare are Ponzi schemes unlikely to
survive down the generation, and it becomes ever easier to convince ordinary
people that taxes are a mugging rather than an investment. There is, after all, a reason that Swedes –
who receive quality education, healthcare, childcare, vacation times, and
pensions courtesy of their government – tolerate far higher taxes than do
Americans. It’s no because they have
some strange Scandinavian-only pro-tax genes in their DNA. Nor is it because of some bizarre streak of
masochism in their culture. Rather, it’s
because they actually get their money’s worth from their taxes. They pay good money and get good quality
services. In America, by contrast,
increasingly the public receives duds.
Sell enough lemons, conservatives have realized, and you can trigger demands
that the whole enterprise be shut down.
It is, quite simply, a classic bait-and-switch maneuver.
Able to spend virtually unlimited sums to influence political and judicial
races, groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS; and individuals such as the
Koch brothers; Newt Gingrich’s 2012 primary season backer, Sheldon Adelson; and
Rick Santorum’s funder, Foster Friess – have seeded a conservative push to
undermine what remains of the progressive tax structure and to denude
government of its role in providing basic serves to the populace.
More and more, as a result of squeezing government services, those with
resources opt out of the public sphere, sending their children to private schools
and colleges, protecting their homes and other property with private security
systems, abandoning public transit systems, forgoing as many interactions with
the public sector and with government agencies as they can. Similar processes have happened in recent
years in countries such as South Africa and Mexico. It no instance has such a retrenchment led to
a fairer, more equal or more tranquil society.
Pg. 88
In part, America’s poverty epidemic is a failure of imagination – we haven’t
invested enough energy into understanding the causes and the manifestations of
poverty in today’s United States, or into imagining alternatives. In part, though, it’s a failure of empathy –
we haven’t as a society worked out why
we should care. Too many people either believe
they have no obligations the broader community or do not understand the
consequences that follow when public infrastructure is allowed to crumble. That is the point raised by then – Harvard
Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, whose word led to the creation of the US
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in her critique of businesspeople who
didn’t want to pay their fair share of taxes and who didn’t believe that the
state played any role in their success.
Even a self-made man, she explained to an audience in 2011 – at the
start of her successful campaign for the US Senate – used publicly funded roads
to truck his goods to market, hired workers educated in publicly funded
schools, and relied on publicly funded police forces for security and firefighters
for putting out fires. “Part of the
underlying social contract,” she continued, “is you take a hunk of that
[profit] and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
Pg. 132
Throughout history, philosophers and political figures have sought to distinguish
between the deserving and the undeserving poor; or, to put it another way,
between those whose poverty is caused by outside forces and thus merits
society’s sympathy and those whose poverty is the result of poor life
decisions, or communal dysfunction, and thus merits our scorn.
Such a distinction is pervasive today in the United States, where politicians
spend an inordinate amount of time trying to distinguish between those simply
down on their luck and those trying to con the system. In doing so, we have set up a tremendous
number of barriers to accessing anti-poverty programs. These barriers have, in all likelihood,
stopped some ne’er-do-wells from gaining assistance they ought not to get; but
such gains have frequently come at the cost of scaring away many others who do
qualify but are deterred from applying by the cumbersome, frequently
humiliating, nature of the application process.
Pg. 136
In the modern American context, all-too-often this discussion about whether or
not impoverished residents are deserving of sympathy and of government aid
takes place against a backdrop of racial and class animus. For while white conservatives use government
assistance e copiously – whether it be Social Security or mortgage tax relief,
low interest federal college loans or Medicare- in their political discussions
they tend to define their benefits as not being “welfare,” in contrast to the
somehow less noble assistance provided to their black and brown neighbors. The Cornell University political scientist
Suzanne Mettler writes in her book, “The Submerged State” that a
self-identified conservative is 50 percent more likely than a liberal to claim
never to have used a government program, despite the fact that 96 percent of Americans she surveyed had, in fact, utilized government assistance – from mortgage tax
relief to federal farm subsidies, from Medicare to Social Security. Certainly, no one has talked about
drug-testing seniors before they can access Social Security, requiring people
filing for mortgage relief piss into a cup or mandating that bankers seeking to
access billions of dollars of bailout funds prove their cocaine-free bona fides
before tapping TARP.
Pg. 177-179
That so many people were seeing huge drops in income, with the resulting and all-too-predictable,
impacts on their ability to pay their mortgages, rents and other basic bills,
wasn’t just to do with unemployment. It
was also to do with a political push to dismantle prevailing wage structures, and
to keep the minimum wage extraordinarily low in many states. In fact, in the years prior to the onset of
the Great Recession, much of the worst poverty data came out of states with
lower-than-average unemployment. In
places like Idaho and Texas, the jobs were there; they just were no longer
paying enough to live on. In 2011,
researchers with the Economic Policy Institute estimated that if the government
entirely absented itself from the business of tax subsidies and assistance to
the poor, the poverty rate in America would immediately jump to 23.7
percent. The reason? As was the case in Victorian-era England,
millions of twenty-first-century Americans, lving in aperiod during which trade
unions were on the sane and the power of employers on the rise, were having to
work jobs that didn’t even get them up to subsistence-level living.
As a result [of “right-to-work” laws making it harder for workers to organize
into trade unions being pushed by conservatives and adopted by more and more
states], even before the Great Recession hit, real incomes for working-class
Americans were lower in the early 2000s than they had been a generation
earlier. To remind readers of the
salient numbers here: The median age
peaked in 1973 at $33,000 in 2010 dollars.
By 2005, during the roaring decade that preceded the financial collapse,
that median wage was down to $29,000; and in the years following, as the
broader pillars of the economy tottered, it fell still further, toward the
$26,000 mark. Millions of poor people were
working full time yet being inexorably swept backwards economically.
[This is] why Texas Governor Rick Perry could enter the presidential primary
contest in 2011 claiming that he’d presided over a period of extraordinary job
growth in the Lone Star State, while his opponents could decry the fact that
17.9 percent of Texans lived in poverty, and 7.4 percent in extreme poverty;
that 6.3 million Texans had no health benefits, which mean that a larger
percentage of the population in Texas has no access to medical coverage than in
any other state in America; and that a higher percentage of the state’s
residents were “food insecure” than in all but one other state.
Both sets of claims were true: Texas was
seeing more jobs being created – between January 2006 and January 2011 it added
over half a millions positions, while other states were hemorrhaging
employment. But they were low-paying,
non-benefited, and frequently dead-end in character. The state wasn’t educating workers well
enough to help them move up the economic ladder; it wasn’t investing adequately
in job training programs; it wasn’t putting resources into monitoring workplace
conditions. For employers, Perry’s Texas
was a low-wage, low-regulation paradise.
For employees, too often it was a place of crushing drudgery.
Pg. 181
So why the skyrocketing food insecurity in Texas? In large part because more and more of the
working poor, in a state with only the federal minimum wage, were earning
rock-bottom wages. In 2010, the US
Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that Texas and Mississippi were tied for
having highest percentage of their workforces earing only at or below the
federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
Fully 550,000 Texans were stuck at this wage level – about half of them
were actually earning less than the
legal minimum – with millions more earning not much more.
For companies such as Walmart, all of this was, quite simply , great for
business. Taking advantage of the
anti-union, anti-labor environment, the world’s biggest retailer opened up
dozens of stores in the 1990s and 2000s in the Lone Star state. In the Dallas region alone, by 2012 it had
more than twenty outlets. Texas’
low-wage environment apparently meshed perfectly with Walmart’s employment
philosophy. According to the online
wage-monitoring site Glassdoor, as of mid-2012 the average pay for a Walmart
sales associate was $8.88 an hour; for a “guest service team member” it was
$8.42; for a cashier $8.62.
When meat-cutters in its Jacksonville, Texas store tried to unionize in 2000 to
better their working conditions, the company responded by eliminating the
butcher’s section from its store, limiting itself to prepackaged meats instead
so as to avoid having to negotiate with a labor union. It’s a tactic the company has perfected all
over the country – rousing the wrath of organizations such as Human Rights
Watch but proving remarkably good for business.
In 2011, Walmart posted profits of more than $15 billion. After all, keeping workers nonunion allows
the company to pay wages so low that the children of many employees end up on
Medicaid, the workers themselves on food stamps.
In October 2012 several Walmart workers in the Los Angeles area launched a
strike against the company; and a month
later, on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, Walmart workers
in several stores around the country, including some in Dallas, walked off the
job, in a rolling attempt to force the company to recognize the UFCW and other
unions. Walmart’s response? A spokesperson denounced the action as a
“union-funded publicity stunt.”
Pg. 185
Utterly wedded to a rigid market ideology – to a belief system that holds that
whatever outcomes the market, left to its own devices, generates must be right
– the Social Darwinists of modern politics simply cannot fathom why a society
would need to intervene to break cycles of poverty that, again by definition,
are caused by personal failings. Once
upon a time, the absolute social mobility that they believed produced fair
economic outcomes might have been the
case for certain groups in society. Not
for enslaved African Americans, clearly; not for Native Americans kicked off
their land; not for women; almost certainly not for poor white sharecroppers…
but possibly for other non-share-cropping white males. Yet, even by the logic of that truncated
definition of “society,” today clearly American is not a land that produces
equal opportunities for all to excel. In
fact, a slew of recent studies have found that Americans born into poverty move
up the income ladder less frequently than their peers do in areas of the world
such as Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Canada, France and many other
advanced industrial democracies; and that the incomes of children born into
poverty end up more closely resembling their parents’ income than is the case
elsewhere. The reports come not just
from liberal academics and think tanks, but also from establishment
institutions such as the Boston branch of the Federal Reserve, and government
data-collecting agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On measure after measure, social mobility in
the United States has fallen off from where it was in previous eras; and, as
worrying, a host of other countries that used to trail America in terms of the
opportunities they afforded the impoverished amongst their citizenry now stand
out as providing increased levels of opportunity.
For a country built on notions of self-improvement, home to millions of
immigrants and their descendants – who come, and come, to a country they
believe gives them opportunities to succeed that they would have nowhere else
on earth – that curtailment of opportunity at the bottom of the economy is
peculiarly devastating.
Pg. 197
My purpose is not to suggest that we enforce absolute equality on a population
of 300 million people. Despite the
fearmongering raised by conservatives whenever conversations about equity take
center stage, absolute equality is neither possible nor remotely desirable; it
is, in fact, a straw man. Rather, I hope
to suggest ways of limiting the extreme levels of inequality that have,
increasingly, come to derail the American civic project in recent decades, as
well as developing quality uses for hard-earned tax dollars so that large
numbers of Americans are willing, once more, to fund the sorts of ambitious
social investments that allowed for the creation of Social Security, Medicare,
and unemployment insurance. Nor is my
goal to undermine important moral and philosophical notions about the
importance of personal responsibility; rather, it is to suggest ways of giving
everybody an opportunity to maximize their own potential.
Lastly, my intent is certainly not to propose a set of policies that inexorably
increase the national debt; nor is it to suggest that the country’s political
leaders somehow spin money out of nothing.
The size of America’s economy, as of this writing, is in the region of
$16 trillion per year. That’s large, but
it’s not limitless. In an era of
anxieties about ballooning budget deficits, I want to show how, in
redistributing a few hundred billion dollars per year of that $16 trillion
economy, through changes to the tax structure and changes in how we prioritize
federal and state spending – or, to put it another way, in reprioritizing who
receives and who spends about 2 to 3 percent of the vast national pot of wealth
that is America, while leaving undisturbed the remaining 97 to 98 percent – we
can create a set of vital anti-poverty initiatives that have the potential to
dramatically improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans. And I want to show how, if done smartly,
these initiatives can serve as a down payment for a decades-long push that has
the potential not just to ameliorate poverty once it arises but to make its
presence a rarity rather than a commonplace in mid-twenty-first-century
American life.
Pg. 199
Poverty is, after all, a web of problems enormous in their complexity. It bubbles up because of systemic failures in
how the economy and the political process functions and at the same time, it
also emerges because of individual choices and behaviors. Any simple solutions, any one-size-fits-all
promises of reform, are doomed to failure, and anyone who claims to have found
a magic bullet to once and for all banish poverty from America’s shores is
either a scam artist or a Pollyanna.
Pg. 206
“In seeking to close the achievement gap for low-income and minority students,”
wrote economist Richard Rothstein in his 2004 book Class and Schools, “policy makers focus inordinate attention on the
improvement of instruction, because they apparently believe that social class
differences are immutable, and that only schools can improve the destines of
lower-class children. “ But, he
continued, in all likelihood “establishing an optometric clinic in a school to
improve the vision of low-income children would probably have a bigger impact
on their test scores than spending the same money on instructional
improvement.”
Raising the minimum wage so that the parents of these children were earning
enough money to adequately feed, clothe, and house these same kids would work
even bigger wonders. In fact, argued
Rothstein, increasing the minimum wage or boosting the EITC “should be
considered educational policies as well as economic ones, for they would likely
result in higher academic performance from children whose families are more
secure.”
Rothstein calculated the cost of a series of big-picture reforms that would use
schools as epicenters in a broader communal effort against poverty and its
consequences. How much wojuld it cost to
create a set of conditions that would allow kids from impoverished backgrounds
to approximate the experiences, both educational and life, of more affluent
children? His answer: $156 billion per
year.
Now that’s a huge sum of money and one that clearly isn’t going to be freed up
by federal and state governments anytime soon.
But, as Rothstein points out, it’s about equal to the amount of money
redistributed back to the super-wealthy as a result of the tax cuts enacted
during the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency. That’s not a nebulous comparison: In a world of finite resources, tax cuts have
consequences. One of them is that less
money is available for public goods that benefit everyone and that can be used
as tools to tamp down broader inequities.
Yes, in the current political moment any politician who proposes raising
taxes to fund a $156 billion per year increase in education spending would be
printing themselves a one-way ticket to political oblivion. But, in another moment, defined by a different
set of priorities, a country as wealthy and dynamic as is America could, clearly,
fund some extremely ambitious anti-poverty, and pro-education, measures.
Rothsein’s yardstick is, though not politically realistic, at the very least a
wakeup call. Even if massive infusions of funds are off the table,
surely states oughtn’t to be slashing
ever more money from already-stressed schools.
For when they do, when states such as California remove billions of
dollars from being spent on K-12 classrooms, year upon year upon year, and
reduce the length of the school year to further trim costs, inevitably the poor
get hurt the most. And as inevitable,
when that happens, inequality increases, and the long-term life prospects for
large groups of Americans deteriorates.
Pg. 211
In 1974, the English political philosopher Steven Lukes published his book,
“Power: A Radical View.” In it, he argues that there were three core
ways in which power could be exercised, each more pervasive than the next. The first was raw coercion; one person, group
of people, or institution had power and through force compelled others to bow
down before it. The second was slightly
more subtle, but even more effective: The groups with power managed to convince
their underlings to legitimate that power, both by shaping people’s preferences
and, as effectively, by determining what they didn’t want in their lives.
In such a society, those without power voluntarily acquiesced in their
own situation. The third, and most
dominant of all, occurred when powerful individuals and institutions managed to
so control the psychology of those without power that populations no longer
even realized they were being manipulated.
They acquiesced in their own powerlessness and no longer could even
envision alternatives.
In such a scenario, power relationships were so utterly omnipresent that they
had become invisible; they were simply the background to every experience, to
every choice made in society. And, in a world so governed, the manipulation of
the many for the benefit of the few became normal, the currency of political
business.
That unfortunately, is indeed how too many transactions are conducted in
American politics today. That’s how
people who live just inside the margins are convinced to blame those just
outside the margins for their poverty; its’ how people whose wages have shrunk
– whose benefits have been eviscerated, and whose access to government
assistance has wanted are convinced to vote for anti-tax, anti-regulatory,
anti-safety net politicians who will further batter their pocketbooks and throw
them into insecurity. It’s how people
without pensions are convinced to blame public sector works who still have
pensions for the country’s economic plight, rather than asking why more workers
in the world’s wealthiest country don’t have secure retirements in the first
place.
Pg. 219
Currently, the federal government mandates that states provide certain benefits
and services, but doesn’t mandate how
the states fund these requirements. As a
result, in many more conservative states legislators simply adopted deeply
regressive tax systems – such as imposing sales taxes on food to fund social
services or, in the case of Alabama, calculating higher state tax liabilities
for the poor if the poor have been given a federal subsidy such as the Earned
Income Tax Credit – to cover their increased obligations. These are pure examples of robbing Peter to
feed Paul, and they are particularly ironic given how vocally anti-tax most of
the political leaders in states such as Alabama are. Any rational antipoverty strategy would
immediately alter such tax codes so as to make them more representative to the
needs of the poorest of taxpayers.
Failure to do so would only stoke the suspicion that when conservative
southern politicians proclaim their hostility to taxes, what they really mean
is a hostility to the sorts of taxes paid by the sorts of affluent voters who
tend to make up their electoral base and a resistance to fund the sorts of
programs generally used by people who aren’t part of that base.
Pg. 224
But while Medicaid is a whole lot better than nothing, it has, historically,
been severely restricted in a number of ways.
In fact, until all of the major Affordable Care Act provisions kick in,
in 2014, most states won’t extend Medicaid to childless adults. At the same time, a minority of states,
mainly southern ones, will continue to place huge restrictions on adults of any status, even those with young
children at home, gaining access.
The problem, however, goes beyond one of gate-keeping. Even in states that have relatively liberal
eligibility requirements for their
programs, there are strict asset tests in place that have the effect of forcing
the temporarily out of work and/or cash poor to strip themselves of almost all
their worldly possessions (homes, car, retirement accounts, savings) simply to
gain healthcare – even if this ends up condemning them to long-term poverty by
depriving them of the possessions and financial cushions that people need
before they can even start working their way up the economic ladder again.
How, for example, can an unemployed person in an area
without public transport get a job, and travel to that job, if he has had to
sell his vehicle so as to get medical coverage?
Or how can a person afford to retire if she has had to liquidate her
small nest egg for that healthcare access?
What should the middle-aged businessmen in California who had lost his
business during the recession and who needed knee surgery before he could take
on new work do when he was told that he couldn’t get medical assistance, and
thus couldn’t get his surgery, until he had stripped himself down to a maximum
of $2,000 of assets? It is, truly, a
Faustian bargain into which large numbers of Americans have been pushed.
In other words, while Medicaid does
enroll more people during recessions, it does so in a way that, at times, might
actually have the effect of tamping down economic recovery down the road by locking
recipients into a deeper poverty than they were in when first they lost their
income. In deep recessions, in
particular, modifying or eliminating, asset test for Medicaid would go a long
way toward keeping people both healthy and out of long-term poverty. Yet that hasn’t happened. The political will simply isn’t there.
Pg. 230
People who feel insecure themselves feel threatened by the idea that somebody
who’s demonstrably worse off than they are is going to get help and they’re
not. They have an instinctive feeling
these people are not deserving. There’s
been a divide and conquer thing coming from people and interest higher up the
income level. We’ve had an unremitting
attack on welfare that started in the late ‘60s. An unremitting drumbeat saying people who are
in need are actually just not trying hard enough, they’re lazy, have become
dependent on welfare and it’s ruined their character, and all the rest of it.
Pg. 233
Instead of the current punishment-based approach to welfare – find a job at all
costs, or you’ll be cut off from welfare – Americans would benefit from, and
the country’s best impulses would be showcased by, an incentive-based solution
that rewards those who find work with extra help. This help should range from an expanded Earned
Income Tax Credit to ongoing childcare assistance, from transportation
subsidies perhaps on up to top-up welfare checks from the state for a specific
period of time while those who have spent months or years on public assistance
navigate the tough early days in a new job.
Such a strategy would go further toward raising lower income families
out of poverty – to eliminating the poverty trap traditionally associated with
welfare – than a great bundle of sticks each used to whack poor Americans
harder than the one before.
Pg. 234
Ultimately, if we cannot work out a language with which to highlight poverty’s
corrosive reach, and posit solutions to the problems facing those at the bottom
of the economic ladder, our democratic institutions will themselves suffer. In the long run, the cost of inaction will
far surpass the price of intervention.
Far better to get it right now than to deal with decades of collateral
damage from our inaction today.
Pg. 240
[David Onek] urged what reformers were calling “justice reinvestments,” taking
money saved by locking fewer people up, and investing it in programs that would
lower crime rates through tracking poverty, addiction, mental illness, and
other massive societal problems.
Use the criminal justice system to deal merely with the
criminal symptoms of a person’s underlying problems, and you solve nothing,
Onek understood. Instead, you just spent
a ton of money locking people up – money that ends up being diverted from other
parts of county and state budgets. And
you effectively brand a large pool of people with a modern-day scarlet letter,
one they will carry with them when they leave jail or prison, and that will
have the effect both of limiting the kinds of work they can do subsequently,
and also reducing the amount of money they will earn over the rest of their
lives. In 2012, the Department of
Justice reported that a spell behind bars can reduce a person’s future earning
by 40 percent.
Imprisonment is, quite simply, all too often a response to
poverty, and overwhelmingly it serves as a one-way ticket to lifelong
penury. It is, for this and many other
reasons, a powerful weapon to use against someone, and as such it should be
used sparingly.
Of course, when people are dangerous, when they are
predatory, when their crimes seriously harm others, and when there is no way to
keep society safe from their actions other than by locking them up, then
incarceration is entirely appropriate.
But when, as is all too often the case in a country that has more than
quintupled its incarcerated population since the early 1970s, and that now
houses far more nonviolent inmates than any other country on earth, a jailor
prison sentence serves mainly to allow society to blow off steam at misfits and
miscreants, then, surely, it is better to look for alternatives. After all, to reiterate a point previously
state, in many parts of the country locking someone up costs more, per year,
than sending a person to an Ivy League college. And, in the same way as the
parents of a Harvard student expect band for their bucks, so, too, taxpayers
have a right to expect criminal justice expenditures to make society safer and
reduce the likelihood that people will return to crime once their sentences are
completed.
Pg. 242
“We have an absolute fiscal crisis. The
number-one driver of that crisis is the cost of prisons. Meanwhile, teachers are getting pink-slipped,
police are being laid off, social services are being cut. Certainly there are
people who need to be locked up for long periods of time. Unfortunately, we have lots of people being
locked up who don’t meet that description. “
Onek talked of a three-strikes inmate serving life for breaking into a
soup kitchen, another serving life for stealing a pair of socks. And he spoke
angrily of how it would cost California nearly $5 billion during the following
twenty years to keep incarcerated its population of nonviolent three strikers. “obviously, life in prison, any
reasonable person would say, is completely exorbitant punishment for the minor
crimes they have committed. It is
foolish; it is literally bankrupting our state.
And we can’t afford it.”
Pg. 264
At the risk of flogging a dead horse, let me reiterate a key point here: cutting education grants to poor people is
utterly counterproductive. It’s stupid, slash-and-burn, public
policy. It burdens families who stay
they educational course with crippling levels of debt, and it discourages
others from staying in school and going to college in the first place, thus
tamping down their income potential for the remainder of their working lives.
Pg. 266
Again, let me stress a point I made earlier; our problem is not a lack of
resources to tackle poverty; rather, it has been a lack of will to enact the
legislature and taxation reforms that would free up the necessary dollars for
such an effort.
Pg. 275
Stable economic environments tend not to produce gangs, street-level drug
markets, hunger, homelessness, and all the other daily facts of life that poor
kids have to navigate in their communities. Less hunger, violence, and drug
dealing tends to mean less disruptive classrooms. Less disruption inside the classroom means
that teachers have more time to actually teach kids and engage with them
educationally as opposed to trying to impose discipline on chaotic, and
sometimes dangerous, situations. And more meaningful teacher-student
interactions tend to lead to higher educational attainments.
In many ways, I believe, educational virtuous circles can be
spurred at least in party by non-educational reforms. And many of those reforms
are at the heart of the holistic anti-poverty strategy that I have detailed in
the pages of this book. Absent those
changes, absent the pathways to broader prosperity made possible by investments
in job creation, by affordable healthcare, by large-scale changes in housing
markets, and so on, the path to a renascent K-12, even with significant
infusions of extra cash, is much rockier.
Pg. 276
Navigate a virtuous circle counter-clockwise, and one dysfunction butts up
against another. If you’re born into
wealthy, you will have available to you the most cutting-edge educational
facilities. But if you’re born into
poverty – and, increasingly these days, into middle-income families – your
options, unless you are one of the lucky few to live near a thriving charter
school or a good local public school, are far more limited. Your family will be unable to afford quality
preschool – which makes it far less likely that you’ll succeed academically
once you do enter school. You will
suffer the consequences of buzz saws having been taken to programs like Head
Start that subsidize early learning opportunities for lower income kids. You will all too likely attend overcrowded
schools reeling from teacher and staff layoffs as a result of endless local and
state budget fiascos, in which you use out-of-date textbooks, no longer have
access to non-core requirement courses, and rarely are exposes to music, art,
and other vital, culturally enriching, aspects of life. Your school year will likely be shorter than
that students experience in most every other wealthy democracy. And, if and when you manage to get into
college despite these obstacles, you will end up heavily indebted and working
an array of jobs in a vain attempt to keep up with soaring tuition costs and
make up the shortfalls from inadequate Pell Grants.
At every stage of the educational journ, in short, we make
it harder on those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. It’s as if we set up a one-hundred meter
race, some of the participants in wich get to sprint down open lanes, while
others have to jump a series of hurdles. No guesses for which group of racers
will tend to finish ahead of the pack.
Pg. 278
But [educational reform] must occur in a way that recognizes that schools, and
school problems, are anchored in the broader community. While taking dollars away from schools is a
surefire way to reduce the quality of the learning experience, raising the
money spent on schools, while leaving the broader social conditions unchanged,
can’t in and of itself guarantee improvement.
Pg. 280
So long as the broader conditions limit children’s learning potential – so long
as kids are homeless, coming to school hungry, living in communities broken
down by drugs and gangs, attending schools so short of funds that class sizes
are soaring and textbooks become a luxury rather than a necessity – good
teachers along will not be sufficient.
“No nation in the world has eliminated poverty by firing teachers or by handing
its public schools over to private managers,” wrote New York University
research professor of education Diane Ravitch in the New York Review of Books .
“Nor does research support either strategy. But these inconvenient facts
do not reduce the reformers’ zeal. The
new breed of school reformers consist mainly of Wall Street hedge fund
managers, foundation officials, corporate executives, entrepreneurs, and policy
makers, but few experienced educators.
Ravitch, a onetime assistant secretary of state for education under president
George H. W. Bush and author of the book The
Death and Life of the Great American School System, felt that wealthy
reformers were setting up charter schools that, because they could cherry-pick
their students, weeded out those who did badly on tests. They provided the illusion of better
education while, in reality, oftentimes they were simply being more selective
in which students they accepted than could the regular public schools with
which they were in competition.
“Charters would be fine if they focuses on the kids who were the
lowest-performing kids. And then [they could] come to the public schools and
say, ‘Hey, we’ve learned something new, we want to share this with you because
we’re part of the same system we want to help,” she told the American Prospect’s Abby Rapoport in the
fall of 2012, “Instead, charters have become a competitor to see who can get
the highest test scores.”
Pg. 283
Think about these problems in isolate and they appear overwhelming. Think of them as pieces of a whole, and
paradoxically, they problems become more solvable. Fixing America’s educational
system cannot be done simply by focusing on schools; but understand the
specific challenges faced by low-income kids who go to school hungry, who lack
basic medical attention, who might have never been tested for eye problems,
whose parents have lost jobs or landed themselves in prison, and more realistic
solutions present themselves. Understand
homelessness as simply a personal catastrophe and it is difficult, if not
impossible, to fathom why so many millions of Americans lack stable housing
options, but approach this crisis as the collateral damage caused by
unemployment, by the systemic marketing of bad debt, by underinvestment in
mental health and foster care systems, by overinvestment in criminal justice
systems, and, again, new and creative solutions can be generated.
As a country, we have the political tools to break both old
cycles of poverty and also the new ones produced in the wake of financial
collapse. Add in a credible does of
empathy, of moral imagination and indignation, and there’s no reason that we
couldn’t, to deliberately misquote Grover Norquist, shrink the problems of
entrenched poverty down to a size at which it could be drowned in a bathtub.
That someone is born poor in a country as wealthy and
dynamic as is the United States ought in no measure to determine that they will
die por. And yet, for millions of
Americans today, their birth is indeed their destiny. Ensuring that the democratic aspirations of
mobility and opportunity for all becomes a reality once more should, I believe
be one of twenty-first century America’s top political and moral priorities.
Pg. 287
The disparity of wealth, the disparity of income, the shrinking of wages. We find our country moving into the most stratified
class distinctions that we have ever seen.
And with it comes an increase in poverty. It’s a very dangerous social crisis that
faces this country. Every time we cut a
vital support program the poverty rate goes up and the misery quotient goes up. For us to tolerate a poverty rate and a
permanent underclass of poor people in this country goes against everything
that we believe we are as a nation in terms of our values.
Pg. 317
The central idea is simple: As a community, we strengthen ourselves when we
find ways to protect our most vulnerable.
When we work out mechanisms to boost the wages of earners trapped at the
bottom of the economy. When we think up
creative solutions to keep poor people housed and with access to
healthcare. We bolster the country when
we invest in educational infrastructure in a way that makes it possible for
poorer children to have as much opportunity in life as their more affluent
peers, and when we make sure that pension systems are strong enough to keep the
elderly out of poverty. We enrich
ourselves as a society when we reinvigorate our sense of the common good.
Pg. 325
How do we pay for such an ambitious set of projects?
Partly through targeted, sensible, fair tax increases: raising the capital
gains tax, increasing the income tax on the wealthiest Americans, eliminating
the upper limit for Social Security contributions, reintroducing an oil
windfall profit tax, creating a viable financial transactions tax, and imposing
estate taxes on large inheritances that are more in line with the taxes levied
by countries such as England and Germany.
We un-starve the beast that Grover Norquist’s acolytes have spent three
decades gratuitously depriving of nutrients. The creature that is social
assistance for the poor, the young, and the elderly is, after all, a far less
harmful beast than that of the new plutocracy – which has spent the past
several decades fattening itself at the public’s expense; insulating its moneys
from taxation; and ensuring the uninterrupted transfer of wealth, privilege and
power down the generations.
Partly, we fund such programs through paring other areas of
the budget – for example, limiting defense spending increases and restricting
the percentage of healthcare dollars that can be used to feather the nests of
insurance company executives. And by
asking consumers to pay marginallymore – for goods bought at big box stores and
fast food restaurants, for example – so as to provide mechanism to boost the
wages of the working poor.
And partly, through designing them well, we make sure that
these programs help fund themselves: Increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit,
for examply, by providing low-income families more money to spend on nutritional
food and on preventive healthcare, reduces the medical costs associated with
large numbers of low-weight and premature babies. Creating a guaranteed minimum
income, using taxes imposed on the extraction of state’s natural resources to
distribute annual checks to residents of specific states, or seeding businesses
in poor communities through an expansion of micro-credit – all would help
circulate money through depressed neighborhoods. Boosting employment through public works
would lead to a virtuous circle of economic growth.
How do we generate the political will for such an
overarching and holistic project? We educate.
We empower people. WE convince
enough Americans that no matter how much money from big-dollar donors flood the
political system, a democracy as vibrant as America’s can, and should, respond to the fundamental needs of its populace.
As did Peicles two and a half millennia ago, when he warned that raging
economic divides threatened the Athenian citizen democracy, and as did Polanyi
sixty years ago, we detail the dangers to freedom than necessarily accompany a
stampede toward ever greater levels of inequality. And we highlight a set of
values and a slate of policies that can block that journey into plutocracy.
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