Last week, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of a War on Poverty, the New York Times published this column, calling the results of the effort a mixed bag. It’s a good, fairly concise read and includes multiple policy perspectives on the matter. Thusly, different people will have different takeaways from the column, but I especially liked these few lines: ” … The more important driver of the still-high poverty rate, researchers said, is the poor state of the labor market for low-wage workers and spiraling inequality. Over the last 30 years, growth has generally failed to translate into income gains for workers — even as the American labor force has become better educated and more skilled …”
There’s a deeper, underlying problem at play not mentioned in the column, however: in addition to improvements in policy, combating poverty requires changes in our prevailing attitudes toward the poor. We must replace antipathy with empathy.
This is not to downplay the importance of policy and how it impacts the less fortunate. Indeed, much is at stake, and we must continue to fight on their behalf. We must fight to INCREASE food stamp benefits. Fight to INCREASE social security benefits. Fight to INCREASE access to housing, to educational and job training opportunities, and to affordable health care. And, etc. But too often, as we’re engaged in well-intended advocacy, many Republicans and others are instead engaged in full-throated derision, and substantive policy debates never actually materialize.
We must call out such ugly antipathy for what it is. It’s not good enough to ignore it and hope that the public is reasonable enough to do the same. The public, after all, tends to pay more attention to the louder voices, even when it disagrees with the message.
The unabashed hatred for the poor expressed in this Howie Carr column from this past Sunday is a good example of the sort of thing we should demand that we all — Democrats and Republicans, alike — reject. Here, Carr brays about “the single mother with two kids (the typical welfare ‘family’)” and Obama’s “shiftless, lowlife base,” while offering no real solutions to address the problem of poverty. He only offers the patented “Get A Job!”-line, while blithely ignoring the harsh reality that there is only one job opening for every three who are unemployed. (This reality also happens to be a very good reason why it’s so important that neither Congress nor the State House make cuts to unemployment insurance.)
To see progress on the policy front, our attitudes must change. But so long as hateful attitudes toward the poor like Carr’s are considered to be acceptable parts of the public dialogue, we’ll get nowhere.
When we speak of fighting poverty in Massachusetts, the fight is almost always about of “how do I keep it away from where I live” rather than “how do I make it better”?
How can we make people see poverty in this state when we have done such an exceptional job at segregating it away from most people in the state?
I was talking to a young kid this weekend, asking him about his school in a nice suburb. I asked him if there were any kids who caused trouble. He told me about one girl who caused so much trouble that she got thrown out of the public school. She then had to go to a public school in Springfield.
Think about the implications of that policy for a minute. This girl was so much trouble to a nice suburban school that she had to be removed and placed in a poor urban school district. Segregation at its finest.
I then spoke to another woman who is a teacher in Springfield. She has some seriously troubled kids in her school – she teaches second grade. One kid assaulted a teacher by punching the teacher in the stomach. That child was suspended for a month, returned to school, and immediately punched same the teacher again on the very first day back. This woman teachers this kid’s brother, and he disrupts the class every single day. The majority of her effort is trying to deal with this kid, and a few others who do the same thing.
Those troubled kids are mostly products of poverty, and they almost never show up in wealthier communities. If they do appear, they get dealt with – either by their parents paying for a private education, or by the wealthy tossing them from school and forcing them to poor urban districts.
Most people in this state don’t see the poverty. Most don’t have people rummaging through their trash at night, looking for returnable bottles. Most don’t live near people who can’t afford to own a house and must instead rent crappy housing from absentee landlords who don’t live anywhere near the property they own.
That is why there is no stomach to fight poverty in this state – because most people are not affected by it.
As the brother and son of one time welfare recipients I find the notion that we ever had welfare queens very noxious and dangerous, but in the post-welfare reform world we cannot argue that the poor deserve their lot or aren’t working hard. We have a wider and wider expanding lower middle class that is just a crisis away from poverty, and we need to do more. I am not sure how we persuade the middle and upper middle class to surrender the wealth needed to eradicate poverty, but it’s a project that needs to be renewed. I’ve heard little mention of ending poverty from a President in either party since Johnson, and that’s a terrible shame.
When people speak of poverty, they speak in terms of “opportunity”. That makes poverty very easy to ignore, because every wealthy person sees those opportunities through their own lenses rather than through the lenses of the poor.
The conversation goes a little like this: college aid for the poor is available, so the opportunity has been given. Since the poor aren’t going to college, it must be because they are lazy and didn’t take that opportunity.
They can’t see that many poor people don’t have anyone in their family who has ever stepped on a college campus, that they are so far away from that process that they might as well be on the other side of the world.
But as long as there are college scholarships for the poor, that’s the way for people to say that they’ve given all they can give. It gives them the freedom to look down on people who don’t earn much because they can just say “well, you should have gone to college, you had the opportunity”.
And the fact that they don’t live near “those” poor people, the fact that they don’t socialize with them, don’t interact with them, that insulates them from poverty.
Over the years, poverty has been spoken of in terms of “the children”. Democrats made that choice because Republicans demonized any programs that help the average person. This led us down the “opportunity” path, whereby we focus most of our efforts on children, especially really young children (via programs like Head Start).
I think this is a tragic mistake. I don’t think that we can cure poverty by focusing on the children – that is like taking seeds, watering and fertilizing them, and then throwing them on the pavement and expecting them to bloom. It’s just not going to happen – a bad home environment kills nearly any opportunity we can provide.
We have to focus on improving the average person. That average person’s life will improve, and this will not destroy families.
One thing which seems really bad to me is that we restrict “welfare” to women – again, because we’re trying to help the children. This has left poor men out in the cold. They can’t just “get a job” because they have no skills. There are no living wages for just being “able-bodied” any more. Skilled education is largely out of the question for most – try training a 40-ish person who dropped out of high school to do a high-tech job, it just isn’t going to happen, they don’t have the fundamentals and spending effort giving them the fundamentals doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I think we need to first start by making them eligible for transitional welfare for a limited time. Five year limit, blah blah, whatever, it’s fine but let’s not devalue them in the society. Stop restricting this to women because this sets up some really perverse incentives in society. I agree that in general, welfare is not the best solution for most because I think it is important to have a purpose in life. I’ve seen too many kids of my relatives who, having their necessities provided for, got into substance abuse problems. I really think that earning a living is an important ideal.
So that means we need to create a “jobs for anyone who will work” program. Public works. Clean the parks, fill potholes, learn skills fixing our crumbling public buildings. This can’t be done with local funds because our local communities are so segregated and our finances are so tied to property taxes (which are tied to poverty) that poor communities can’t afford this. Ideally it should be nationally, but we could do it statewide.
Then we need to rinse, repeat, and perfect the system. I think that providing basic jobs instead of “opportunities” will help most people, but there will be some people who need extra help (perhaps mental counseling), and others who will be beyond help (the disabled or mentally ill). We need to figure out how those people fit in rather than just telling them to “get a job”. And yes, we need to figure out how to judge the imposters – because there will be some.
This is what will cure poverty – making less people poor by giving them places to earn money.
for the poor is crap. It barely exists. William Julius Wilson has written extensively about the lack of well-paying jobs available for those in the city.
There are always some individuals who transcend their neighborhoods–usually because they have an extraordinary family–and use get them as examples of what can be done if each individual student puts his effort into it. I learned a lot from Ruby Payne’s book Understanding Poverty. It’s not great scholarship, but it gives a good idea of the lens that middle-class and the inter-generationally poor view life. She doesn’t pathologize poverty, rather she explains why poor people so often fail to plan for the future, when that’s what we in the middle-class obsess about.
your student friend’s anecdote. Mainly because students so rarely have the all the facts of the situation. Having been on the inside of many school issues and having heard students talk about them, I find that they may have fragments of information and a lot of third- or fourth-hand gossip.
Students can rarely get thrown out of public school. They can get “expelled,” but that’s rarely more than a semester or a year and that’s rarely without some sort of academic support. More likely is that the student in question chose to leave the suburb because her parents were divorced or she had a relative that live in the suburb and she wanted to go to Springfield.
Case in point: there was a female student at my high school who had psychological problems. Her father had moved to East Longmeadow to live with his girlfriend. She was originally from Springfield. She had serious issues, fighting with other students, and acting extraordinarily insubordinate. Eventually, she urinated, (yes, dropped her pants and peed), on a teacher’s classroom door. That got her a long-term suspension. My students who occasionally bring her tell me she’s at another public school. She wasn’t kicked out. She may have not liked her alternatives, e.g. our school pushing her to an alternative school on our district’s tab. Or she may not have wanted to return to a school where she did what she did. I assume she went to live with her mother.
Mark, I will agree with you that a 12 year old kid isn’t going to know the entire picture. I don’t know the specifics of that situation either. It does sound unjust for a district to be able to expel a student from their public school district yet force other districts to accept that child. However, the district in question in this example – Wilbraham – does not have a variety of schools within its borders. They structure their schools so that, for example, all 5th grade students attend one school. If you get expelled from that school, you have nowhere to go.
Even if the child was not expelled, they may have been “counseled out”, which is pretty much the same thing. In your example, the East Longmeadow school district did not solve that student’s problem. They made it the problem of another district. It sounds like a big win for the district – they didn’t have to pay for an alternative school for this student. They may have just made it Springfield’s problem.
I do know more about the situation involving the troubled kid in the Springfield school. This child is one of three. Only a mother in the picture. All three kids are disruptive. One of the children brought a machete to the school – not necessarily to threaten anyone, but it was nonetheless a weapon. This teacher explained to me how they have to go through a rigorous process with the parents to get disruptive kids removed from a classroom or school, and that the parent must sign off on the plan. In this case, they did all that work, and the parent wouldn’t sign; she said the plan expires after 3 months, so at this point, they have to start the process again.
The point that I see here is that suburban schools almost never have children who bring machetes to their classrooms. They don’t have elementary school students who punch teachers. They have better leverage to get such students removed. Those students have an easy, default place to go – an urban school district. It may not be the only path, but it is likely the easiest path, and it sounds like the skids are being greased (in your case, maybe by leaning on the parent and saying “you can either leave the district voluntarily, or we will commit your kid to an alternative school which will be much, much worse”).
Affluent small towns like Granby don’t have the degree of problems that urban schools do. But I think the problem is more structural and social than a matter of getting rid of individual students by sending them to different districts. I was thinking about this very topic today going to work. Little Rock is dealing with still with the segregation you’re talking about. It was on NPR.
Yes, the problem with those students is definitely social, perhaps a bit structural, but the point, in the context of this article is that the problem is largely unseen by the majority of people in this state because the fight against the poor has been fought via segregation.
That is why no one cares about it. That is why it is not being addressed.
Poverty is an issue that is almost never talked about in this very forum. We talk more about the MBTA than we do about getting people jobs. It’s not deliberate, but it is a telling symptom.
agree. The Democratic Party will never get its soul back until it confronts poverty. I wince when I hear Obama talk about the middle-class all the time. The poor are an afterthought. I know there are politics involved in appealing to the middle-class, but a better man would lead, not follow the poll results.
Poverty and near-poverty is the direct result of our obscene wealth concentration.
Some of us are trying to talk about it.
Getting people “jobs” isn’t going to address the core issue. I don’t think encouraging the 1% who have nearly all the money to hire more minimum wage and part-time workers — even at $10 or $15 per hour — is going to do much, if anything.
I think we need to get the ENORMOUS wealth that the 1% is now hoarding back into circulation. I think we need to put more wealth into the hands of more people. I think more jobs will result, but focusing on the jobs while ignoring the wealth concentration is allowing the tail to wag the dog.
I agree that $10 to $15 per hour jobs aren’t going to solve poverty, but there are tens of thousands of people unemployed in the Pioneer Valley (and likely many more who are working part-time). If the state somehow announced that a $10 to $15 hour job would be available to anyone willing to show up and put in a fair day’s work, that would massively help poverty in the area and would contribute to helping other social issues as well.
You need to look at it from the perspective of someone who has no job and absolutely zero prospects.
The state simply is NOT going to “announce[] that a $10 to $15 hour job would be available to anyone willing to show up and put in a fair day’s work”. That’s just la-la-land thinking. And even if it did, it would last only so long as the state funding. The funding for such a program would have to come from somewhere, and the top 1% is the only place where that funding wouldn’t do as much harm to those who foot the bill as the intended recipients.
The prosperity we all seek can come ONLY when we recapture the excess wealth that is now concentrated in the top 1%. Offering tens of thousands of $10-15/hour jobs is NOT the most effective way to get that wealth back in circulation even it it was recaptured.
A consumer economy like ours WILL create the prosperity we all seek — when consumers have money to spend. That prosperity will create the economic opportunities needed by those tens of thousands of people. I’m not all certain that hourly jobs are the choice that is best for them, the economy, and our long-term prosperity.
I am sure, however, that it has to start with recapturing the excess wealth now held by the 1%. That’s why I argue that wealth concentration is a higher priority than ineffective government efforst to accomplish “job creation”.
uses the terribly flawed Cato “study” on unemployent benefits vs working for a living? My surprise, let me show it to you.
He sure does cover all the bases too in this throw away piece:
• Auntie Zeituni
• Rev. Jeremiah Wright
• Marathon bombers
• Detroit
I guess that’s all it takes to cater to the dittohead crowd.
I think the issue is really fear. In other words, if I spend time and money helping the poor, I will end up poor too, and no one will help me and I will wither and die.