{"id":14471,"date":"2023-03-10T05:14:58","date_gmt":"2023-03-10T13:14:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14471"},"modified":"2023-03-13T05:17:49","modified_gmt":"2023-03-13T12:17:49","slug":"message-of-the-day-economic-opportunity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/?p=14471","title":{"rendered":"Message of the Day: Economic Opportunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Why Poverty Persists in America<\/em>, 3.12.23<\/p>\n

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Just posted is the upcoming story in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on poverty in America.<\/p>\n

As we’ve said often, our oft-revisiting of this source is both a terrible commentary on the shrinking of newspapers and print journalism in America, and deserved high praise for the ongoing finest of journalism (including excerpting of books, as this piece is) to be found at this source.<\/p>\n

After the War on Poverty in the early sixties–including the expansion of the social programs of FDR and other new programs under LBJ, poverty was cut in half. But poverty has since stayed at similar persistent rates for 5o years, as part of the process that we have described often that led to the immense inequality of today.<\/p>\n

Official poverty rates don’t begin to tell the full tale of poverty because those just above the line or even considerably above it are still suffering and struggling to varying degrees with all the attendant personal and social woes, such as hunger disease, lack of health care, affordability of housing and so on. Poverty always was and always is going to be there to the extent that the system is set up in effect to exploit a certain percentage to the advantage of the rest, in the main, of the wealthy. Of course, as we keep saying, this has never been sustainable, much less moral.<\/p>\n

This piece in The New York Times Magazine doesn’t cover all the related issues, but it covers many, tells a riveting story, and puts the focus on the ongoing disgrace of poverty in America.<\/p>\n

Here’s an excerpt:<\/p>\n

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Antipoverty programs work. Each year, millions of families are spared the indignities and hardships of severe deprivation because of these government investments. But our current antipoverty programs cannot abolish poverty by themselves. The Johnson administration started the War on Poverty and the Great Society in 1964. These initiatives constituted a bundle of domestic programs that included the Food Stamp Act, which made food aid permanent; the Economic Opportunity Act, which created Job Corps and Head Start; and the Social Security Amendments of 1965, which founded Medicare and Medicaid and expanded Social Security benefits. Nearly 200 pieces of legislation were signed into law in President Lyndon B. Johnson\u2019s first five years in office, a breathtaking level of activity. And the result? Ten years after the first of these programs were rolled out in 1964, the share of Americans living in poverty was half what it was in 1960.<\/em><\/p>\n

But the War on Poverty and the Great Society were started during a time when organized labor was strong, incomes were climbing, rents were modest and the fringe banking industry as we know it today didn\u2019t exist. Today multiple forms of exploitation have turned antipoverty programs into something like dialysis, a treatment designed to make poverty less lethal, not to make it disappear.<\/em><\/p>\n

This means we don\u2019t just need deeper antipoverty investments. We need different ones, policies that refuse to partner with poverty, policies that threaten its very survival. We need to ensure that aid directed at poor people stays in their pockets, instead of being captured by companies whose low wages are subsidized by government benefits, or by landlords who raise the rents as their tenants\u2019 wages rise, or by banks and payday-loan outlets who issue exorbitant fines and fees. Unless we confront the many forms of exploitation that poor families face, we risk increasing government spending only to experience another 50 years of sclerosis in the fight against poverty.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here’s the full piece:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

“Why Poverty Persists in America”<\/a><\/p>\n

By <\/span>Matthew Desmond, The New York Times Magaizne, Sunday, March 12, 2023<\/span><\/p>\n

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A Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist offers a new explanation for an intractable problem.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article is adapted from Matthew Desmond\u2019s book \u201cPoverty, by America.\u201d<\/a> It is being published on March 21 by Crown.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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In the past 50 years, scientists have mapped the entire human genome and eradicated smallpox. Here in the United States, infant-mortality rates and deaths from heart disease have fallen by roughly 70 percent, and the average American has gained almost a decade of life. Climate change was recognized as an existential threat. The internet was invented.<\/p>\n

On the problem of poverty, though, there has been no real improvement \u2014 just a long stasis. As estimated by the federal government\u2019s poverty line,<\/a> 12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent. To graph the share of Americans living in poverty over the past half-century amounts to drawing a line that resembles gently rolling hills. The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years.<\/p>\n

What accounts for this lack of progress? It cannot be chalked up to how the poor are counted: Different measures spit out the same embarrassing result. When the government began reporting the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, designed to overcome many of the flaws of the Official Poverty Measure, including not accounting for regional differences in costs of living and government benefits, the United States officially gained three million more poor people. Possible reductions in poverty from counting aid like food stamps and tax benefits were more than offset by recognizing how low-income people were burdened by rising housing and health care costs.<\/p>\n

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The American poor have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn\u2019t mean they can access what matters most.<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Any fair assessment of poverty must confront the breathtaking march of material progress. But the fact that standards of living have risen across the board doesn\u2019t mean that poverty itself has fallen. Forty years ago, only the rich could afford cellphones. But cellphones have become more affordable over the past few decades, and now most Americans have one, including many poor people. This has led observers like Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, senior fellows at the Brookings Institution, to assert that \u201caccess to certain consumer goods,\u201d like TVs, microwave ovens and cellphones, shows that \u201cthe poor are not quite so poor after all.\u201d<\/p>\n

No, it doesn\u2019t. You can\u2019t eat a cellphone. A cellphone doesn\u2019t grant you stable housing, affordable medical and dental care or adequate child care. In fact, as things like cellphones have become cheaper, the cost of the most necessary of life\u2019s necessities, like health care and rent, has increased. From 2000 to 2022 in the average American city, the cost of fuel and utilities increased by 115 percent. The American poor, living as they do in the center of global capitalism, have access to cheap, mass-produced goods, as every American does. But that doesn\u2019t mean they can access what matters most. As Michael Harrington put it 60 years ago: \u201cIt is much easier in the United States to be decently dressed than it is to be decently housed, fed or doctored.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why, then, when it comes to poverty reduction, have we had 50 years of nothing? When I first started looking into this depressing state of affairs, I assumed America\u2019s efforts to reduce poverty had stalled because we stopped trying to solve the problem. I bought into the idea, popular among progressives, that the election of President Ronald Reagan (as well as that of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom) marked the ascendancy of market fundamentalism, or \u201cneoliberalism,\u201d a time when governments cut aid to the poor, lowered taxes and slashed regulations. If American poverty persisted, I thought, it was because we had reduced our spending on the poor. But I was wrong.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n