The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (16 page)

It is a challenge that cries out for government intervention. Yet too often, that intervention is either lacking or unsuited to the great needs of the moment.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE FRAGILE SAFETY NET

Burned out high school in North Philadelphia.

F
or Jessica Bartholow, a Sacramento-based legislative advocate for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, the stories of dysfunctional or inadequate government systems failing to raise people out of poverty, as well as of public opprobrium toward the poor, had become a dime a dozen. No matter how hard her organization worked on anti-poverty initiatives the need for help seemed to grow on a daily basis.

Put simply, America’s safety net, never particularly munificent to begin with, was showing itself unable to adequately meet the cascading needs triggered by the rolling collapse, over several decades, of wages at the bottom of the economy; the post-2008 unemployment crisis; and the massive loss of assets so many families lived through as the housing market disintegrated.

Welfare systems in states with a social safety net exist to mitigate the worst excesses of poverty. That’s the theory, anyway. The post–World War II Keynesian state was crafted on the understanding that markets required management. The components of that state were supposed to act counter-cyclically, increasing in availability during those months, or years, when the economy hits the skids, serving to iron out the kinks in inherently volatile, dynamic, market economies, and thus providing something of a firewall against a growth in severe poverty during downturns.

In practice, that’s never really been the case. While the countries of Western Europe, during the austere post–World War II years in which welfare systems were fully developed, embraced the notion of cradle-to-the-grave security for citizens, America chose not to go down that path. Southern and rural politicians, in particular, stood as blocks in the way of comprehensive reforms. As a result, what progress
has
been made toward securing government benefits to the needy as a right of citizenship—during the New Deal years, and in the 1960s, in particular—was made in the face of southern and rural opposition rather than with their blessing, and was left permanently vulnerable to conservative political winds. In recent years, those winds have torn gaping holes in the safety net.

Bartholow herself, the daughter of a Vietnam veteran who suffered from severe posttraumatic stress disorder, had grown up in chronic poverty. She had carved out for herself a career working at the center of California state politics on issues that she passionately cared about. Ideally, her group lobbied to increase resources for nutritional assistance for the poor, to make welfare benefits more accessible, to expand subsidized healthcare, the network of affordable housing units, community mental health clinics, and so on. In practice, in recent years, the work had been all about preventing more cuts rather than increasing resources. In a particularly discouraging encounter, she recalled, the Republican Party’s House minority leader had blasted the safety net as a “hammock with cute little drinks with umbrellas.” Presumably he meant this opaque comment to reflect his belief that welfare recipients were simply having sun-drenched vacations at state expense. Ironically, Bartholow noted, he came from Tulare County, the poorest county in California, with, she said, 12.9 percent of the population on the CalWORKs welfare program.

A disabled state employee had phoned Bartholow to tell her that she was losing her job, was about to lose her home, and needed help finding transitional housing until she could find a more affordable place to live. “There wasn’t a place to send her other than the Salvation Army shelter,” said Bartholow. “There isn’t anywhere in between. That’s the current state of our safety net program right now. If we keep food in the refrigerator for three weeks out of the month, we’ve achieved what we can right now. We force people to become very, very poor before we are able to help them.”

FINGERS IN THE DIKE

In the post-2008 milieu, and especially in the conservative, budget-cutting environment prevailing after the 2010 midterm elections, many parts of the country’s welfare system have actually ceased to have any real impact on poverty numbers. President Obama’s administration, in the years following 2008, did a good job of protecting what
remained of the safety net for those who lost jobs in the recession; it did a far less solid job, however, of protecting both the long-term poor and the very poorest of the poor at the bottom from budget cuts.

Hence the fact that, once American Recovery and Reinvestment Act dollars dried up in 2011, job training programs were decimated; many food programs ended up running on fumes; many community health and mental health clinics, drug treatment centers, and homeless shelters had to shutter their doors or limit their clientele to those already on their rosters.

For advocates such as Ed Shurna, executive director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, the trends were dispiriting. In 2012, his organization had had to fight to reverse a 52 percent cut in funding for the state’s emergency shelters, implemented as a part of a package of cuts to deal with Illinois’s catastrophic budget deficit. They had succeeded, but the numbers of homeless were growing so astronomically that he felt his organization was, at best, always playing catch-up. “It’s just been cutting and cutting and cutting, and there’s no end in sight,” Shurna explained. “There’s very few stories of people we have who are able to leave homelessness, get a decent job, and pay for rent without some kind of assistance.” And yet, adequate levels of assistance weren’t forthcoming.

People accept homelessness as just a condition of modern society; “Yeah, people are going to fall through the cracks.” And then we blame the individuals for that failure. We don’t think there’s a problem with the system itself. But the mark of who’s homeless is just somebody who’s poor. And in Chicago, it’s people of color—primarily African Americans, and secondarily Latinos. It would take a sea change over the next twenty-five years in thinking in this country to turn around the idea that government doesn’t have a role to play in protecting needy people.

Absent that sea change, Shurna worried that his organization was simply putting fingers into a broken-down dike and watching the floodwaters surge around the plugged hole and through the nearby gaps. No matter how hard he worked to counter homelessness, the need grew. It was an endless, Sisyphean battle against chronic, hardcore poverty. Shurna felt, he said, like the man in the fable who threw one beached starfish, out of hundreds, back into the sea, and humbly said, “At least that one starfish got help.”

Ninety-two thousand Chicagoans could expect to be homeless during the course of a year, and on any given night fully 21,000 would be sleeping in improvised accommodations. “You have to create more affordable housing for working poor people,” Shurna argued, sitting behind his desk on the seventh floor of a large office building in the heart of Chicago’s Loop. “The other solution is the service jobs have to be paying more than they’re paying now.” To really tackle homelessness, he knew that “you’d have to have a massive jobs program that paid decent wages.” He also knew that wasn’t about to happen.

In 2010, Chicago authorities had calculated that 14,000 school kids would be homeless in the city at some point that year. By 2011, that number had increased to 16,000—more than 3,000 of whom weren’t even living with an adult. In fact, the advocate fretted, every year from 2005 onward the number of homeless kids in his city had dramatically risen. Nothing suggested to him that trend was about to be reversed.

WELFARE, WEIGHT LOSS, AND THE INVISIBLE WORKING CLASS

In 1965, the author Philip Stern had written about America’s priorities before the onset of the War on Poverty, excoriating the country for spending “more for the care of migrant birds than for the care of migrant humans,” and for a culture in which it was acceptable that 98.5 percent of new homes built were unaffordable for low-income Americans. Forty years later, after decades of underinvestment in affordable housing, one in twenty Americans, and one in six families
who rented homes, were living in what the government described as “worst case” housing situations, with incomes at less than half the local median income, and having to pay more than half of that paltry income toward housing.
¹

As for what the country was spending on fripperies: at a time when vital social services were being slashed, Americans in 2007 spent $41 billion on their pets. “More than the gross domestic product of all but 64 countries in the world,” the
Business Week
journalists Diane Brady and Christopher Palmeri dryly noted. Four years later, with the country mired in the after-effects of the financial collapse, and with the number of desperately poor Americans skyrocketing, that number had risen to $51 billion, nearly double the total federal and state expenditures on Temporary Aid to Needy Families.
²
Americans spent more than $40 billion per year on maintaining their garden lawns
³
and another $40 billion-plus annually on weight loss products.
⁴
Close to half a million cosmetic liposuction surgeries were being performed annually by the early twenty-first century.
⁵
And according to ABC News, as of 2011 more than 2,000 Americans were signed up to be cryogenically frozen, at a cost of $30,000 per person, after their deaths.
⁶
In 2003,
Business Wire
estimated that Americans were spending $12 billion annually on tanning salon visits and tanning products.
⁷
That’s roughly the same as the amount that was being spent annually on renting and purchasing porn movies at the time.
⁸

The result of all these changes in the national mood, and in the spending priorities that accompanied it: a social structure that in many ways had more in common with India than with other first-world industrial democracies, with joblessness, homelessness, and lack of access to healthcare becoming simply a part of life for millions of Americans, even while those at the top of the economy built ever bigger homes, spent ever more on luxuries and absurdities, and accumulated ever more capital. The most unequal states, according to American Community Survey data put out by the Census Bureau
in 2011, were New York, California, Connecticut, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama, along with the District of Columbia. Throughout almost the entire South, by 2009 upward of 17 percent of the population, and 23 percent of children, lived in poverty.
⁹
Many large urban areas, including New York; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; and Dallas also saw the rise of particularly skewed income distributions.
¹⁰

By the time the economy had the rug pulled out from under it in 2008, the plight of America’s poor had become something of a political footnote. Lacking money, the poor tended to lack political clout; lacking organization, they tended to become invisible. Even as the numbers of poor soared, a political commitment to tackling poverty remained elusive. Democrats tended to simply ignore the scale of the problem, defending the largest safety net programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) while turning a blind eye to the dismantling of other parts of the system, touting relatively small declines in unemployment while only half-heartedly defending extended unemployment benefits for those millions who still couldn’t find work. Republicans, as the party swung rightward, increasingly took gleeful swipes at programs aimed at the poor. In Maine, a newly elected Tea Party governor, Paul LePage, set out an agenda to dismantle much of the state’s anti-poverty infrastructure; among other destructive policies, his budget proposals went after free medical coverage for thousands of low-income residents and shattered the state’s preventive health systems for the poor. In South Carolina, GOP leaders in early 2012 pushed through legislation requiring applicants for unemployment benefits to pass a drug test, and then requiring them to “volunteer” sixteen hours per week to access these benefits.
¹¹