The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (19 page)

In a desperate attempt to save money, states also began cutting back the number of weeks in the school year, one unintended consequence of which was that hungry children, whose main meals came through free school breakfast and lunch programs, spent more of each year hungry. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that states also began slashing the number of “summer feeding sites” that they operated in poor neighborhoods, meaning that already-hungry children had even fewer options, during the elongated school breaks, for accessing hot meals.

When federal grant money from the Department of Agriculture was used to try to shore up such sites, conservative cheerleaders such as Rush Limbaugh were shrill in their opposition. In a tirade against such a plan for Kansas City, Missouri, that was aimed at feeding 10,000 low-income kids, Limbaugh called the children who received such free food “wanton little waifs and serfs dependent on the state.
Pure and simple.” Children in school lunch programs, he argued, had had their independent impulses bred out of them. “If you feed them three square meals a day during the school year, how can you expect them to feed themselves during the summer? So they
demand
to be fed during the summer, or their acolytes
demand
that they be fed. Because we’ve conditioned them to not feeding themselves.”
²⁰

Back in Pomona, California, some of these young waifs and serfs were clinging onto their dreams against almost impossible odds: “At our highest financial point, we had all the bills paid and $30,000 in the bank. Life was easy compared to what we have now. Now all the bills are late, and we owe $10,000 in credit and like $15,000 in home equity. Now we’re just trying to get by,” said Juan, in Michael Steinman’s AP English class.

Ever since I was introduced to the idea of college, I’ve been wanting to go—especially to the U.C. I have three goals; one to get a college diploma, the other to buy my parents a house, and third to have a son and see my dad play with him. During this time in November, when we’re supposed to be applying to college, I am, but I’m not putting as much care or attention as I thought I would. Whereas I’m putting more care into my résumé, looking out for jobs, talking to people; I write cover letters, talk to the manager, but I don’t get a call back. It just really sucks. I really wish I could get a job. College has sadly become a second priority. That’s how things are right now.

Another student, Nielli, talked about how her mother tried to hide the family’s financial crisis from her, “because she wants me to go to school.” And she, wanting to please her mother, pretended not to know. Only through such double bluffs could she continue with her education.

Fighting to save his immigrant parents’ home, a boy spent hours trying to translate legal documents from the bank for his mother and
father to read. “I couldn’t understand what it was saying. I’d have a sentence with huge words, foreign, alien words to me. I’d type it up, use Google Translate; it isn’t that good for really long documents. Whenever we couldn’t understand what a letter from Chase Bank was saying, we saw bold letters, red marks, so we knew it was important. If I couldn’t help, we’d go to someone who could. That’s how we got through stuff.”

Three years after the nation’s financial catastrophe unfolded, in the summer of 2011, the poor were once again being blamed for the sorry plight of the nation’s finances, and being asked to bear the burden of fixing those finances. “So let me be as clear as I can be. Without significant spending cuts and reforms to reduce our debt, there will be no debt limit increase,” House Speaker John Boehner told an audience at the Economic Club of New York on May 9, in the early days of the debate about raising the country’s debt ceiling—a debate that took America to the very precipice of defaulting on its debt obligations. “And the cuts should be greater than the accompanying increase in debt authority the president is given. We should be talking about cuts of trillions, not just billions. They should be actual cuts and program reforms.”
²¹

Cut entire federal programs, especially those aimed at ameliorating the conditions of America’s poor, the men and women who made up Boehner’s majority warned, or they would shut down the government. Said Michele Bachmann, the Minnesotan congresswoman whose opposition to raising the debt ceiling briefly propelled her into the front tier of GOP presidential hopefuls, “The ‘Great Society’ has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security. . . . They don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing.
And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.”
²²
Programs, it should be noted, that include Medicare and Medicaid.

Bachmann might have been slightly franker than many of her peers, but she wasn’t alone in her basic beliefs. Thus, for example, despite the fact that there’s an abundance of evidence that enrolling poor people in Medicaid saves society money in the long run—by emphasizing preventive health measures, by cutting down the number of emergency room visits, and by enabling the medical system to monitor emerging health crises before epidemics develop—an increasing number of politicians urged replacing right-of-access to programs like Medicaid with block grants to the states. Such a plan was at the heart of Representative Paul Ryan’s budget proposals in April 2011, a change supported by conservative governors such as Virginia’s Bob McDonnell and Mississippi’s Haley Barbour, both of whom argued that their states couldn’t afford to keep doling out Medicaid to all those currently entitled to it under federal laws.
²³
What was perhaps most disingenuous about all of this, about the implication that this was a system weighted down by freeloaders, was the notion that accessing Medicaid was either easy or pain-free. To qualify for Medicaid, most states mandate that applicants have first sold off almost all of their assets; homes, cars beyond a bare minimum value, retirement accounts, and so on. It’s a program that
does
provide a basic level of service, argued Jessica Bartholow, of the Western Center on Law and Poverty, but at the cost of “eviscerating the assets of the working class.” Instead of making it harder to qualify for Medicaid, a genuine anti-poverty strategy, she believed, would make it easier, allowing the temporarily out of work and cash-poor to access medical coverage without stripping themselves of the assets that they would need, down the road, to pull themselves back into a condition of economic security.

In the budget-cutting environment of 2011, however, such arguments received short shrift.

While the Obama White House held the line against the most savage of these cuts, in exchange they ceded ground on a raft of other issues. Job-training programs were slashed; monies used by states to fund counseling for sexually abused children shriveled, services available to the mentally ill were curtailed, and budgets for drug and alcohol treatment programs were reduced. At best, as the election neared, the administration was willing to play defense, fighting to preserve what it could of the legacy of the New Deal and Great Society. Absent was the sense of offense, the sense that epidemic levels of poverty merited the creation of
new
programs,
new
benefits,
new
investments specifically targeted at tackling the underlying causes of poverty. Absent was the language of a new social compact that could build public support for such programs. “Liberals, at the end of the day, their solutions maintain poverty,” Jim Wallis, CEO of Sojourners, concluded, sitting in his book-lined study in a northern suburb of Washington, D.C. “And conservatives, they want to abandon poor people.” Absent was any real commitment to a wide-ranging, holistic approach to poverty. There simply wasn’t gas in the tank to allow the body politic to rev up and launch a new, twenty-first-century War on Poverty.

Marshall Ganz believed that there was a “need for a whole counterargument. There’s intellectual work that’s not been done, political work. The whole post-war Keynesian welfare state was designed to create automatic stabilizers. It was understood that markets required management. We have been savaging the political and cultural and social institutions that emerged from that order—and we’re paying the price right now.”

That price was being seen in the form of programs cut, benefits slashed, and social infrastructure corroded. A form of public squalor was becoming the norm in contemporary America, girded by an expectation that the government could only deliver below-par services, and by a belief that those who utilized such services were illegitimately sucking off an overutilized public teat. It wasn’t that America
didn’t have the resources to care for its poor or to nurture its great public institutions. Rather, in many ways, it seemed to be suffering from a crisis of will, its collective moral imagination no longer quite up to the task of understanding the impact of poverty on the lives of the poor and the necessity of solutions big enough to meet this existential challenge.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS

Darren McKinney sits on a vacant lot that used to be houses and businesses before Katrina obliterated the Lower Ninth Ward.

O
n any Saturday morning, hundreds of people, of all ages, and of all colors, can be found snaking along the sidewalk of West LeHigh Avenue, toward the entrance, sunk several steps below street level, to a large community food center. The pantry is in the basement of a local public library. Down the street from the center the fire-gutted stone-and-brick shell of a huge high school dominates the landscape, looking more like a ruined medieval monastery than a modern-day American urban academy. The smaller side streets are pocked with hundreds of boarded-up houses, and hundreds more in such disrepair that one can only marvel at how people manage to live in them.

This is North Philadelphia, one of America’s poorest urban neighborhoods. In 2011, researchers with Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that citywide Philadelphia’s poverty rate stood at 25 percent, with a median household income of barely $37,000. But those numbers hid huge disparities. Some suburbs were as leafy, as affluent as any in America. Meanwhile, in the eastern part of North Philadelphia, the city’s poorest district, the poverty rate stood at above 56 percent, and the average household income was only $20,896. In 2008, the median home price in this blighted neighborhood was $33,000; by 2010, it was a mere $10,000.
¹

Sitting on the curb, waiting for the food pantry to open, in the chill of a late fall morning, was Vicenta Delgada. She was bundled up in several layers, had a walker resting on the sidewalk beside her, and wore a dark head scarf to cover her bald head.

Vicenta was 61 years old and undergoing chemotherapy to treat a brain tumor. Originally from Puerto Rico, she had lived on the mainland since 1967, first in Trenton, New Jersey, then in Philadelphia. She suffered from depression and an array of other mental health ailments, problems that went from bad to worse after her oldest son was shot dead in Trenton several years earlier.

Vicenta’s husband received a little more than $1,000 a month from Social Security; with almost no work history of her own, she qualified, she said, for just $27 a month in SSI. The couple also qualified for $34 per month in food stamps. On a multitude of medications, the
prematurely aged lady paid a $3 copay each time she filled a prescription. While that might not sound like much, it quickly added up, eroding what little financial security the couple enjoyed. Medicaid didn’t cover the nutritional supplement shakes that she needed because of her cancer, and so she had to buy those out of pocket.

Priced out of the food market like so many of her neighbors, Vicenta was reduced to spending each Saturday morning waiting in line for several hours until the pantry opened its doors for shoppers. She tried to stay warm, but feared picking up a cold—because the chemotherapy had undermined her immune system.