The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (21 page)

In the area that Ziliak studied, the central Appalachian region of Eastern Kentucky, “economic opportunities,” the professor explained, “are few and far between. They tend to be either directly associated with resource extraction—either timber or coal—or affiliated industries. And those undergo a lot of boom and bust cycles. So incomes tend to be quite volatile for the people in these regions. From a year-to-year basis they’re going to have a lot of uncertainty trying to make long-term plans. It makes it a lot more difficult to plan for the future. You have many, many people getting by on a hand-to-mouth existence. They have what’s known as the heat-or-eat decision. Do they buy food and run out of money for heat? Or do they keep the heat on and run out of money for food?

In Eastern Kentucky, if you want to draw a caricature of poverty, you want to think of a person who’s more likely than not to be white. They could be a child, they could be a senior; it spans the
entire age spectrum. Their parents are likely to have been from here, and their grandparents. They’re likely to be third, fourth, fifth generation, even more in the Appalachian region. They tend to love its beauty; but they have poor access to steady jobs, to healthcare, and deep challenges to access to fresh foodstuffs, especially vegetables. They have to travel extensively to get medical care, and often to find employment as well. They face a lifetime prospect of low wages, $10,000 to $15,000 in wages.

CARROTS, STICKS, AND PISS TESTS FOR THE POOR

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.

Take Californians’ relationship to food stamps, for example. While the Golden State doesn’t have the highest rate of poverty or hunger in the country, simply by virtue of its size its raw hunger and food insecurity numbers are stunning. The state with the largest population in the country had, as of mid-2012, the highest number of food stamp enrollees, with more than 3.98 million residents on its Cal-Fresh program. Of these, close to one and a half million were
children. Texas, with the country’s second highest population, but one not much more than two-thirds California’s size, had, according to USDA data, almost as many residents on food stamps—mainly reflecting stunningly high rates of poverty, especially child poverty, in the Lone Star State. New York and Florida, with considerably smaller populations, also had almost as many enrollees as did California.
⁷

California would, however, have had far more food stamp recipients if it had done even a remotely decent job at reaching out to those poor enough to qualify for the federally funded program during the preceding years. As things stood, though, while some states successfully enrolled upward of 90 percent of food-insecure households, as of 2012 more than half of all Californians who should have been covered by food stamps remained outside of that part of the safety net. That translated to roughly four million hungry Californians going without basic food assistance from the government. To survive, these men, women, and children were reliant either on the largesse of local charities, churches, and food pantries, or they were simply missing meals to stretch their meager food dollars across as long a time as possible.

“California’s about the bottom of the barrel,” explained California Food Policy Advocate (CFPA) executive director Ken Hecht, of the low food stamp enrollment rate. Hecht’s organization had published a report in 2010, titled
Lost Dollars, Empty Plates
, which concluded that approximately 3.6 million Californians who qualified for food stamps were nevertheless not enrolled—thus sacrificing federally funded benefits worth a total of more than $4.8 billion annually. Because food stamp expenditures circulate rapidly through the economy, the CFPA researchers calculated that the total cost to the California economy of these unclaimed benefits was a staggering $8.68 billion. Many who should have been on food stamps were deterred by the state’s requirement that applicants be fingerprinted, as well as by the four-times-a-year means test that the state administered on recipients. It was partly as a result of this report that California’s state legislators passed a series of reforms, in 2011, to kick in a couple years
later, that would streamline the food stamp application process, ending the fingerprinting, reducing the number of means tests per year, and making the online application process easier. Whether this would result in more Californians accessing the benefits remained to be seen, however.

In the meantime, with enrollment rates still dismal, hunger advocates from around the state convened in Sacramento in 2011 to highlight the urgency of the problem. Members of Hunger Action Los Angeles showed up at the Capitol carrying cardboard cut-out figures, on each of which was glued a paper plate on which was printed out hunger data, generated by the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), from individual counties.

In Los Angeles County, there were 1.138 million “food-insecure” adults in 2009, the most recent year for which such CHIS data exists, most of them insecure because they were not enrolled in the food stamp program. In Riverside County, the number was close to a quarter of a million. In Alameda, there were 169,000 adults in this category. Even in eminently middle-class counties, the numbers were high: Sonoma came in with 51,000 food-insecure adults; Yolo with 16,000.

Cumulatively, the survey found that statewide, even after the expansion in food stamp usage since the start of the recession, 3.7 million Californian adults were struggling to put food on the table in 2009, up from 2.8 million just two years previously.

California’s ambiguous relationship to the food stamp program was indicative of the country’s complex relationship to poverty as a whole. For those we deem the deserving poor, we provide carrots to help get them back on their feet: tax breaks, perhaps; suspensions of student loan repayments; mortgage loan modifications; in particularly harsh recessions extensions in the length of time people can receive unemployment insurance.

For those we see as the undeserving poor, we use sticks: tying welfare payments to job searches; barring felons from public housing; making addicts and those convicted of drug felonies ineligible for government-funded student loans and a raft of other benefits; requiring applicants for a host of government assistance programs to undergo regular drug checks and fingerprinting. Neighborhoods such as North Philadelphia, or Los Angeles’s Compton, long crippled by extraordinary poverty rates and depressingly high crime rates, are exactly the kinds of communities most scorned by conservative social reformers. As a result, more and more of their residents find themselves cut off from government assistance, or simply unaware of its existence, and ever more reliant on the sorts of charity interventions provided by PhilAbundance.

In February 2012, building on laws enacted in the months prior by states such as South Carolina, Congress took one more step against the “undeserving poor”; in exchange for Republicans agreeing to extend a payroll tax cut for middle- and working-class Americans, Democrats agreed to a provision allowing states to mandate that men and women claiming unemployment insurance while applying for jobs that would require drug tests undergo these invasive tests simply to access their insurance benefits. Disproportionately this provision falls on blue-collar workers, because—with certain professions, such as airline pilots or police officers, being the exceptions—the higher up the pay scale one goes, the less likely it is that an employer will make you pee in a cup before being hired on. A related measure to withhold unemployment benefits from those who didn’t have, or weren’t trying to get, a high school equivalency diploma, was defeated by Democrats in the Senate.

Later that month, the
New York Times
reported that close to two dozen states were proposing similar laws, to make welfare recipients have to undergo regular drug tests. Mitt Romney, hard at work wooing conservatives on the GOP primaries campaign trail, was reported to have said he thought this an “excellent idea.”
⁸
In April 2012, Georgia went a step further, passing a law stating that TANF applicants
would have to take a drug test within forty-eight hours of applying for the assistance,
and
that they would have to pay $17 for the privilege.
⁹

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 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.
¹⁰
Certainly, no one has talked about drug-testing seniors before they can access Social Security, requiring people filing for mortgage tax relief to 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.

University of Pennsylvania historian of poverty Michael Katz had reached similar conclusions to those of Mettler. Most tax-based subsidies in America, he argued, go to the middle and upper classes. Less than 3 percent of these subsidies ended up going to the bottom 60 percent of the population.
¹¹
Yet, listen to the political rhetoric around government assistance, and one could be excused for thinking that a nation of fiercely independent homesteaders was being undermined from within by a plot involving government bureaucrats, in league with the underclasses, working to redistribute hard-earned incomes ever further, and ever faster, down the income pyramid.

It’s not a far leap from that to a more pernicious interpretation: that while the middle and upper classes live righteously and deserve
whatever help is sent their way, the environs of those whom these government-assisted anti-government conservatives consider to be on welfare, the concentrated conditions of inner-city poverty of these other Americans, are, somehow, breeding grounds for social pathologies. Witness some of the comments on radio personality Sean Hannity’s online discussion thread about the causes of poverty: “Giving away free and reduced breakfast and lunch sounds like a great policy to liberals,” wrote Silkworm19. But, the commenter opined, “these parents are taking that money that should be spent on their kids and are using it for more drugs or more TVs or more luxuries that do not promote education.” Another participant, using the screen name JKM, added: “Staying home with kids who clearly couldn’t be afforded most likely from the beginning sets a bad example for the children.” JKM worried that it was encouraging people to stay poorly educated and unmotivated, knowing they would end up with “free apartments, free medical care, free and reduced cost food to fall back on.”

Hannity has not hosted similar diatribes against the huge subsidies doled out by the federal government at the other end of the food distribution process: to agribusiness, to corn producers, to the great combines that determine what we eat, how we eat it, and how much we pay for the privilege.

For conservatives, entrenched, dysfunctional poverty, bringing in its wake drug use, mental illness, breakdown in family structure, and underachievement educationally, is casually assumed to be a black or Latino problem, or also, in an expanded version of the analysis, a “white trash” problem. It’s assumed to exist in concentrated, isolated, communities—be they inner-city racial ghettoes or exurb trailer parks—and to be largely immune to social interventions.