The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (23 page)

Withholding aid from the “undeserving poor” is often penny-wise but extremely pound-foolish. In 1965, Philip Stern reported that the existence of pockets of blight around America ended up costing taxpayers huge sums of money: in New York City, he wrote, “blighted areas contain 27 percent of the city’s population, yet account for 45 percent of the city’s infant deaths, 71 percent of the venereal disease, 51 percent of the juvenile delinquency, 73 percent of the dependent-children-on-welfare.” In Los Angeles, for every
dollar the government spent on more affluent communities, it ended up having to spend $1.87 to police poorer neighborhoods, $1.67 to provide fire services, and $2.25 to cater to healthcare needs unmet in impoverished communities by private insurers.
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Take another, more recent example. In New York City a variety of rent-subsidy programs exist for ex-homeless people who have gotten jobs and started to sort out their lives. They cost, on balance, about $800 per month per recipient, not a huge sum in a metropolis where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in 2012, even before Hurricane Sandy left tens of thousands homeless and added further pressure to an already overheated rental market, was a staggering $2,568 per month.
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But the city worries that if it makes the application process too easy, people who don’t genuinely need the aid will sneak onto the rolls. And so it makes applications deliberately difficult. The result? More people end up going to shelters. But here’s where things get really crazy: since the city has a policy in place saying that it cannot turn anyone away from shelters, it ends up with higher bills. Instead of paying $800 per person in rent subsidies, it runs an emergency shelter system that can cost up to $25,000 per year per resident.
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Or take the fact that during the post-2008 crash, many states either removed dental treatment from amongst the services offered to Medicaid recipients or reduced the amounts they paid practitioners so much that most stopped serving Medicaid clients. The result, according to a report by the Pew Center for the States: huge increases in the number of emergency room visits for untreated dental problems. Teeth that could have been filled easily in a dentist’s office are left to rot until they abscess; minor traumas become major infections. In 2009, the authors estimated, emergency rooms were used more than 830,000 times for preventable dental conditions. That year, more than half of all kids on Medicaid did not receive even a routine dental exam. In Florida, in 2010, Pew estimated, these dental-related ER visits cost $88 million.
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Or the decline in services provided to the destitute mentally ill in the community. From 2008 to 2011, visits to psychiatric emergency rooms around the country increased by upwards of 20 percent. Why did that happen? Probably because, according to the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors, in the years following the financial collapse state funding for mental health services declined by $3.4 billion even as the number of people requesting mental health interventions grew by several hundred thousand.
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In the 2011–12 budget cycle alone, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, California cut $177 million from its mental health services budget and New York State cut $95 million.
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With nowhere but the hospitals to turn to, the mentally ill flooded emergency rooms from one state to the next.

THE MISSISSIPPI EFFECT

It is easy to be an armchair critic of those who rely on government assistance; to denounce them as crazy, manipulative, lazy, or dysfunctional; to declare them their own worst enemies; to urge them to stand on their feet and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Get beyond the tired, clichéd, sound bites, however, and one enters a world of frequent humiliation, of desperate poverty, of shrunken horizons.

Witness the life stories of many of the students who populated principal James Kuzman’s Rancho High School, in the desperately poor region of North Las Vegas—an area scarred by precarious tent cities under freeway overpasses, with halfway houses and drug treatment facilities, with overcrowded rental units and the omnipresence of gangs and violence. About half of the students were enrolled in a well-regarded magnet school on the site; these kids commuted in from all over the metropolis. The other half were locals, most of whom attended Rancho’s non-magnet classes. The school, Las Vegas’s second largest, which in 2011 had close to 200 homeless students out of a total of around 3,000 enrollees, was barely three miles
from the northern end of the fabled Strip, home to some of the world’s most famous hotels and entertainment centers. Yet Kuzman had found that a large proportion of the local teens had never ventured outside of their own few square blocks. The Strip, for them, might as well be on the moon.

Many of our students are coming from families of generational poverty; parents have come from another country and are struggling to make ends meet, working one or two jobs. We have difficulty getting many of our neighborhood, zoned students, to participate in activities at school. The children are often asked to go home to babysit, to provide care to younger siblings; or they’re asked to work, too, to meet the needs of their families. It prohibits them from fully taking part in activities at our school. Anything from helping their fathers in a landscaping business to trying to sell things. Go up and down our streets at night, you’ll find all sorts of vendors selling food products. For our homeless students we provide backpacks they can take home. They need toilet paper, shampoo, soap, deodorant. The things we take for granted when we open up our medicine cabinet, they don’t have, especially if they’re moving from house to house. This year, we did a door-to-door campaign to look for seniors who didn’t show up on the first day of school. We came up with a list of 229, out of a group of seniors of 700.

Some of the students were playing truant. Many, however, had had to move to other schools, either in Las Vegas or elsewhere, after their families had been forced to move following evictions, foreclosures, or job losses.

A few years ago, when I was still at Von Tobel middle school, we had a straight-A recognition ceremony for some kids. So we took about twenty kids to Ricardo’s Mexican restaurant, and a place called Mountasia, where they have miniature golf and bumper cars and
whatnot. I was talking to the kids; they’d lived here their whole life and they’d never seen the Strip, never been out of this area. Here’s these people that live in this town that people are coming from all over the world to visit, because of the pomp and the grandiose buildings and the light, and here’s people living here who’ve never even seen it. At school there’s only so much kids can learn. What you learn from most are your experiences. Their experiences are so limited; they don’t have a lot to relate to. If you’re teaching a student a geography lesson and you make a reference to Washington, D.C., if you’ve been to the Smithsonian or to the Capitol, it’s easier to relate to than if you don’t even know where it is.

Despite the myth of a welfare-addicted population, for the overwhelming majority of poor families in today’s America, the central part of the welfare system, Temporary Aid to Needy Families, is not an option. When Harvard sociologist Kathryn Edin spent years interviewing impoverished residents of Philadelphia and Camden in the years surrounding the onset of the Great Recession, she found that almost none of the young people used TANF, or believed that they
could
use it. Moreover, for most of those few who do manage to qualify, the amount of cash assistance available amounts to only a fraction of that needed simply to raise a family up to the federal poverty line.

In California, for example, as of 2012, 22 percent of kids lived in poverty, but only 3 percent of kids were members of families on welfare. The maximum amount those families could receive was $643 per month, but only one in five welfare recipients got this level of assistance. For the childless indigent, aid options were even sparser. Only about half of the states still provided cash assistance to this group, and even in those states that did the amounts were tiny. For “unemployable” individuals, New Hampshire led the pack, providing
$688 per month, followed by Hawaii at $418. Washington and Massachusetts each gave a little more than $300 per month. Other states ranged downward, all the way to Delaware’s $95. For the twelve states that still provided some general assistance to the “employable”—or able-bodied—and childless poor, down from twenty-five states in 1989, recipients received a few hundred dollars a month but could only access the aid a few months out of each year.
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However one crunched the numbers, even in a state traditionally as generous as was California, welfare, at this point, really was only for the poorest of the poor: people at or below half of the federal poverty line, with no assets to speak of, and no ability to generate income. In California, as elsewhere in the country, as the political leadership sought to deal with its deficit problems, increasingly it was this most vulnerable part of the population that was being asked to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden.

In many ways, the Golden State, for all its liberal promise, was now taking a lead from ultraconservative states such as Mississippi, its safety net imploding under the weight of a relentless anti-tax ideology embraced by voters in a series of initiatives dating from the late 1970s onward and by the modern-day Republican Party—a minority in the statehouse but, until the 2012 elections delivered a supermajority to California’s Democrats in both state houses, a large enough minority to block tax increases.

And that didn’t bode well for California’s millions of impoverished residents, or, by extension, for the country. After all, historically, perhaps nowhere in the country have the anti-welfare mentality and a general contempt for the lives and needs of the poor held more sway than in Mississippi. The Magnolia State has, throughout much of American history, ranked at the bottom of all the states in terms of150its poverty data. Choose your measure, and Mississippi underperforms. In 2008–09, at the start of the recession, Mississippi’s average household income was roughly $35,000, barely half that of New Hampshire, the state with the best average. Its public school math
and reading scores, as well as graduation rates, were worst out of all fifty states. Its life expectancy was the lowest in the nation. And its infant mortality rate was the highest.
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Mississippi Delta attorney Bill Luckett ran for the Democratic Party’s nominee for governor in 2011. His platform was an anti-poverty platform, with a particular focus on increasing educational opportunities for low-income residents. Luckett came a strong second in the primary election; but even if he’d won, it wouldn’t have made a hill’s bean of difference; these days, Mississippi is a lock for the Republicans.

A large man with a shock of white hair, exuberant, charismatic, Luckett has a finger in many pies. He’s a lawyer, a real-estate developer, a co-owner, with actor Morgan Freeman, of the best blues club in Clarksdale—home of the birthplace of that musical genre; a politician, an anti-poverty activist, an advocate for more investment in education.

We have the lowest paying jobs, the lowest educational attainment levels. Poverty means an inability to sustain oneself. Mississippi has the highest federal poverty rate, somewhere around 22 percent year in, year out. We have another 15 percent of our population here who cannot sustain themselves. So, almost four out of ten people here in the Mississippi Delta cannot make it from paycheck to check. We have the highest rate of infant mortality in the country—and it’s more pronounced here in the Delta. It cuts across race lines. But if a comparison were done, you’d have a higher percentage of blacks poor than of whites; but it’s not exclusive. We’ve never enjoyed true prosperity compared to the rest of the country; so we don’t suffer a recession or depression as much as the rest of the country do. We have chronic high unemployment; we have chronic seasonal workers. Two or three months with no work at all—looking for a part-time fill-in and trying to draw unemployment benefits.

Yet despite—or maybe because of—the large numbers of its residents who, even in the good times, struggle merely to subsist, the
state’s conservative political culture makes the life of the poor as unpleasant as possible. Accessing welfare in the state is an exercise in humiliation, both in terms of the obstacles placed in the way of applicants and in terms of the value of the aid made available. “Welfare is short-lived, hard to get, and not much of it. The average welfare check to a person who qualifies is $66 a month,” averred Luckett. “There’s a two-year lifespan on it unless there’s an extreme circumstance. They live looking for day work, and a lot of people turn to crime. We, along with Louisiana, have the highest rate of incarceration of any jurisdiction in the world. I said that correctly. In. The. World.”