The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (30 page)

Lower Ninth Ward landscape. Darren McKinney was working on the shell of a building to the left of the photo when the author interviewed him.

S
hortly after the 2008 presidential election, longtime anti-poverty organizer Jim Wallis, head of the nationally renowned group Sojourners, which had campaigned on social justice themes since the early 1970s, asked Barack Obama if he would commit to a goal of cutting poverty in half in ten years. It was a goal that had recently been articulated by a coalition of progressive organizations under the catchy title Half in Ten. Obama, according to Wallis, replied that he would.

But in the years following that conversation, the momentum toward a new War on Poverty stalled. Preoccupied with preventing further economic collapse following the cascading crises of 2008, the Obama administration focused on damage control rather than a proactive anti-poverty program. “No one’s even talking about that now,” Wallis noted sadly. “All we’re talking about is a circle of protection,” a
cordon sanitaire
around existing programs, thus sealing them off from the most aggressive cuts being bandied about in D.C. “No one has an anti-poverty agenda.” Here is one indication of how far out of the political spotlight poverty had fallen: as of mid-2012, of the approximately 5,000 registered lobbyists in Washington, D.C., only one firm, Advocates for the Other America, marketed itself as focusing exclusively on legislation relating to poverty and to low-income Americans. Advocates for the Other America had a staff of one registered lobbyist, Brad Penney, and one ex-legislator from West Virginia, Arley Johnson, who hoped to soon become a lobbyist. “Every time you turn around, low-income discretionary programs are being cut. And one reason is they don’t have that lobbying voice on the Hill,” argued Johnson, who had grown up in a ten-child family in a hardscrabble mining community deep in Appalachia. “Members [of Congress] don’t feel there’s a price to pay, because the poor don’t have political clout, don’t participate civically, don’t vote in the same numbers as some of the larger voting blocs.”

Yet, behind the scenes, for many years now a slew of academics, policy wonks, community organizers, and economists
have
been developing ideas about what a new war on poverty, and more broadly a
renewed relationship between government and populace, would look like. “We’ve got our critique of the current economic moment down pat,” noted George Goehl, executive director of the National People’s Action organization. “We’ve been talking about how do we pivot to the aspirational, the economy as it
could
be. The direness of the moment has created a new openness to new questions. The appetite for rethinking things is much different from anything I’ve experienced.”

My hope is that the stories in the first part of this book will serve to stimulate both our national imagination and our empathy, opening the door to a more general conversation about how best to tackle cascading poverty. My intent is that the second part of the book will present a roadmap to change, a blueprint for a new War on Poverty, as the country starts to pay long overdue attention to this crisis.

In this second part, I shall touch on many vital reforms—and will point the reader toward experts in specific areas whose work goes into more detail on individual changes than I will be able to do in the space of these pages.

My purpose is not to suggest that we enforce absolute equality on a population of 300 million people. Despite the fearmongering raised by conservatives whenever conversations about equity take center stage, absolute equality is neither possible nor remotely desirable; it is, in fact, a straw man. Rather, I hope to suggest ways of limiting the extreme levels of inequality that have, increasingly, come to derail the American civic project in recent decades, as well as developing quality uses for hard-earned tax dollars so that large numbers of Americans are willing, once more, to fund the sorts of ambitious societal investments that allowed for the creation of Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. Nor is my goal to undermine important moral and philosophical notions about the importance of personal responsibility; rather, it is to suggest ways of giving everybody an opportunity to maximize their own potential.

Last, my intent is certainly not to propose a set of policies that inexorably increase the national debt; nor is it to suggest that the country’s political leaders somehow spin money out of nothing. The size of America’s economy, as of this writing, is in the region of $16 trillion per year. That’s large, but it’s not limitless. In an era of anxieties about ballooning budget deficits, I want to show how, in redistributing a few hundred billion dollars per year of that $16 trillion economy, through changes to the tax structure and changes in how we prioritize federal and state spending—or, to put it another way, in reprioritizing who receives and who spends about 2 to 3 percent of the vast national pot of wealth that is America, while leaving undisturbed the remaining 97 to 98 percent—we can create a set of vital anti-poverty initiatives that have the potential to dramatically improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans. And I want to show how, if done smartly, these initiatives can serve as a down payment for a decades-long push that has the potential not just to ameliorate poverty once it arises but to make its presence a rarity rather than a commonplace in mid-twenty-first-century American life.

My design, in these chapters, is to sketch the general outlines of a truly national anti-poverty campaign, a new War on Poverty that tackles both short-term hardship and long-term destitution, that deals with difficulties faced by individuals and by communities, and that seeks to set in place a series of support beams within the economy and the body politic to minimize people’s vulnerability to the exigencies of the market.

Readers should come away from
The American Way of Poverty
with an understanding of the interconnectedness of these issues, of the complexity both of the world of poverty and also of anti-poverty strategies, and with a sense of the changes—both in political attitude and practical administration—that need to be embarked upon in order to reverse the increasing economic polarization that, more so by the day, is coming to define twenty-first-century America.

Any systemic push to first significantly reduce poverty, and then to prevent its rapid recurrence, will, of course, have to include many moving parts: local, state, and federal government involvement, including changes in how we raise taxes and how we spend revenues. Attention must be paid to the kinds of debt that we as a society encourage people to accrue, and the sorts of institutions we allow to issue that debt. Additionally, we must consider immigration reform, new energy policies, and changes in the way we use the criminal justice system. Overuse of incarceration is both expensive, and thus a huge drain on limited public resources, and also inimical to the public policy goal of eliminating entrenched poverty. We must look to public-private partnerships as well as nonprofit and philanthropic engagement in arenas such as education, services for the mentally ill, programs available to foster youth as they age out of the foster care system, and the building of affordable housing units. We need aid tailored to meet the needs of geographically distressed regions—and so on.

Poverty is, after all, a web of problems enormous in their complexity. It bubbles up because of systemic failures in how the economy and the political process functions and at the same time, it also emerges because of individual choices and behaviors. Any simple solutions, any one-size-fits-all promises of reform, are doomed to failure, and anyone who claims to have found a magic bullet to once and for all banish poverty from America’s shores is either a scam artist or a Pollyanna.

If we can’t drive a great stake through poverty in all its manifestations, however, we can certainly do a whole lot better than we are doing currently. We can make a bigger effort, both at the local level and nationally, to eliminate its symptoms and to knock out its causes. And we can prioritize investments and institutional reforms that minimize the scope, the intergenerational transmission, and the geographic concentration of poverty when it does emerge.

Obama might not have talked about the specifics of these issues in his re-election campaign, but he certainly had them on his mind
after he got re-elected. The day following that election, a shirt-sleeved Obama spoke to campaign workers at his headquarters in Chicago. In an emotional, teary-eyed address, the president talked about how he had come to Chicago as a young man, “knowing that somehow I wanted to make sure that my life attached itself to helping kids get a great education, or helping people living in poverty to get decent jobs, and be able to work and have dignity; to make sure that people didn’t have to go to the emergency room to get healthcare. I ended up being a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. The work that I did in those communities changed me much more than it did those communities. It taught me the hope, and the aspirations, and the grit of ordinary people.” And, the president continued, as he talked of Bobby Kennedy’s “ripples of hope” idea, “I grew up, I became a man during that process.”

Above all, as Obama is all too aware, we have to get the government out of the business of selling lemons to taxpayers and into the business of selling the service equivalents of Cadillacs. It used to be able to do so—witness the durability of Social Security and the ongoing public support for keeping the program viable. Design modern-day government-backed Cadillac programs, and broad swaths of the public could come to feel, as they did in the heyday of the New Deal, that they have a stake in a revitalized social compact, that their tax dollars are being put to use in ways that manifestly benefit them and their children.

We could, for example, create two more dedicated trust funds to complement those for Social Security and Medicare. Adding a half-percent payroll tax, divided equally between employees and employers, would allow for the creation of a massive Educational Opportunity Fund (EOF) capable of giving out roughly $20 billion per year—
or $5,000 to every child born in the United States
—the money to be invested into education accounts so that those children could, eighteen years later, attend college without saddling themselves or their families with catastrophic debts. Employees win because suddenly
college becomes a whole lot more affordable. Employers win because they end up with better-trained and -educated workers.

With the money left over, for the next couple decades the government could give out grants to those born before the launch of this fund so that they, too, benefited from the program. For those children who don’t attend college, their portion of the fund could be converted into additional Social Security payments once they retire. That way, everyone has a vested interest in the program. It’s a relatively painless way to share the costs, and benefits, of higher education.

Adding a 1 percent payroll tax, again divided between employers and employees, would allow for the creation of a huge public works trust fund that could be tapped during periods of prolonged recession so as to effectively put large numbers of unemployed workers back to work quickly, and on projects that benefit the public good. Again, if the money were dedicated to this particular program, one that would clearly help millions of workers during years such as the ones that followed 2008, it ought to be possible to craft political coalitions, similar to those that have kept unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation on the books for generations, to support such a tax. It would be the ultimate social insurance buy-in. After all, as the recent collapse has shown, almost nobody’s job security can be taken for granted when the financial system wobbles.

In addition to adding these two large pillars to the social contract, a host of other important measures also stand out. Major parts of such a redesigned compact would include reforming federal and state tax codes that too often protect the assets of the affluent while socking it to the poor; raising federal revenues for anti-poverty investments by creating a financial transaction tax and energy profit taxes; and investing in an ambitious community infrastructure to support low-income children in high-poverty schools.