The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (8 page)

Paul Abiley and Cruzanta Mercado, standing in the home that they built for themselves on the edge of the rainforest, on Hawaii’s Big Island.

B
ecause we use such simplistic language to explain poverty, we oftentimes find it easier to pile blame on the poor for their plight rather than to look for ways to tackle poverty. After all, it’s easy to castigate someone; it’s much harder to truly understand his or her circumstances. Both major political parties have been guilty of this sleight of hand in recent decades, though the Republicans, and their talk radio allies, have taken it to new levels—turning verbal denigration of the poor into something of an art form.

In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan sneeringly referred to “welfare queens,” Cadillac-driving moochers impudently turning up at government offices to claim their checks. The answer was to ratchet up means testing, drug testing, fingerprinting, and other intrusive checks for welfare applicants. In other words, to
assume
the worst of applicants, to have as a bureaucratic default position the belief that all applicants would cheat the system if they could, rather than that most were simply people who were mired in hard times and needed assistance to survive from one day or one week to the next.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton pushed a welfare-to-work model that served largely to remove impoverished women from state welfare rolls without first ensuring that they had decently paying jobs to make up for the lost income, and also without creating fallback systems so that welfare recipients who couldn’t find work wouldn’t be kicked off the rolls during economic recessions. The reform appeared to be a success during the boom times, allowing President Clinton to argue that he had both shrunk the welfare rolls and also reduced the percentage of Americans living in poverty. And to a point, that was true: When Bill Clinton came into office in 1993, approximately 39 million Americans, or 15.1 percent of the country’s population, were living in poverty.
¹
By the time he vacated the White House eight years later, that number had been reduced to a little higher than 11 percent.
²
That so many people had been lifted out of poverty represented an economic achievement of an order not seen since the Great Society years of the 1960s and their immediate aftermath, when the poverty rate plunged from 22.4 percent to 11.1 percent.
³
But, at the
same time, the package of reforms signed off on by Clinton when the economy was booming stacked up a host of problems for the downturns to come, when shrinking welfare rolls and ever-more stringent lifetime limits imposed by states on welfare recipients resulted not in more people employed but in higher numbers living in deep poverty. Just prior to the implementation of welfare reform in 1996, 4.43 million families nationwide were on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the main welfare program for families in deep poverty. In 2010, two-plus years into an economic crisis that had created the worst job market in America since the Great Depression, only 1.86 million families were on Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), the successor program to AFDC.
⁴

In the 2000s, George W. Bush talked about “compassionate conservatism” while presiding over a stampede toward income inequality the likes of which America hadn’t seen in nearly a century. By 2004, the poverty rate had bounced back up to 12.7 percent, following four straight years in which the Census Bureau reported growing economic hardship for those at the bottom of the economy—falling median wages, despite enormous productivity increases and an expectation that workers would work ever more hours per year,
⁵
and an increased inability to meet the daily needs of life.
⁶
By 2008, at the end of Bush’s two terms in office, the poverty rate was up to 13.2 percent.
⁷
At the same time, tax rates were cut for high-end earners, for investors, and for corporations, resulting in a massive expansion in wealth for those at the top of the economic pyramid.

No period since that surrounding the 1929 stock market crash has produced such a vast disparity between rich and poor, a vivid example of Michael Harrington’s argument that, in America, poverty exists hidden in plain sight within the crevices and cracks of the affluent society.

More recently, as tens of millions more Americans have come to rely on food stamps to avoid hunger and malnutrition, political figures such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have accused those on food stamps of no longer possessing the American will to success,
of having become permanent charity cases. Barack Obama, Gingrich told audiences around America during the early months of 2012, was a “food stamp president.”

Precisely
why
so many tens of millions of people were poor enough to qualify for food stamps—to access the program one has to have a gross income of at or below 134 percent of the federal poverty line in most states, up to 200 percent in other states, and a net income that doesn’t exceed 100 percent of the poverty line—didn’t concern these presidential hopefuls. What enraged Gingrich, in particular, was the mere
existence
of a safety net, of programs, however inadequate, to break the fall when people lost jobs and incomes, homes and healthcare. That the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) was, by 2012, by far the most effective and universally accessible part of a frayed safety net—the number of enrollees expanding roughly in lockstep with the growing need for assistance—made it that much more of a tempting target for those who believed that government should get out of the business of poverty prevention and alleviation.

For Gingrich, poverty represented not a societal failing but an individual one. Twisting the words of Harrington, who had argued that the existence of poverty created a dysfunctional culture in its wake, he decried a culture of poverty that was preventing poor people from bettering themselves. Where Harrington argued that poverty locked in place behaviors that then exacerbated poverty, Gingrich reversed the equation. In particular, he argued, the prevalence of poverty demonstrated a collapsed work ethic. His solution, as advocated during an address at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government on November 18, 2011, was to relax child labor laws that “entrapped” poor kids, and to put the children of impoverished families to work as school janitors and in similar hourly jobs. “You’re going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America and give people a chance to rise very rapidly,” the ex–Speaker of the House told his audience.
⁸

While progressives lambasted GOP candidate Mitt Romney for saying that he didn’t care about the poor, conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh jumped on his explanation—that he meant the poor already had a safety net in place, and if that net had holes in it he would fix it—as proof positive that Romney wasn’t in fact a true conservative. “‘I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there,’” Limbaugh repeated in mock astonishment. “The safety net is one of the biggest cultural problems we’ve got!”
⁹
Throughout the long recession, Limbaugh used his platform to repeatedly oppose measures such as federal grants to provide meals to hungry children at summer feeding program sites. On November 28, 2011, the talk show host quoted from a
New York Times
article on how Democrats were wooing voters—especially minority voters—who depended on safety net programs, in particular those on food stamps. Limbaugh’s response was, “So the Democrat Party and Obama are making it official. We’re going after life’s losers, and we’re going to empower them. We’re gonna make them the reason we win. Now, everybody, you should know this, this should not be a surprise. This is what the Democrat Party’s been doing for years, they’re admitting it now. They’re admitting it. They are saying they’re not interested in voters who work.”
¹⁰

Meanwhile, as the debate over the budget deficit heated up in 2011, Tea Party activists, energized by the 2010 midterm elections, proposed cutting a startling $9 trillion from federal spending during a ten-year period. How would they accomplish this? Among other things, by eliminating the Departments of Education and of Housing and Urban Development, repealing the 2010 healthcare reform, and redesigning Medicaid so that it would cease to be an entitlement for families with children at or below a certain income level and would instead be given out as a block grant to the states—as subject to raiding as welfare funds were once they started being distributed via block grants. Finally, they proposed rolling back
all
discretionary spending—overwhelmingly, moneys spent on social programs for the poor—to 2008 levels.
¹¹
Republicans in Congress also repeatedly
called for replacing the entitlement provisions of food stamps with a bloc grant system, one that independent analysts reported would have resulted in millions more Americans being rendered ineligible for food aid and thus being put at risk for going hungry.

The slash-and-burn proposals reached the highest levels of the Republican leadership in Congress. House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, soon to be anointed Romney’s running mate, called for rolling back Pell Grants, one of the country’s most successful methods for allowing low-income people to gain higher education. His proposal, which was ultimately killed off in the Senate, would have eliminated the Pells for up to one million students and reduced the value of the grants allotted to millions more.
¹²
And South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, hero of the Tea Party, proposed $4.2 trillion in cuts, fully 70 percent of which would have been chopped from safety net programs for the poor.
¹³

Absent from all of these discussions were the voices of the poor themselves. What would it mean to cut food stamps?

For 35-year-old Maribel Diaz, a onetime employee of a California-run nutritional program for low-income residents who lost her job when the recession eviscerated the state’s budget, it would mean that she and her three young children would no longer be able to afford fresh fruit and vegetables.

Something that’s fresh, from the farmers’ market, it’s something everyone would want access to. If you are consuming your fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, it’ll prevent you from getting sick. It’s very important to have access to fruits and vegetables. I receive for myself and my kids, Cal-Fresh. If we didn’t have those benefits, we’d basically be hungry. I wouldn’t be able to feed them. We don’t have a lot of access to fruits and vegetables, but we do have some access. If the programs were cut, we’d be hungry, we’d be at food pantries. And they don’t give you no protein. They give you two, three, four cans of canned goods, with a box of cereal. We’d be hungry. I don’t know what we’d do.

For Marcy Glickman, a widow from Los Angeles’s chic West Side whose upper-middle-class lifestyle was destroyed by the medical bills accrued during her late husband’s battle with cancer and by the loss of income after they lost his business, the disappearance of food stamps would push her toward outright hunger. As the family’s finances imploded, with their income declining from more than $10,000 a month to less than $1,000, “I started collecting coupons for groceries, and I remember cutting down our spending on groceries,” said Glickman. Then she began frequenting food pantries, her lean steak and salmon diet replaced by noodles, canned tuna, and beans. “We had to get food stamps. At first I felt embarrassed. But after a while I realized at least we’re eating. At least we’re able to eat; we just have to cut down on everything.”

What would it mean to reduce the services provided by Medicaid? Ask Patty Poole, a Medicaid recipient in the upstate New York town of Endicott, who explained how she underwent surgery to reduce severe swelling in her leg caused by a nasty disease called lymphedema, spent weeks in the hospital, and came out to find that Medicaid in New York would no longer pay for the compression stockings that she needed to keep the swelling from re-emerging. Despite having already been measured for the specialized garment, she was told that due to budget cuts the state was only authorizing the purchase of these stockings for pregnant women or lymphedema sufferers whose skin was so wounded that it had actually broken out in ulcers.

“It made no sense. It would be more expensive to wait till a patient had ulcers,” Poole recalled thinking. Desperate to prevent her recently-operated-on leg from filling up again with fluid, Poole embarked on an odyssey of visits to patients’ rights advocates and doctors. But she couldn’t find a way to get the garment without paying full price, and that price—$900—was quite simply out of her reach. And so, without access to the needed stockings, Poole—who was born with spina bifida and had been disabled her whole life—was reduced to improvisation: spending hours each day carefully covering
her own leg with an array of bandages, cotton wraps, and stockings. Some days, it took Poole and her roommate two hours each time her leg needed to be wrapped, and on occasion it would need to be rewrapped three times in a day.

What would it mean to restrict access to Medicaid? Listen to Megan Roberts, whose family ceased to qualify for Medicaid after her husband received a $1 an hour pay raise from the truck mechanics’ company that he worked for. The young couple with four children had recently moved from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a small, impoverished community in California’s Central Valley so that her husband could take up a new job with the company. His health benefits were due to begin in January. But, a few weeks beforehand, Megan’s appendix ruptured; lacking medical insurance, the family was bankrupted by close to $100,000 in medical bills. Their credit shattered, they resorted to borrowing from one payday loan company after another.

Five or six days after I was home from the hospital, I got my first hospital bill. About two weeks after that, I got my first failure to pay notice, saying that “you have not paid your $96,000 hospital bill.” The dollar pay raise had knocked us off housing benefits; we went from $612 rent to $1,030 rent. Knocked us off food stamps, so we didn’t get any food assistance. We had no Medicaid, because the dollar pay raise knocked us off that. He was going to get private health insurance through his work in January. But I got sick. We were left with this bill. On April 16 [2007], we filed for bankruptcy.