The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives (9 page)

In 2008, a year after her husband’s company health insurance had kicked in, at the age of only 31 Megan came down with a devastating form of pancreatic cancer. After she survived, against the odds, an extraordinarily brutal regimen of treatments, the family found that even with insurance, and even with anonymous donations from private donors, they now owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional bills. Because they had already declared bankruptcy
in the recent past, they could not do so again—and, once more, the bills kept piling up. “I want to eventually get a house for my kids. But it ain’t going to happen,” she said sadly.

Reduce Medicaid services, you get more Patty Pooles. Reduce Medicaid access, you get more Megan Robertses.

In the same way that our political culture lacks the language to adequately confront poverty, so too in recent years it has lacked a vocabulary to explain
why
rampant inequality is a problem. As that inequality grows, and as the political rhetoric and agenda of state and federal politicians increasingly is skewed toward meeting the requirements of the country’s new elites, so public infrastructure becomes ever more fragile. An anti-tax, anti-government movement, using the language of populism, and turbocharged in the aftermath of the 2010
Citizens United
Supreme Court ruling, which allowed outside interest groups to spend freely on attack ads and “independent expenditure” campaigns, claims to represent the little man against Big Brother. In reality, however, it has created a public sector defined by squalor and an insecure citizenry unable to define itself by commonly accessed, and accessible, institutions.

The method is simple: defund public services, ensure that the government only delivers second-rate goods, convince the electorate that long-term societal investments such as Social Security and Medicare are Ponzi schemes unlikely to survive down the generations, and it becomes ever easier to convince ordinary people that taxes are a mugging rather than an investment. There is, after all, a reason that Swedes—who receive quality education, healthcare, childcare, vacation times, and pensions courtesy of their government—tolerate far higher taxes than do Americans. It’s not because they have some strange Scandinavian-only pro-tax genes in their DNA. Nor is it because of some bizarre streak of masochism in their culture. Rather, it’s because they actually get their money’s worth from their taxes. They
pay good money and get good quality services. In America, by contrast, increasingly the public receives duds.

Sell enough lemons, conservatives have realized, and you can trigger demands that the whole enterprise be shut down. It is, quite simply, a classic bait-and-switch maneuver.

Able to spend virtually unlimited sums to influence political and judicial races, groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Crossroads GPS; and individuals such as the Koch brothers; Newt Gingrich’s 2012 primary season backer, Sheldon Adelson; and Rick Santorum’s funder, Foster Friess—have seeded a conservative push to undermine what remains of the progressive tax structure and to denude government of its role in providing basic services to the populace. In fact, the push aims to “starve the beast,” as anti-tax guru Grover Norquist has piquantly put it—denuding environmental and workplace regulations, protections for trade unions, and broad social safety net programs. Theirs is an attack not only on the legacy of the Great Society, but also that of the New Deal and the Progressive Era. They lead this charge in the name of fiscal probity, but they do so knowing the results will further exacerbate economic divisions within the country. That they didn’t succeed in the 2012 elections is an extraordinarily positive thing, but to think that their agenda has somehow dissipated would be naïve in the extreme. They were, after all, remarkably successful in the post-2008 period, especially at the state level, despite being in the political minority in D.C.

Witness one example of the counterproductive impact of this rhetoric: From 2008 to 2011, during the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the number of people able to claim welfare checks (TANF) actually declined in a number of states. Many single mothers, in particular, could no longer access cash assistance, job training, or help with childcare so that they could place their children in safe environments while they looked for employment. Others simply saw the clock run out on them—with many states reducing the number of months a woman could access TANF over the course of her lifetime.

More and more, as a result of the squeezing of government services, those with resources opt out of the public sphere, sending their children to private schools and colleges, protecting their homes and other property with private security systems, abandoning public transit systems, forgoing as many interactions with the public sector and with government agencies as they can. Similar processes have happened in recent years in countries such as South Africa and Mexico. In no instance has such a retrenchment led to a fairer, more equal, or more tranquil society.

The effects of the twin trends of growing inequality and of declining opportunity are particularly apparent the further down the income scale one goes. At the bottom of the economy is a pool of misery in which an increasing number of undereducated, under-skilled, underresourced people are being condemned to lives of insecurity, either out of work or working jobs with declining pay in real terms, many of them without access to even rudimentary social benefits—pensions, health insurance, meaningful vacation time, and so on.

In his book
Free Lunch
, the Pulitzer Prize–winning
New York Times
journalist David Cay Johnston estimated that by the early years of the century, most Americans were getting by on about $75 less per week, in real terms, than they and their parents were a generation earlier. He chronicled a hollowed-out middle class, and a resulting chasm between a growing minority of poor people and a sliver of the population in possession of extraordinary and rapidly growing wealth. So great was the economic insecurity experienced by the bottom half and so potent was the concentration of wealth at the very top that, Johnston argued, America now looked more akin to Brazil, Mexico, or Russia than to any Western European society.
¹⁴

Between 1950 and 1975, Johnston calculated, for each additional dollar in income most Americans received as the economy expanded, those in the top 1 percent received $4. From 1960 to 1985, it was $17. “And for 1981 through 2005, it is almost $5,000.”
¹⁵
For the top 0.01 percent of the economy, that number was a staggering $140,000. In other words, if an average earner took home $100 more one year, it was reasonable to assume that the billionaire living across town had increased his income by roughly $14 million during that same time period. Today, a few hundred billionaires, a new plutocracy, control several trillion dollars in assets—enough to pay median-income salaries for years on end to tens of millions of workers.

The flipside of this wealth concentration is the resurgence of a gritty poverty that decades of New Deal and then Great Society programs had sought to eradicate, a return to a country in which, as Franklin Roosevelt famously noted, “one-third of the nation is ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” The Census Bureau calculated that not far shy of 50 million Americans in 2011 were living at or below the federal poverty line; included in this demographic were a growing number of children. In many parts of the country, at the height of the post-2008 recession, one-quarter of all kids were living in conditions of deprivation—and when economic measures as a whole started to improve in 2011–12, the poverty numbers remained stubbornly high. If the economy
was
improving, it was doing so selectively, leaving behind millions of families trapped in brutally corrosive impoverishment.

In some of the poorest regions of Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and a few other spots of concentrated misery, the number of local children in poverty routinely approached 50 percent. In Detroit, more than 37 percent of residents were living in poverty as of 2012,
¹⁶
and nationally approximately six million Americans were entirely excluded from the cash economy, their only formal source of income government food stamps.
¹⁷
These men, women, and children were part of a growing subgroup living in what the Census Bureau labeled “deep poverty,” their incomes below half that of the
federal poverty line. More broadly, a record number of people, upward of 46 million, were receiving food stamps and other nutritional assistance—although even this aid seemed to be increasingly at risk as a budget-cutting mind-set took hold both in Washington, D.C., and in state capitals, with congressional Republicans, in particular, calling for a scaling back of vital safety net programs.

Millions more did not qualify for government aid, yet were poor enough to routinely have to fall back on the charity of food pantries, churches, and other nonprofit groups. These were the people who, in the words of Billye McPherson, found that “the month is longer than the money.” McPherson, an 84-year-old woman, and her husband had run a food pantry in California’s Siskiyou County since the late 1990s, so she was in a position to know. Able to make their income cover two or three weeks of expenses out of each month, these people were juggling which bills to pay, which services to let be cut off, which meals to skip, and which medicines to do without come the end of the pay cycle.

Billye’s husband, a World War II veteran suffering from bone cancer when I interviewed him in late 2011, put it this way:

When we were younger, and we had moved up here from the Bay Area, we had some really hard times raising our family. I remember, we got to say “we lived on stone soup.” Pancakes sometimes—with syrup on ’em as long as we had syrup, sometimes pancakes without anything. We struggled simply just to feed our family. So we understand what it is to be hungry. I’ve worked pretty hard all my life; never taken any workmen’s compensation or unemployment insurance or money from charitable things. Like I said, we understand what poverty is, what it is to be hungry.

Jim Ziliak, a Lexington-based University of Kentucky economist and director of his campus’s Center on Poverty Research, called it the “eat or heat” conundrum, in which people are reduced to making an
elemental calculation: Feed the kids when they’re hungry and not have enough money to heat the house in winter, or heat the house when the cold gets too much and have to listen to the kids bawl for food.

When it comes to healthcare, millions of Americans find that that too presents appalling dilemmas, with one illness having the potential to plunge a family into poverty, even into bankruptcy. And why not? After all, with the political classes piling blame on the unemployed for being out of work, on families reliant on welfare for being destitute, and on the hungry for needing food stamps, it makes perfect sense that those who cannot afford insurance can be asked to pay a devastating financial price for daring to need medical care when they get sick.