Domestic Poverty Controversies: Who is Poor and How We Treat Them

Most Americans disagree on the causes of poverty and hold deeply ambivalent views about the poor and our policies reflect this. Cutting through the bunk and reframing the debates are critical to effective anti-poverty efforts. Following is a longish review of the major challenges to fighting poverty, but it’s worth reading!

1) Demographic inequality: Poverty rates vary significantly across groups. Residential and occupational segregation and discrimination against women and people of color, as well as persistent gendered and ethnic-racial inequality in education, child-rearing, domestic work, wages, crime victimization, and incarceration adds up to historically uneven job, housing and educational options for different groups. Economic policies that favor big business and the wealthy at the expense of unions and workers don’t help either.
Check out the following group disparities, especially for racial-ethnic minorities and single mothers:

In addition, poverty is higher in cities (18%) and rural areas (17%) than in the suburbs (10%), and highest in the South (15%) compared to other regions (12-13%).

Poverty is often “concentrated” in particular communities; anywhere from 20% to 65% of neighborhood residents live in poverty in cities like Detroit, Miami, Cleveland and Los Angeles. Income and wealth inequality is worsening in cities and across and within racial groups. Boston’s income distribution, for example, is taking on a “teardrop” shape, as those earning near the bottom increase and the middle- and upper-income classes shrink (even as the wealthiest earn more and more of the overall income). In economic crises like the one we’re in now at the end of 2008, foreclosures, job losses and overall economic contraction will disproportionately hit racial minority groups, women and children, and those already living near or in poverty.

Given the gendered, racialized, and generational face of Americans living in poverty, we must be vigilant about carrying out equitable and humane anti-poverty policies and programs. In other words: Not this.

2) The “undeserving” poor: Contributing to demographic inequities is the established but pernicious thread of the “deserving” versus the “undeserving” poor. The “deserving” poor typically include the elderly, disabled, children (but not their mothers), and hardworking, low-income (white) individuals who have been hit by unexpected financial or social hardship – job loss, an accident, death in the family, etc. The “undeserving” poor typically include promiscuous mothers, shiftless or criminal young men, addicts, people who “refuse” to work, non-whites, and undocumented workers. Given that the majority of Americans will experience some spell of poverty in their lives, and that the majority of Americans living in poverty are there for a short period of time, we might think that the “deserving” poor dominate the public imagination – they certainly drive our public policy. Yet, it is the image of the “welfare queen” or the unemployed black man in the city that looms large in the American mind when we think of the poor and public assistance.

Following on this dichotomy is the question of whether or not poor people’s behavior is to blame for their poverty (versus structural factors such as a capitalist political economy). This is the “culture of poverty” debate: to what extent do learned behaviors and attitudes keep people from moving up and out of poverty? Leftist activists of the 1960s first used the cultural argument to make the case for public policy intervention; the right eventually hijacked it to demonstrate the futility of government action.

Research shows that low-income Americans hold mainstream values like other Americans. Culture of poverty arguments are risky due to perceived victim-blaming or complete exoneration of the poor for their decisions, as well as tendencies towards racial or gender bias, paternalism or middle-class condescension. They enable us to dismiss the poor as different from us, obscure the material resources needed to structure behavior, decision-making and goal-setting, and thus paint the experience of poverty as a lifestyle “choice.” And if living in poverty is a choice, then certain people don’t deserve our help, wouldn’t you say? Reagan and Gingrich would.

3) The Legacy of Welfare Reform, or, Ending “Welfare as We Know It”: The Personal Work Opportunity and Responsibility Act, or “welfare reform,” became law in 1996 after two decades of conservative efforts to end the New Deal-era cash assistance program for needy American families. Signed into law by President Clinton after he twice vetoed earlier versions of the bill, it was considered a demonstrative victory of the GOP’s Contract With America, with the major changes being a welfare-to-work emphasis and a five-year lifetime limit for benefits. Welfare reform was also a cultural rebuke against alleged Cadillac-driving “welfare queens” living on the dole while hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding Americans pulled themselves up by their bootstraps without government assistance. Right.

Most Americans simultaneously support government assistance for the poor while condemning “welfare.” Research suggests welfare opposition is predicated on racist and/or sexist beliefs of the moral failings of the mainly non-white mothers who are welfare recipients, as well as the conviction that welfare programs are antithetical to our mythic notions of an egalitarian, meritocratic society, breeding “dependency” among recipients. As a result, welfare reform passed with major public support. Given its passage during a major economic expansion, the drop in welfare case rolls and entrance of so many former welfare recipients into the workforce was seen as a major victory, and the ideological controversy enshrouding reform was largely silenced.

Yet, the success and legacy of welfare reform are dubious at best. Although it is likely time limits and an emphasis on work are here to stay in public assistance for needy families, as reform opponents predicted, a drop in case rolls did not translate into long-term poverty alleviation. Most welfare recipients were corralled into low-wage jobs without benefits, and the poverty rate has been rising again during most of the Bush Administration. Since the millennium, the bulk of anti-poverty efforts focus on the economic struggles of an “invisible” “working poor.” In turn, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit has become a key poverty alleviation initiative. And locking up the poor is always an option…

4) Incarceration: The Annie E. Casey Foundation cites four major obstacles for an individual to exit poverty: domestic violence, substance abuse, depression, and incarceration. We’re highlighting incarceration here because of the frighteningly explosive growth of the prison industry in the last 30 years, and its disproportionate impact on poor communities of color.

Punitive drug laws such as mandatory minimum sentences are the main culprit for the enormous growth in imprisonment in the U.S. and further exacerbate racial discrimination in the criminal justice system. 41% of all adult prisoners in the United States are African-American; at current rates of incarceration for black men, one in three will go to jail or prison in their lifetimes. In some urban poor communities, human services advocates report that 70% of adult black men are ex-offenders. Public housing projects in the poorest neighborhoods are only some of the “million-dollar block” communities in cities nationwide, where the total cost of imprisonment of residents exceeds $1M.

Paul Street’s piece on the intersection of race, poverty and incarceration summarizes the depressing reality: an estimated 13% of black men have lost the right to vote; 50% of ex-offenders may be unemployed. This lack of job opportunities contributes to high recidivism rates among parolees, taking them away again and again from their communities and families. 80% of inmates are parents. Perpetuating this racist, anti-urban prison-industrial complex is the fact that it often provides a tremendous economic benefit to rural, low-income white communities – from building the prison complex and from the money spent by the tens of thousands of prisoners that sometimes double or triple the local population.

These host communities, of course, are not exclusively white, nor is the problem of mass incarceration restricted to African-Americans or violent crime or drug offenses. The rise of immigrant detention also is wreaking havoc on home and host communities of immigrants across the country. Now, if only there was a movement to deal with these human rights violations and the vagaries of poverty all at once…

5) Economic Human Rights: Almost 16 percent of all households spend more than half their income on housing costs, yet federal affordability guidelines state that housing should cost no more than 30% of a household’s annual income. As a result, these families spend about one-third less on food than families living in affordable homes, and 80% less on their healthcare! Loss of health insurance, rising healthcare costs and disability together are the #1 reason middle-class families fall into poverty.

The U.N. Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights exists to protect and enforce the right to adequate housing, healthcare, education and jobs worldwide. Yet, the ratification of Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 curtailed a wider movement to enforcement of economic human rights, and despite the Covenant’s existence, the U.S. has not committed fully to fulfilling these rights here at home. Activists cite the growth of poverty as a major catalyst for the renewed need for an economic human rights framework here at home.