Subsistence is the Only Choice

Monday's post about the lack of housing affordability for anyone working minimum wage struck a chord with many readers; to date, it's driven the most readers to this blog.  I noticed that after folks read it, they tended to root around in our Actions to see what they could do.  There's a lot of options, but here's a couple suggestions:

• Join a campaign for a Living Wage;
• Join a coalition of affordable housing advocates to push for more quality housing for low-income Americans, especially for families, the elderly and the disabled;
• Fight for welfare "reforms" that count higher education towards work and expand access to subsidized childcare and for longer periods of time.  (There's actually a lot more that could be done, but I'm trying to keep you all focused.)

Talking about poverty day in and day out can get pretty debilitating - I can't imagine how it is for my readers and loved ones who live it everyday.  I'm feeling particularly beat down this morning by the combination of this absolutely horrendous report of the tragic confluence of child poverty, tenant exploitation and substandard housing from New Orleans, as well as the insistence from many readers around the web that minimum wage is generous enough - that if immigrants can get by, why can't we; that it will make teen workers more irresponsible, that it will hurt the businesses too meager or cheap or profit-oriented to even pay benefits.  Bull.  Bull. And more bull.

Commenter Marissa left in comments a link to the graph featured above, which shows that one adult working full-time at minimum wage will never move her family across the federal poverty threshold.* This is meant to demonstrate that for low-income Americans, welfare is a more "rational choice" than working at minimum wage.  In reality, there is no choice: living at a subsistence level is your sentence for being poor in America.

Consider Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), our current cash assistance program for poor mothers.  First of all, it's time-limited to a lifetime maximum of five years.  Second, it requires looking for work and obtaining work in order to retain your benefits, young children at home and/or disabling health be damned.  Degree-granting education is discouraged or out-of-reach.  There are all kinds of penalties for behavioral issues.  Any child support from fathers is taken by the state first as reimbursement for TANF; then the mom may receive the rest.  Currently, countless states are understaffed and overworked, and the length of time to qualify and begin receiving benefits is dangerously long.  Only about 40% of those eligible for benefits actually manage to collect them.  And so on.

Grinding out as many hours as possible at minimum wage may be a healthy parent's only viable option.  If you have any obstacles to working, well, good luck to you.

But this is apparently how we think it should be in the US.  We de-linked minimum wage from inflation in the 1970s, so it hasn't kept up even remotely with the cost of living.  And we're going on 13 years of flushing poor mothers from the welfare rolls and dropping them into cycles of dead-end, low-wage work and unemployment.  And we falsely believe, apparently because we lack any adequate mathematics and economics education in this country, that increasing minimum wage will drive up the cost of living.  Face it people, wages have been declining for decades as the costs of housing, energy and food have risen dramatically.  Paying those holding up the economic ladder for the rest of us is not going to lead to a startling across-the-board cost of living increase.

But you know what will?  Reducing corporate taxes to rates not seen since the early 1980s; funding insane, needless wars of aggression abroad; bailing out banks; and subsidizing mega-developments and corporate plant decisions at the expense of housing, education and services in our communities.

*The graph is somewhat misleading, as it shows one adult working towards the poverty level for a family of four that presumes two adults and two children.  In actuality, two adults working at minimum wage should be able to eek across that threshold, but the reality that two low-income parents can both work full-time while raising dependent children and afford childcare at minimum wage is questionable.