Shailly Gupta Barnes: Census data show that anti-poverty programs work

Homeless man in Boston

— Photo by Enver Rahmanov

The Town Farm, in Easthampton Mass. Now called the Easthampton Lodging House, it’s an historic poor farm at 75 Oliver St. It was established in 1890 as an inexpensive way to provide for the town's indigent population, and is the only locally run facility of its type to survive in the state. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996. Poor farms, which housed the penniless, some of whom paid for this with farm work, were a feature of many New England communities into the 20th Century.

— Photo by John Phelan

Via OtherWords.org

The U.S. Census Bureau recently reported that poverty dropped notably in 2021. Amid a pandemic and widespread economic pain, this is a significant accomplishment.

There are three lessons here — about government programs, about how we measure poverty, and about how far we have left to go.

First, these numbers show that government programs work. After Social Security, refundable tax credits like the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC) and stimulus payments were the biggest contributors to reducing poverty.

Without them, over 20 million more people would have been poor last year. The expanded CTC alone lifted millions of children above the poverty line and reduced racial inequities among poor children.

These programs worked because they departed significantly from how anti-poverty programs have worked for the past 30 years. They provided direct cash transfers to recipients, without any work requirements or bureaucratic indignities.

Welfare-rights organizers have been pushing for these changes for decades. This year, they were proven right.

But unfortunately, official federal poverty figures still conceal the true number of people who are struggling — and underestimate the scale of our responsibility to help them.

At just $31,000 for a family of four, the federal government’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, or SPM, is far too low. That’s less than half of the typical cost of living for a family this size in rural Mississippi, or just one-third for Chicago. And the official poverty measure, or OPM, is even lower.

I’m the policy director of the Poor People’s Campaign, which defines poverty to include everyone living up to 200 percent of the SPM.

Using this measure, which is still less than median income, we counted 140 million people — or 43 percent of the country — who were poor or one emergency away from being poor before the pandemic. In 2021, this rate went down to about 34 percent, or 112 million people.

This is a significant decrease. But it means over a third of our nation has little to celebrate.

In fact, the population living between 100 percent and 200 percent of the SPM threshold stayed basically the same between 2020 and 2021: nearly 90 million people, just one emergency away from poverty. If we only looked at the poverty rate, we would have missed them entirely.

That means we can and must do more. The expanded CTC expired in December 2021, and there has been no further discussion of reviving stimulus payments — even with the federal minimum wage at its lowest value in 66 years and the cost of living continuing to rise.

This is not to minimize the gains we’ve made. They just remind us that poverty is a policy choice — and fortunately, we can make different choices.

In 2020, there were over 80 million eligible poor and low-income voters. Fifty million of them voted in the presidential contest, accounting for a third of the electorate overall and even higher percentages in key states in the Midwest and South.

These voters share a common interest in securing health care, living wages, decent housing, and safe schools for their kids. If they could be organized to take action together — across race, religion, and other lines of division — we could advance the moral policies we need to fully address poverty.

“What’s hurting me in Kentucky is hurting you in Alabama, in West Virginia, and across the nation,” said Tayna Fogle, a leader in the Kentucky Poor People’s Campaign, earlier this year.

“Can you imagine all the poor and the low-income people coming to the ballot box?” she asked. “What if we did everything we could to make sure that our vote counted? We could overturn this madness that’s going on.”

If poor people vote in the midterms like they did in 2020, we could make another leap towards ending the madness of widespread poverty in the midst of plenty.

Shailly Gupta Barnes is the policy director for the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and the Kairos Center.

Shailly Gupta Barnes: In crisis, pols focus on helping the rich

Via OtherWords.org

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed fundamental inequalities in this country.

With millions of us hurting — especially the poor and people of color — there’s been widespread public support for bold government action to address long-standing social problems. Unfortunately, our lawmakers haven’t met the overwhelming need to focus on the poor and frontline workers.

Instead, trillions of dollars have been released to financial institutions, corporations, and the wealthy through low-interest loans, federal grants, and tax cuts — all without securing health care, wages, or meaningful income support for the unemployed. This is all unfolding as we enter the worst recession since the Great Depression.

As Callie Greer from the Alabama Poor People’s Campaign reminds us, “This system is not broken. It was never intended to work for us.”

This system treats injuries to the rich as emergencies requiring massive government action, but injuries to the rest of us as bad luck or personal failures. It reflects the belief that an economy that benefits the rich will benefit the rest of us, because it is the rich who run the economy.

It is easy to see how this plays out in policies that directly favor Wall Street, corporations, and the wealthy. But we see it even in policies that appear to be more liberal and equitable.

The CARES Act, for example, provided free testing for coronavirus, but not treatment. It offered unemployment insurance for some who’ve lost their jobs, but not living wages for those still working. It identified essential workers, but didn’t secure them essential protections.

The failure to fully care for workers and the poor is the flip side of the belief that the rich will construct a healthy economy out of this crisis. We see it directly as politicians slash money from public programs during this crisis while refusing to touch the accumulated wealth of the few.

In New York state, Gov. Andrew Cuomo passed an austerity budget that will cut $400 million from the state’s hospitals. In Philadelphia, Mayor Jim Kenney revised the city’s five-year budget to include government layoffs, salary cuts, and cuts to public services. Neither Cuomo’s nor Kenney’s budget made the proactive decision to tax the wealthy.

The same is true in Washington state, where Gov. Jay Inslee has been cutting hundreds of millions from state programs, anticipating major declines in tax revenue. This in a state that’s home to two of the wealthiest people in the world, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Of course, the rich are not the driving economic force in the country. It has become crystal clear during this pandemic that poor people, including frontline workers, actually fuel this economy. “We may not run this country,” said Rev. Claudia de la Cruz back in 2018, “but we make it run.”

But now we see the early rumblings of people coming together to assert this reality and challenge our faith in the rich.

Health-care workers, students, child-care givers, food-service workers, big-box-store employees, delivery drivers, mail carriers, and others are taking action to call out gross inequities and organize our society differently. Demands to cancel rent and to secure housing for all, universal health care, living wages, guaranteed incomes, and the right to unions are being heard all across the country.

Meeting these demands would not only secure the lives and livelihoods of millions of people — it would begin to release our economy from the suffocating grasp of the wealthy and powerful. Instead of waiting for wealth to trickle down, we would revive our economy by raising up the poor.

When you lift from the bottom, everybody rises.

Shailly Gupta Barnes is the policy director for the Kairos Center and the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.