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.

Ebony Slaughter-Johnson: Expanding poverty won't make America great

This summer, U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty Philip Alston presented his observations on the state of international poverty to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The country at the center of his most recent report wasn’t a developing one — it was the United States. In one of the wealthiest countries.  Alston found, many Americans live without access to water and public sewage services.

More alarmingly, at a time when 40 million Americans live in poverty — including over 5 million experiencing “developing world” levels of poverty — congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump are jeopardizing access to the social safety net for millions, the report concluded.

Exacerbating poverty won’t “Make America Great” for anyone.

For instance, health care, which is already prohibitively expensive, could become more so. A new rule allowing small businesses to buy plans without certain “essential health benefits” required by the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is expected to increase insurance costs for people who need those benefits.

Even now, ACA premiums are increasing thanks to the president’s decision to stop sharing costs with insurers.

Rising out-of-pocket costs and premiums could either push the poor out of the market or force them to contend with even higher medical expenses. And by encouraging people to opt out of pricier plans, that leaves those who remain insured confronting higher costs, and subsequent financial insecurity, themselves.

Lack of insurance either drives the uninsured into hospital emergency rooms, where they face more expensive treatment they have no hope of affording, or promises an amplified public health crisis. In a December report, Alston recalled encountering poor Americans who had lost all of their teeth because they lacked access to dental health care.

The social safety net, which plays a crucial role in reducing poverty among children, is also under threat.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) alone kept 3.8 million children and 2.1 million children out of poverty and “deep poverty,” respectively, in 2014. The Center for American Progress calculated that childhood poverty alone stunts economic output by $170 billion each year and deprives the economy of $500 billion each year.

More importantly, poverty is morally reprehensible, subjecting children to a lifetime of harm. It portends adverse health consequences, limited educational achievement, and lower rates of employment. Yet SNAP is on the chopping block for the House Farm Bill.

Poverty has also been shown to make communities fertile breeding grounds for abuse by law enforcement.

America’s homeless have been among those most vulnerable to this abuse. Instead of addressing homelessness with increased access to affordable housing, however, the Trump administration has suggested cuts to rental assistance programs. These cuts could push more Americans into homelessness — and then into the criminal justice system.

Across the country, homeless Americans are arrested and hit with an avalanche of fines and fees simply for trying to survive. The criminalization of homelessness deepens the poverty of the homeless and creates a criminal justice system that discriminates against the poor. No one benefits.

Fortunately, such hostility to the poor has been met with a wave of progressive activism.

Only a day after Alston presented his report, the Poor People’s Campaign rallied in front of the Capitol Building to cap six weeks of anti-poverty advocacy. Lawmakers are already following the campaign’s lead: Several influential senators and representatives recently heard testimony from struggling Americans.

Anti-poverty measures also featured prominently in the winning campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is likely to become the next congresswoman for New York’s 14th District.

As Republicans pursue policies that make American poverty a global concern, at least some progressives are preparing to fight back.

Ebony Slaughter-Johnson is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Mona Younis: On poverty, Americans' low expectations of their government

Homeless man in Boston.

From OtherWords.org

Are we Americans unworthy? That’s certainly the message we’re getting from our government.

Over 40 percent of us are poor or low-income. How is that possible in the wealthiest country in history?

“The United States is alone among developed countries in insisting that while human rights are of fundamental importance,” explains U.N. rapporteur on poverty Philip Alston, “they do not include rights that guard against dying of hunger, dying from a lack of access to affordable health care, or growing up in a context of total deprivation.”

Alston says that “the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power” — which means that “with political will, it could readily be eliminated.” Unfortunately, our government’s political will is increasingly exercised to make things more, not less, difficult for us.

Most Americans don’t know it, but in 1977 the U.S. actually signed an international treaty called the U.N. Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which mandates government responsibility to ensure their citizens do more than merely survive. Unfortunately, one

U.S. administration after the other has completely disregarded it, and Congress never ratified it.

Our leaders have apparently judged that we either don’t need — or don’t deserve — things like an adequate standard of living and universal health care. As one dizzy U.S. congressman,  Idaho Republican Raul Labrador claims, “Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.”

164 countries have ratified the treaty, but ours won’t. Are their people more deserving than we are? Is it something we’ve done?

It can’t be because we’re doing fine without those rights.

I mean, look at our minimum wage. There isn’t a “single county or metropolitan area,” as a Guardian report put it, where a minimum wage can get you a “modest two-bedroom home, which the federal government defines as paying less than 30 percent of a household’s income for rent and utilities.”

The price we pay for this disregard for our fundamental human rights begins at the beginning of our lives. Indeed, many of us struggle to survive to our first birthday. Citing figures from the Centers for Disease Control, the Washington Post declared our infant mortality rate “a national embarrassment,” noting that it’s higher “than any of the other 27 wealthy countries.”

That’s painful enough. But they went on: “Despite health care spending levels that are significantly higher than any other country in the world, a baby born in the U.S. is less likely to see his first birthday than one born in Hungary, Poland, or Slovakia. Or in Belarus. Or in Cuba, for that matter.”

Sad!

And a recent UNICEF assessment of how children are faring found the U.S. near the bottom of 41 rich countries when it came to meeting goals on child poverty, hunger, health, and education.

Tragic!

Well, there’s an important difference between us and other prosperous countries: Their citizens expect and demand more of their governments than we do of ours. And governments do only as much as their citizens expect — not more! So why do we accept so little from ours? How have we come to deem ourselves less worthy than others?

Mona Younis is a human rights advocate. 

Chris Powell: Connecticut's state government helps create urban poverty

For many years state government has been obsessed with making taxes and spending add up without much regard to what government actually produces.

Few in authority have noticed that despite the desperate efforts with arithmetic, Connecticut has been declining steadily. While the state auditors of public accounts often expose the ordinary management failures of particular agencies, no one in authority has tried to audit Connecticut on a comprehensive scale.

But a few months ago a scholar with the Manhattan Institute, Stephen D. Eide, working with the Yankee Institute, Connecticut's foremost public-policy research organization, produced a few lines of data that may be all the audit Connecticut needs.

For a study titled "Connecticut's Broken Cities," Eide took U.S. Census Bureau figures for Connecticut's four largest cities -- Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and Waterbury -- to calculate the changes in the poverty of their populations from 1970 to 2014.

Eide found that poverty had exploded. Hartford's population fell 21 percent but its number of poor people rose by 56 percent. New Haven's population fell 5 percent but the number of its poor rose 41 percent. Bridgeport's population fell 6 percent but the number of its poor rose 86 percent.. Waterbury's population rose marginally, by 1.7 percent, but its poor rose by an extraordinary 154 percent.

That is, during the last five decades Connecticut's cities have been turned into poverty factories. Government policy has only increased poverty and social disintegration in the cities, not reduced it.

Ordinarily such policy might be considered a catastrophic failure. But since these results have been produced for so long without causing any change in policy or even reconsideration, another possibility must be acknowledged: that Connecticut intends  to create poverty. After all, poverty creates dependence on government; dependence on government creates political power; and administering poverty creates lucrative business for government and its agents in what are called social services and criminal justice.

Eliminating poverty would destroy that political power and lucrative business. Of course poverty has many destructive and unattractive effects, and if the people whose taxes pay for poverty policy saw those effects up close, they might raise questions.

So with exclusionary zoning, dressed up with noble-sounding terms like open space and farmland preservation, and with the concentration of rent subsidies, Connecticut has confined most of its poverty to the cities, largely out of sight.

But now the poverty business -- welfare, child protection, rent subsidies, Medicaid, criminal justice, remedial education and so forth -- along with government employee pensions, are cannibalizing the rest of state government, and the General Assembly and the governor lately have not been able to enact a budget.

Taxpayers  are  noticing. So the managers of the poverty business are raising distractions, trying to deter questions. When the state Education Department's program supplying free meals to schoolchildren during the summer reopened the other day, its executive director said the program is needed because many employers fail to pay a "living wage."

That is, Ronald McDonald, the Burger King and Wendy the Hamburger Girl have induced people to have children they were never prepared to support after they graduated from high school without mastering high school work, confident that government would provide. Kids have to be fed but government itself is making more of their parents unfit to feed them.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Stop manufacturing poverty

MANCHESTER, Conn.

Connecticut's impoverishment continues, as was recognized the other day by Hartford's school system, which decided to offer free breakfast and lunch to all students because more than half of them qualify as impoverished, the federal government will pay for it all, and keeping track of who qualifies and who doesn't is no longer worth the trouble.

It was the right decision -- somebody has to feed the kids, and some schools in Connecticut are already providing not only free breakfast and lunch but dinner as well. Indeed, some schools also are providing medical and dental services to their students, and good for them, since, again, somebody has to.

But this stuff raises urgent questions the rest of government is ignoring: Where are all this poverty and child neglect coming from and how can they be reversed? Why do so many kids today have poor parents or none at all?

How can it be a problem of a lousy economy? The federal and state administrations are both controlled by the "party of the people" and say the economy is great. (Of course that also means poverty no longer can be blamed on anyone named Bush or Reagan.) So what is it exactly and what can be done about it?

Eighty years ago during the Depression the journalist Upton Sinclair ran for governor of California on a platform called End Poverty in California. As Sinclair was a socialist who became a Democrat only to help his candidacy (the technique was not invented by Bernie Sanders), his platform was nationalization of industry, a progressive state income tax, and old-age pensions. Connecticut and the country already have progressive income taxes and the country already has a good Social Security system. As for nationalization, this is not the week to argue for having the entity that runs the state Motor Vehicles Department run everything else as well.

So what should a campaign to end poverty in Connecticut do?

Probably it should inquire into why most poverty in Connecticut is a matter of fatherless families, why 40 percent of the kids being born in the state are being born outside marriage, and why the fatherlessness rate in the cities approaches 90 percent.

Most social science in recent years confirms the huge correlation between childbearing outside marriage and poverty, so ending poverty in Connecticut would begin with understanding what causes this phenomenon and induces people to have kids before gaining a committed spouse and the education and training necessary to earn an income sufficient to support a family. After all, the fatherlessness phenomenon is relatively recent. People began behaving this way in such large numbers only in the last four decades or so, a period corresponding with the vast increase in government financial support for people behaving this way -- cash, food credit cards, medical insurance, housing vouchers, and such.

Of course financial assistance from the government is necessary for people who have encountered unavoidable problems. But what about avoidable problems? What about poverty that is self-inflicted and facilitated by the availability of government assistance for what is really antisocial behavior? Why does government fail to distinguish between such situations?

Government will always get less of what it taxes and more of what it subsidizes. So to end poverty in Connecticut, first government must stop manufacturing it.

Until government stops manufacturing poverty, schools that are providing free meals may not be able to do much more for impoverished students than to have the teachers take the kids home with them at night.

As for why government hasn't realized all this, Sinclair explained it: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." If poverty was ever ended in Connecticut, half of government would be out of business.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer.