The other day, an acquaintance from college posted a YouTube video from the show Judge Judy in which a litigant reveals ways that he has been taking advantage of government services and tax payer money. The video was titled: "Here's who we support with taxes." The comments started from other like-minded individuals who would like nothing more than to rid society of such human beings.
On October 10, 2010, John Stossel (who once touted that he "built his career on unpaid interns") talked on Fox News about "the makers versus the takers." On August 15, Ann Coulter said that welfare is creating "generations of utterly irresponsible animals." On August 18, Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning compared the poor to raccoons. On June 22, Neal Boortz called the poor "parasites." On July 6, he said there is an all-out war between the productive class and the moocher class.
These only scratch the surface of the kind of talk you hear out there; all examples that seem to confirm suspicions of mine about widespread disdain for the poor, a dualistic view of society, and misguided ideas about what tax dollars do. The implicit assumption is clear: whenever government services help people, they are helping lazy people who don't deserve it and they're using your money to do it. One person actually told a friend of mine who ministers with impoverished communities that the best way to take care of those communities is to bomb them out of existence.
First of all, let's be clear: laziness is a universal problem. You find laziness among people of any socio-economic level, so you can't say that laziness = poverty. Before going any further, we've got to pull this discussion of the poor out of the muck.
First, let's economically define poor. There's much more to it than money, and even then there's a lot of debate surrounding it, but for my purposes here, when I say "poor" I mean individuals or families whose income is less than 125% of the 2011 HHS Poverty Threshold. So, for example: the poverty threshold (or "line") for a family of 4 is an annual income of $22,350 (aspe.hhs.gov), and I'm defining a family of 4 as "poor" if they make 125% of that: $27,937 or less. This is very conservative, because it is widely known that the federal poverty guidelines are off by a factor of 2. A family of 4 realistically needs to make twice the amount of the threshold (200%) to keep up with today's cost of living.
So, here we go. Who are "the poor?"
26% of them have a job. How is it possible to have a job and still be poor? For one, the federal minimum wage is obscenely low and is nowhere close to covering the cost of living. Another reason is that the system ends up penalizing people for working. I was told a story of two different people who were each drawing $8000/year in disability, and after they finally found a job at which they could work, they ended up at a financial disadvantage. Is that their fault?40% of the poor are single women and/or single moms. For many of the moms, getting a job would mean having to shell the money right back out in child care costs. 25% are children. 16% are senior citizens (65+).
All in all, roughly 67% of "the poor" either do work, can't work (children), or shouldn't work (elderly). What about the others? Some who only work part-time do so because of physical limitations. Among the poorest of the poor and the homeless, there are physical, emotional, and psychological challenges that contribute greatly to their situation and virtually no employer will touch them.
As David K. Shipler points out in his book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, those who work but can't make ends meet are among the most forgotten and most vulnerable people in society. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, in 2008, 8.9 million adults were "working poor" (those who have a job but whose income is insufficient), which was up 1.4 million just from the previous year. Some have more than one job. 4.5 million family units were living below the poverty level despite having at least one member of the family in the labor force (www.bls.gov).
People just don't seem to understand these realities, especially politicians. On February 25, 2010, during the televised bipartisan summit on the health care bill, Senator John Barrasso (R-WY), a former orthopedic surgeon, was explaining why he thought it would be prudent for people to purchase only catastrophic health insurance and have health savings accounts on the side. President Obama asked him, "Would you feel the same way if you were making $40,000 a year?" Barrasso had a blank stare on his face, and a few minutes later would reiterate his point about the people who could take advantage of a catastrophic health insurance plan, completely ignoring the point about those in lower income brackets. They either don't get it, or they wish everyone who makes less than 6-digit incomes would just go away and stop bothering them. They really operate off of this idea that if the government is helping you, you're a moocher. Tell that to military kids getting their college education while in the service or senior citizens on Medicare.
Are there people who are scamming the system? Yes. Do all of them realize they're scamming the system? I've met people who don't. Are some people irresponsible? Yes. We've all been in the houses of the paycheck-to-paycheck families who have huge, flat-screen TVs and expensive smartphones—which, by the way, can be easily obtained by signing up for one of these pyramid schemes that prey on the desperate and uneducated, or by having an absent, drug-selling father who thinks he's done his part by getting the kids a TV. But let's assume for the sake of argument that the person's gadgets were purchased with money they don't have. Are you assuming that just because your parents taught you money management and how to be responsible that they have the same knowledge? It was eye-opening to me the day a neighbor and mother of 3 came over with all her receipts and bills, asking us to help her learn how to manage her finances. She literally had no idea. No one has taught her. On top of that, I learned in talking to her that she genuinely believes that good parents get their children lots of stuff. When they come home with all the toys, to me, they're being irresponsible. In their minds, they're being loving parents. Are you prepared to help teach them?
We have to understand the difference between an excuse and an explanation, and I'm giving the latter. I once had a conversation with a very poor and struggling single mother. I was visiting her in her home, which one church member described as "a dump." Any and all of the appliances in the house had been donated to her. I asked her, "What are your dreams and hopes for the future?" She said, "I don't know, we're just living." Things like that used to frustrate me, and I would think to myself, "If the poor are going to have that attitude and not plan for the future, then they deserve to be poor." But then I heard the executive director of a local homeless shelter give a speech, and I'll never forget one thing he said: "If I don't know what I'm eating today, I can't plan for tomorrow." In other words, we humans cannot see beyond our unmet needs, and in asking that question, I was asking the single mother to think beyond her unmet needs. Are you prepared to help them? We all want people to be independent. The problem is the myth of equal opportunity. It's just not true that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed if they just try hard enough (see Compassion International's "Poverty Wheel").
As my friend and minister to the poor Wendy McCaig writes in her book, hopelessness abounds in impoverished communities, but transformation can happen when we personally connect with the poor, learn their stories, and offer them a chance to serve others and feel like a person of worth again. In a recent email conversation, Wendy said:
"Most folks do not want to live off the government. Some simply know no other way or are too disabled, under-educated or face too many barriers to move into competitive employment...The answer is creating jobs that give my friends a chance to be productive citizens. AmeriCorps grants allow us to create jobs for people no one else would hire. The jobs we create are jobs that are designed to change the take, take, take culture of our community and turn it into a giving culture. They are very part-time positions but...they do it because they get so much out of giving to others."
I encourage you to read Wendy's book to see how this kind of personal ministry and valuing the other as a person with dreams has transformed people and communities. However, there are still large-scale, systemic things that need to be done that churches, non-profits, and individuals can't sustain. I fear that the current climate is putting lawmakers and policies in place that are only going to make things worse. I explore this in Part 2.
Many thanks to Wendy McCaig for editing and improving this post.
Corey, Thanks for bringing up the issue of this growing "blame" being cast on the poor in this nation. I work in one of the poorest communities in Richmond and while there is fraud in the system it is not the poor who are benefiting. If they were the ones milking the system for large gains, they would obviously not be poor. The fraud I have seen has been organizations who are manipulating the desperate and taking all the profit. It is the large scale medicaid scams and not the single mom drawing TANF that is the real problem. Being a minister working among the poor it is very disheartening to read and hear the kinds of comments you noted. Thank you for revealing how misguided these kinds of comments are.
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