A
piece from the Washington Post I just came across by Premilla Nadasen
lays out the rise of extreme poverty in the U.S. in our era. Thanks to
the shredding of the safety net and the rise of inequality in recent
decades, the U.S. has the lowest rate of social mobility and the highest
rate of child poverty in the developed world. Now, there's something
to be proud of as 2017 ends! Tom
“Finish all your food,” my
mother used to tell me. “There’s a child in Africa who would love to
have that food on your plate.” It was an effective disciplinary
approach, especially because my family is from Africa. But my experience
is not unique. Images of poverty in the “Third World” — then and now —
permeate American society, reassuring us about our country’s ostensible
democratic promise and potential for upward mobility. What economists
call “extreme poverty,” most Americans think, is a distant problem, a
hallmark of the less developed world.
"But could extreme poverty
also be a feature of what is (although perhaps not for long) one of the
richest and most powerful nations in the world? Quite possibly. To
answer the question, the United Nations launched an investigation of
extreme poverty in the United States.
"Philip Alston, the United
Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, has just
wrapped up a 15-day tour of the United States. His team visited
Alabama, California, Puerto Rico, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. The
findings, released last Friday, documented homelessness, unsafe
sanitation and sewage disposal practices, as well as police
surveillance, criminalization and harassment of the poor. The rise in
poverty, they found, disproportionately affects people of color and
women, but also large swaths of white Americans. The report concluded
that the pervasiveness of poverty and inequality “are shockingly at odds
with [the United States’] immense wealth and its founding commitment to
human rights.”
"To be sure, poverty in the United States is not
equivalent to poverty in less developed countries. This has never been a
country free of inequality and poverty, but their rapid growth over the
past two decades has undermined any professed commitment to equal
opportunity or the belief that the nation’s prosperity rests on the
well-being of ordinary Americans.
"In the late 19th and early
20th centuries, unfettered capitalism in the United States led to rapid
economic expansion. This was characterized by widening class disparities
and profound economic insecurity among the poor, a recipe that
contributed to the crisis of the Great Depression.
"Amid this
crisis, our modern welfare state was born. Because of massive
grass-roots protest, politicians and business leaders came to believe
that capitalism would function better — in fact, flourish — if Americans
could be assured a basic standard of living. While the welfare state
primarily benefited and bolstered the white middle class with housing
and education assistance, it also uplifted many of the poor (both white
and nonwhite) through Social Security for the elderly, monthly stipends
for single mothers and the disabled, and a minimum wage for workers. The
safety net was later expanded to include food stamps, public housing
and health care.
"Although unequal and stigmatizing, public
assistance successfully kept most people out of extreme poverty. The
welfare state fueled post-World War II economic growth, strengthened
consumer capitalism by putting money in the hands of the middle and
working classes, and upheld the promise (if not always the reality) of
upward mobility through access to education and a modicum of economic
security.
"But since the 1970s, the safety net has been
diminished considerably. Labor regulations protecting workers have been
rolled back, and funding for education and public programs has declined.
The poor have been the hardest hit. With welfare reform in 1996, poor
single parents with children now have a lifetime limit of five years of
assistance and mandatory work requirements. Some states require
fingerprinting or drug testing of applicants, which effectively
criminalizes them without cause. The obstacles to getting on welfare are
formidable, the benefits meager. The number of families on welfare
declined from 4.6 million in 1996 to 1.1 million this year. The decline
of the welfare rolls has not meant a decline in poverty, however.
"Instead, the shredding of the safety net led to a rise in poverty.
Forty million Americans live in poverty, nearly half in deep poverty —
which U.N. investigators defined as people reporting income less than
one-half of the poverty threshold. The United States has the highest
child poverty rates — 25 percent — in the developed world. Then there
are the extremely poor who live on less than $2 per day per person and
don’t have access to basic human services such as sanitation, shelter,
education and health care. These are people who cannot find work, who
have used up their five-year lifetime limit on assistance, who do not
qualify for any other programs or who may live in remote areas. They are
disconnected from both the safety net and the job market.
"In
addition to the reduction of public assistance and social services, the
rise in extreme poverty can also be attributed to growing inequality. To
quote the U.N. report: “The American Dream is rapidly becoming the
American Illusion, as the U.S. … now has the lowest rate of social
mobility of any of the rich countries.” In 1981, the top 1 percent of
adults earned on average 27 times more than the bottom 50 percent of
adults. Today the top 1 percent earn 81 times more than the bottom 50
percent...."
The rising rate of homelessness in places like
San Diego is one of the signs of growing poverty in the United States.
(Gregory Bull/AP)
