Around town here in Akron, men and women pretty much have staked out major street intersections (some freeway entrance and exit ramps, too). Like mushrooms after a spring rain, they seemed to sprout everywhere overnight. When the traffic lights permit, we glance at poorly lettered cardboard signs bearing summaries of up-ended lives and pleas for cash, work or whatever might flow from the goodness of a stranger’s heart. There’s a chill in the air now, and soon there may be only a hardy few left peddling their stories streetside.
Skeptics look and say it’s a darn good scam if all a person needs to do to haul in quarters and bills is pick up a cardboard sign and a collection plate. The soft-hearted observe the same scene and remind that a nation is judged by the way it responds to the poor. (As a county, Summit appears to have covered the bases, being neither a soft-touch nor a hard-boiled cynic. I learned recently that all the people toting signs at street junctions in the county have been approached by the social services with offers of assistance. If they preferred the street corners, it wasn’t for lack of caring.)
As a practical matter, though, we on the other side of cardboard boxes have a rather complicated relationship with the self-identified poor. How do we know who is poor? And how do we judge who among them is deserving of our individual and collective sympathy and our dime?
I’ve learned it’s the hardest thing with children in the car to try to ignore a person begging for money: “You have money. Let’s give them some because they are poor,” the small, tight voices would plead.
Poor compared to whom? Some 22 years ago, a real estate agent gave us a tour of Akron when we were house-hunting. She showed us the range, ending up in the neighborhood around the zoo and the old Edgewood Homes as one of the city’s poorest (Note that I said old; the neighborhood is nothing like it used to be). It was a quick route to give out-of-state visitors a flavor of the city. We used it ourselves many times later for that purpose, venturing to other neighborhoods as we learned more about the city.
It was after one such trip that a guest declared that Akron didn’t have a slum worth the name. How so? The explanation went something like this: How poor can you be when you have running water (in your house) and electricity? You can drive on the roads. And you say school is free. You don’t have to pay anything. People eat, even if they are poor. How else can people grow fat if they are poor, if they don’t have enough to eat?
Yes, “poor” is relative. Robert Rector, a senior researcher at the Heritage Foundation, for example, makes the argument that poverty in America is not the severe and extensive problem the government and the media have led people to believe.
“A poor child in America,” he writes, “is more likely to have a widescreen plasma television, cable or satelliteTV, a computer and an Xbox or TiVo in his home than he is to be hungry.” Among other statistics he cites, 92 percent of poor households have a microwave; at any one time only one in 70 poor persons is homeless; and in a survey, only one out of five adults said they had been hungry at some point the previous year because they had no money for food. Moreover, the government chips in substantial amounts in cash allowance, housing subsidies, food stamps and health care.
Every September, the Census Bureau publishes a status report on income, poverty and health coverage in America. The latest report, released last week, is as dismal as can be imagined after the economic grind of the past three years. The report said the number of poor people increased to 46.2 million in 2010, 2.6 million more than the year before. It said poverty rose in every demographic group. Black, white, Hispanic, young workers, older workers and children, men and women — no group was spared. Roughly, every seventh American is poor, according to the census data.
And how does the government know? By the relatively simple measure that households that don’t earn enough in a year to afford a base level of essential goods and services need help. Thus, a single person who earns below $10,890 this year is officially in poverty. A household of four with an income below $22,350 is poor.
Is the standard too elastic? Is possessing a microwave, a widescreen TV and a truck or eating three meals a day sufficient to determine who is poor or not poor? Usually, we convey a sense of poverty in other places by referring to the percentage that lives on a $1 or less a day. Poverty is relative, indeed — relative to the standard of living that prevails in a given society. And right now in America, a household would be pretty much deprived to live on 20 bucks a day — with or without a microwave and an Xbox.
Ofobike is the Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.
