I am plotting my survival strategy for the presidential election season. I am working on the principle that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. In political terms, that translates vaguely as: An argument that doesn’t cause you to keel over from a heart attack, just might be absurd enough to tickle your funny bone and preserve your sanity. You could be annoyed unto death, or you could savor the extravagant absurdities in many campaign assertions.
Among the more impassioned arguments I heard a while back during the tea party’s townhall heyday fell in the “government is the problem, not the solution” category. The general gist was relatively simple: Get government involved in anything, and it would just make a royal mess of things.
Health care, of course, was a prime exhibit. (Who wants to “socialize” medicine like Canada or Britain, for heaven’s sake?) And so was education (you know how kids have run wild since the government barged in and took prayer out of schools).
But there was poverty, too. Oh, yes. Why, the government declared war on poverty back in the 1960s and what has happened since? We are not within a mile of winning the “war.” Worse, the war has encouraged dependency, generations of families unused to work, waiting on handouts from taxpayers. According to the count of the Census Bureau this fall, the number of Americans living at or below the official poverty level, topped 47 million.
For all I heard, the government has succeeded in engineering a pretty good racket to increase the numbers of the underserving poor.
An argument becomes absurd to the extent that it takes a transparent truth and stretches it beyond recognition. Let’s grant one simple truth, that there is no way to erase, or end, “poverty.” If you live on $100,000 a year, say, in a community where it takes $500,000 to feed, clothe and keep a roof over your head, you are poor relative to that community. You might be one very wealthy person, with your $100,000, if you lived somewhere else (imagine Haiti, for example). The drawback, though, is that you don’t live there. Being in poverty means lacking the resources necessary to survive in the place where you live.
In that sense, it is absurd to act as if government can “end” poverty — by declaring a war, no less. Still, it is depressing when that realization leads to another absurdity: that government can do nothing and should do nothing to narrow the divide. A war on poverty is not winnable simply because we define poverty upward, morally, as living standards rise.
In a country seething with discontent as we have been in the past four years, I expect the arguments about inequalities — not least among them how we define poverty and count the poor and what we consider the right help for them — will grow more intense in coming months and quite likely to provoke spikes in blood pressure. Or comic relief.
Defining and counting who is poor is controversial as it is. When the Census Bureau releases its annual count, it faces invariably a barrage of criticisms. Critics point out the many flaws that distort understanding of poverty in America as presented in the official report. The count does not take into account the impact of relief programs such as food stamps, tax credits and subsidies for medical care, housing and child care, government assistance that significantly supplement cash income. Neither does the count factor in the cost of expenses such as health care and wide regional differences in the cost of living.
If nothing else, government is pretty good at churning out data. The Census Bureau has released this week a new alternative measure, the Supplementary Poverty Measure, in a bid to provide a more comprehensive and accurate picture. Depending on who is analyzing the data, the new measure shows a modest increase in the poverty rate (up to 16 percent in 2010) or a decrease (13.4 percent) compared to the 15.2 percent poverty rate in the official count in September.
Either way, the point of the exercise is that at least 40 million Americans live at or below a standard that their government considers decent in this country. An analysis released recently by the Brookings Institution indicated that the number of people living in neighborhoods of extreme poverty has increased by about a third since 2000. More than 10 percent of America’s poor live in areas where at least 40 percent of residents are below the poverty line.
As we head into the presidential elections, with Occupy movements around the country raising the issue of growing inequalities, there is an urgency to the question: What does the government — and we the people — do about poverty, other than yell at one another across the divide?
Ofobike is Beacon Journal chief editorial writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3513 or by email at lofobike@thebeaconjournal.com.
