Actually, the official poverty rate in the U.S., as defined by the government, which has used the “Orshansky Poverty Threshholds” measure since 1964, is currently 12.7%. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Current_poverty_rate) But I daresay European countries would still compare favorably by the same measurement. Give me a contrary cite if you can find one. (See the same page for discussions of the various ways proposed to define the “poverty level”.)
Suppose you were elected president and you resolved, within your first term, to significantly reduce the number of Americans living in poverty, however defined. Assume further that, whatever you decide to do, you can get Congress to back it. What would you do? Would you do what LBJ did in his “War on Poverty” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_poverty) (which by some accounts failed only because the Vietnam War sucked away the necessary funding for it), or would you try something else? What do you think would work?
First of all, a workable poverty baseline would be needed. You can’t know the dimensions of the problem without measuring it.
The implications of this become obvious when you consider that France considers 7.5% of its citizens to live in poverty, yet their unemployment rate tops 10%. I don’t think these numbers can be squared with each other at all.
I think a person can be considered to be out of poverty when they have a sufficiently high income to support a modest lifestyle, are employed, and aren’t on government assistance. Pensions to the aged or disability payments would be an exception to this rule.
I read once that France’s fierce labor unions have secured uemployed workers long-term unemployment compensation that might be close to half what they earned when working. If that is true, one might conceivably live on that without being poor.
Why should “not on government assistance” be essential to the definition? If A gets X dollars a year from the state and Y gets the same amount from his parents’ trust fund, there is no moral or economic difference between them, at least as far the source of their income goes (although Y’s general prospects in life are probably much better in the long run).
But never mind all that. Suppose you’ve arrived at some figure which you are reasonably satisfied represents the level of poverty in America, and you are resolved to reduce that figure significantly by the end of your term, as your number-one, make-or-break, success-defining goal. What do you do?
Doesn’t this pretty much mean that ‘poverty’ will never go away? There will always be someone below this level. Does that mean, though, that the person below this level can’t take care of his personal needs and requires someone else to help him improve his condition?
Health care is probably the first thing to address. Much of our poverty is caused by our health care “system”, and a lack of health care is the most pressing problem for the poor. To be honest, you aren’t likely to starve to death in America, but it’s extremely possible to die an easily preventable death because of a lack of proper screening and treatment.
Then comes the harder problem- schools. First, we need some better way to fund them than by local property tax. I recognize the arguments for tying schools to property tax, but it is one of the biggest factors in the “cycle of poverty.” Poor kids go to poor schools. The disparity is amazing. I can walk a mile north to a school with a full lineup of honors classes, enough money to buy stuff like two dozen breathalyzers to use at the doors of school dances, and a college rate of nearly 100%. Coincidentally, this school is the only nearly all-white school you will find in the area. I can walk two miles south to a definitive inner city school, where sometimes you can’t use the rooms after heavy rains because the roof is bad. There are hardly any electives, much less honors classes, offered. Councillors there consider it a success when a kid graduates. Anyway, the point is, that we can have no such thing as equality of opportunity when some kids are damned to the worst schools in the nation by virtue of where their parents live.
I also think we should start a teacher-corps. Take kids from bad schools. Offer to pay them a full-ride scholarship if they promise three years service as a teacher in their neighborhood. Make it a lot like the education opportunities offered by the military. Right now there are programs to help you pay back loans if you teach in inner city schools, but this doesn’t help the people that never made it to college in the first place. The best people to teach in inner cities are those that know the inner city. And the best way to improve a neighborhood is to start on the ground- by convincing their bright educated people to stay a while and try to improve things.
Then comes the rest- taking care of seniors, figuring out how to deal with childcare for single working parents, getting some basic credit education in the schools, ramping up sex ed and contraceptive availibility, making drug rehab programs availible (did you know you have to get on a years long list if you want help getting off heroin?), and reigning in college tuition costs. Most of the poor are seniors, children, and working people. There is no reason for this in a country with this much prosperty. We can take care of our helpless. We can make sure that working for a living means you’ll get a living out of it. It is entirely within our reach to make poverty a rare thing that truly reflects on a person’s choice.
Change our healthcare system drastically, institute a single payer system that covers everyone.
Slowly raise the minimum wage to about $8/hr
Offer those below the poverty line the ability to do minor work on the side for the government (maybe 10 hours a week at $8/hr) doing things like cleaning streets
Offer subsidized daycare and shelter to poor people
Change the poverty line so that it isn’t 3x what families spend on food.
I suppose you could launch several rapid attacks on the various inner cities and rural areas of the country using heavy armor and artillary, closely supported by air strikes and Special Forces raids. Most likely it wouldn’t be that difficult, especially if you had surprise on your side. I’d probably stage up at maybe 5 or 6 ‘secret’ locations in the various regions of the country, infiltrate in my SF teams for recon, then launch a simultaneous attack across the nation. Also, target the various poverty leaders for assasination or capture. After a few days fighting I expect most of the poor to surrender, so then round them up and put then in ‘re-education’ camps and declair victory. The War on Poverty would thus be short, sharp and over with quickly enough.
That wouldn’t constitute a war (unless they resisted…and that might simply be an uprising). Besides, based on BG’s definition of poverty ‘“poverty” means a family income at least 50 percent below the mean personal income in the nation as a whole’, eventually there would be no one left in the US at all (well, maybe one n the end).
Not necessarily. Even under a more-or-less free-market system, there is nothing theoretically impossible about a society where practically nobody has an income below 50% of the median income.
See link in OP for discussion of differing measures of poverty.
I would attack the unemployed, first by shelling their homes, and then, when they run out into the streets, mowing them down with machine-gun fire. And then, releasing the vultures.
I realize these views are unpopular, but I have never courted popularity.
War on Poverty? Hell, how do y’all think we became the richest, most powerful nation on the planet? Not by coddling the poor. We need poor people to be poor, so we can be rich! If nobody’s poor, then nobody’s rich, get it? If nobody’s rich, then who’s going to run all the companies? Politicians won’t have anyone to listen to! All this nonsense about abolishing poverty is just that. Why kill the golden goose?
"According to the definition preferred by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “poverty” means a family income at least 50 percent below the mean personal income in the nation as a whole."
It is theoretically possible for everyone to be above that “poverty” level. A perfect example would be if everybody had the exact same income.
However, that definition has no bearing whatsoever on a level of income adequate to live a “reasonable” “normal” existence in any given country.
Let’s say I just sent a gift of $10,000 to my brother-in-law’s family in Mexico (and he spent it so it’s just like income if not technically so). Does that mean everybody else’s standard of living just went down?
While this could be important, I think it would be a bad idea to do as a stage 1 proposal. Here’s why: It’s long been known that quite a number of relatively poor schools, particularly rural ones, do quite well. OTOH, even well-funded urban schools often do quite poorly.
Because of this, I think we need to clean up the school system, and that shouldn’t start with financial ruckus. One crisis at a time.
In order to change this, I believe we ought to do the following (on a state-by-state level).
Establish education commissars for troubled school districts. Definitions may vary from state to state, but in general, the legislature will take note of failing schools. The commissar has power to fire, even tenured teachers. The commissar’s primary mission, however, is to take a look at failing schools and “encourage” them to shape up. Or else.
Reaffirm the principal’s role. The principal is to keep order, period. If he must insitute a strict dress code, fine. proper order and decorum is essential to proper learning. In other districts it may be OK for kids to dress down and act casual, but in failing ones it’s a luxury you can’t afford. Since these are primarily urban districts, we also need the cities to cough up extra money for counseling, tutoring, and so on.
It would really help if they changed the way they teach things. Right now, education in America just plain sucks, by and large. Kids need to be challenged, and they need to be challenged deeply and consistently. More to the point, teachers need to capture and hold student’s interest. Also, block scheduling should be abolished until the school systems have an actual reason for it. Thus far, I’ve seen very few of them ever use it with a reason other than “It makes scheduling easier.” That is unacceptable. They are not there for comfort.
For as much as I argue with you, we must share the same kind of sense of humor. The war on terror. We fight the poor in the aire. We will fight the poor on the beaches…
We’ve had suggestions about health care and education – what about jobs? There was a time when the U.S. economy offered lots of high-paid, low skill manufacturing jobs – that’s mostly gone now, due to a combination of technological unemployment, industrial restructuring, and outsourcing. So, under contemporary conditions, what can we do to provide steady, gainful employment to the poor? Qualifications aside, what do we do if not enough jobs for all of them are available? Is there a way to provide jobs outside the market system, without simply paying people to, in effect, dig holes and fill them up again?
A lot of people, especially kids, are kept in a cycle of poverty because of the effects of drugs on neighborhoods. Parents get addicted and then blow all their money and focus their attention on the drugs rather than managing the home.
I think it is clear that we first need a War On Dr… Oh, wait, nevermind.
We don’t ‘need’ the poor to keep us rich. That’s just silly. If the poor were more productive, they would contribute more to the aggregate wealth of the country, and we would all be richer.
What we do need is the possibility of being poor if you do not work and create wealth. We need that as an incentive for people to get off their asses and go to work and contribute to society. Without the possibility of poverty, there will be many people who simply refuse to work. Therefore, a ‘war on poverty’ either has to accept a drastic reduction in economic output, or set up new regulations to force people to work when they no longer choose to do so willingly.
It would be great if the ‘war on poverty’ would start from an understanding of reality - the poor are poor simply because in any large group of people, some will be better, luckier, harder working, or smarter than others. Any characteristic of a diverse population is going to fall on a bell curve. If you did a ‘do-over’ tomorrow and redistributed all the wealth equally among the people, within a generation you would once again have rich and poor people.
Too many people approach the ‘war on poverty’ as a one-time fix. If only we could educate the poor. Or if only we could give them more welfare spending. If only the minimum wage were higher. If only there were more worker protections. If only CEOs didn’t make so much. If only the rich were taxed more.
Look at what’s happening in France today, and you see the result of this denial of reality. France has very generous social programs. France has far more worker protections and regulations than does the U.S. Has any of this eliminated French poverty? Or even reduced it? Or has it made it worse?
When you deny reality and just keep shovelling money from the most productive members of society to the least productive, all you wind up doing is killing economic growth. The poor don’t suddenly become more productive. In fact, giving them more money reduces the incentive for them to be productive. And higher taxes on the productive give them an incentive to be less productive. In the meantime, heavy-handed regulations meant to ‘protect’ workers often have a perverse blowback in that they kill job creation and create ‘featherbedding’ in which the workers who deserve protection the least gain the most benefit, at the expense of the ones who work the hardest.
The result is a disintigration of the social fabric, resentment of the citizenry towards those who benefit from government and those who pay, and a moribund economy that creates more poverty.
So, what should a ‘war on poverty’ look like? First, it’s time the left dropped the notion that equality of outcome is possible, or even desirable. Instead, the focus should be on equality of opportunity. Identify those areas where the poor lack opportunity to engage in the economy with everyone else, and work to improve them. Job training, educational opportunity… Hell, even free haircuts and loaner suits for job interviews. Make sure the poor have a chance to get a foothold on the economic ladder. Once they are on it, it’s up to them to make their own way.
Along with that, I support social programs that prevent the truly destitute from starving or going without critical medical attention. In a rich society, the ‘bottom’ should not be a cardbox box for a home in an alley somewhere. If for no other reason that to maintain a civil society, the poor should be given at least enough that they have a roof over their heads, their kids have clothing and a school to go to, and reasonable nutrition. IMO, we already do that today, and more.
It should also be pointed out that while their will always be ‘poor’ people, that’s only because we tend to measure our wealth in comparison with others in our society, not on some absolute scale. That’s why there will always be poverty. The poor in America today generally live about as well as the middle class did in the 1940’s and 1950’s. If you drive down 50 year old streets in my city, the first thing that jumps out at you is how small the houses are. That’s because the middle class 50 years ago generally lived in a house that was perhaps 1000 square feet in size. Today, it’s almost double that. I can remember when a real sign of wealth was if you had more than one TV, or more than one car. Today, families on my middle class street often have two or three cars, and maybe four (the kid has one, mom and dad each have one, and there might be a sports car for the summer or an RV). And the health care available in free clinics or under medicaid today is vastly superior to what was available 50 years ago.
So 50 years from now people will still be ‘poor’, but the poor will probably have at least twice the purchasing power of the poor today.
Or else what? We abolish them and let the children run free in packs? We fire everyone in the building and replace them with who? “Or else” solutions to complex problems don’t work.
Ah, no. That’s one part of a principal’s role, and one that a good principal manages to successfully delegate to the assistiant principals. A principal also must recuit great talent, montior all the other administrative functions (e.g, keep the counseling and attendance offices in line), foster community relations (and this MATTERS), and oversee the budget, among other things.
Yes, and medical science needs to find a way to cure all diseases and, more to the point, get rid of all the nasty side effects of their treatment. There is no easy way to accomplish this. If there were, we’d be doing it. We’re trying. If you think more talented people could do a better job, find a way to get them into the profession.
I am no fan of block scheduling (though there are better arguements for it than that), but I think it’s a hangnail on the terminal cancer patient that is American education.
