“A Story About How We Treat The Poor”: Sometimes, Race Is More Distraction Than Explanation
Dear white people:
As you no doubt know, the water crisis in Flint, Mich., returned to the headlines last week with news that the state attorney general is charging three government officials for their alleged roles in the debacle. It makes this a convenient moment to deal with something that has irked me about the way this disaster is framed.
Namely, the fact that people who look like you often get left out of it.
Consider some of the headlines:
The Racist Roots of Flint’s Water Crisis — Huffington Post
How A Racist System Has Poisoned The Water in Flint — The Root
A Question of Environmental Racism — The New York Times
As has been reported repeatedly, Flint is a majority black city with a 41 percent poverty rate, so critics ask if the water would have been so blithely poisoned, and if it would have taken media so long to notice, had the victims been mostly white.
It’s a sensible question, but whenever I hear it, I engage in a little thought experiment. I try to imagine what happened in Flint happening in Bowie, a city in Maryland where blacks outnumber whites, but the median household income is more than $100,000 a year and the poverty rate is about 3 percent. I can’t.
Then I try to imagine it happening in Morgantown, West Virginia, where whites outnumber blacks, the median household income is about $32,000 a year, and the poverty rate approaches 40 percent — and I find that I easily can. It helps that Bowie is a few minutes from Washington, D.C., while Morgantown is more than an hour from the nearest city of any size.
My point is neither that race carries no weight nor that it had no impact on what happened in Flint. No, my point is only that sometimes, race is more distraction than explanation. Indeed, that’s the story of our lives.
To be white in America is to have been sold a bill of goods that there exists between you and people of color a gap of morality, behavior, intelligence and fundamental humanity. Forces of money and power have often used that perceived gap to con people like you into acting against their own self-interest.
In the Civil War, white men too poor to own slaves died in grotesque numbers to protect the “right” of a few plutocrats to continue that despicable practice. In the Industrial Revolution, white workers agitating for a living wage were kept in line by the threat that their jobs would be given to “Negroes.” In the Depression, white families mired in poverty were mollified by signs reading “Whites Only.”
You have to wonder what would happen if white people — particularly, those of modest means — ever saw that gap for the fiction it is? What if they ever realized you don’t need common color to reach common ground? What if all of us were less reflexive in using race as our prism, just because it’s handy?
You see, for as much as Flint is a story about how we treat people of color, it is also — I would say more so — a story about how we treat the poor, the way we render them invisible. That was also the story of Hurricane Katrina. Remember news media’s shock at discovering there were Americans too poor to escape a killer storm?
Granted, there is a discussion to be had about how poverty is constructed in this country; the black poverty rate is higher than any other with the exception of Native Americans, and that’s no coincidence. But it’s equally true that, once you are poor, the array of slights and indignities to which you are subjected is remarkably consistent across that racial gap.
That fact should induce you — and all of us — to reconsider the de facto primacy we assign this arbitrary marker of identity. After all, 37 percent of the people in Flint are white.
But that’s done nothing to make their water clean.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, April 24, 2016
”People At The Far Ends Of The Economic Ladder”: Why Are Poor Americans Dying So Much Earlier Than Rich Americans?
For a poor woman born in the Roaring Twenties, getting to age 50 was something of an accomplishment. She had to contend with diphtheria and tuberculosis, hookworm and polio, not to mention childbirth, which killed about 800 women for every 100,000 births at the beginning of the decade. Widespread use of penicillin to treat infections was still 20 years away; Medicaid, four decades. If she did make it to 50, on average she would live to be 80 years old. That sounds pretty good, until you consider that the richest women born at the same time lived about four years longer.
Americans have become much healthier since then, generally speaking, thanks to scientific advances, higher living standards, better education, and social programs. Life expectancy hit a record high in 2012. But as with economic prosperity, gains in physical health haven’t been spread equally. Instead, they’ve been increasingly skewed towards the wealthy—and a new analysis from the Brookings Institution indicates gaps in lifespan between the rich and the poor are getting worse, not better.
Using data from the Social Security Administration and other government records, the report compares the lifespan of people born in 1920 and in 1940 who were in either the top or bottom ten percent of wage earners. It turns out that rich men born in 1940 can expect to live 12 years longer than the poorest, compared to a six-year gap between rich and poor men born in 1920. The disparity in life expectancy between women at the top and bottom more than doubled, growing from four to ten years. In fact, women at the bottom saw no increase at all in their life expectancy. The difference continued to grow between rich and poor people born in 1950.
The Brookings analysis “adds to a growing body of evidence that there is a widening gap in health between the haves and have-nots in the country,” said Steven Woolf, director of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. It’s been clear for some time that how long Americans live depends on how much money they have, even their zip codes. What the Brookings study adds is evidence of the problem getting steadily worse.
As for how socioeconomic inequalities translate into inequities in life span, “It’s rather mysterious,” said Lisa Berkman, the director of the Center for Population and Development Studies at Harvard University. One answer is that low-income people tend to be sicker in the first place, because the neighborhoods they can afford to live in are more polluted; because they can’t afford to adopt and maintain healthy behaviors; because they can’t afford health insurance premiums, copayments, and prescription drugs.
Woolf accounts much of the disparity in death rates to what he calls “stress-related conditions.” People who aren’t secure economically are likely to experience high levels of stress, which studies have linked to shorter lifespans and a heightened risk of death from strokes, heart attacks, and other illnesses. “We’re seeing a dramatic increase in deaths from opioids, whether we’re talking about prescription painkiller or heroin, but also from suicides, liver disease, and other conditions that I personally feel come from different ways that people are coping, in an unhealthy way, with the stresses that they’re facing in their daily lives,” Woolf said, particularly since the recession. Smoking, the leading cause of preventable death, takes a particularly costly toll on low-income people.
Berkman traces at least some of the stress load on lower-income Americans to changes in the workplace. The 1920s cohort analyzed by the Brookings researchers had their greatest earnings in the 40s and 50s, a time of economic growth and greater equality across the income spectrum. While low-income people born in the 1940s entered a labor market that was less demanding physically, they may also have experienced greater insecurity as wages stagnated, and difficulty balancing work and family life as more women entered the workforce. Unlike many other peer countries with more robust family support, the United States didn’t do much to accommodate the increased challenges facing working parents, Berkman noted. “The second wave of occupational risk are sets of working conditions that are hugely stressful,” she said. “They aren’t so physically stressful, but they’re socially stressful. They’re insecure, they’re inflexible, or they have no ability to balance work and family issues. We need to rethink what occupational health and safety is.”
The point of the Brookings study was to examine how the redistributive impact of Social Security benefits were impacted by lifespan gaps. The report’s authors concluded the disparity
means that high-wage workers will collect pensions for progressively longer periods, even as low-wage workers see little improvement in life expectancy. That gap, when taken together with the rise in average retirement ages since the early 1990s, means the gap between lifetime benefits received by poor and less educated workers and the benefits received by high-income and well educated workers is widening in favor of the higher income workers.
In other words, one of the programs that’s specifically intended to help poor Americans through retirement isn’t really working to their benefit anymore. To Berkman, that suggests the need for reform tailored to different groups—people who’ve worked physically demanding jobs, for instance, need a different sort of retirement security than wealthier people who are in good health able to work longer.
“It’s sort of amazing that people haven’t stood up and said, ‘Oh my god, what are we doing?” Berkman said. “What are we doing to not a small part of our country, but the bottom third, maybe even the bottom half?”
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, February 18, 2016
“The Poor Are Bad And Irresponsible People”: The Grotesque Moral Atrocity Of Blaming The Poor For Being Poor
The Republican Party has long struggled with how to package its blatantly pro-rich policy portfolio of top-heavy tax cuts and deregulation. Such things are deeply unpopular — even self-identified Republicans are divided on whether the rich pay their fair share of taxes — but the GOP’s wealthy donor class demands them.
Thus far in the 2016 presidential race, candidates have basically landed on the George W. Bush formula: Sweeten your handouts to the wealthy with far smaller ones for the rest of Americans, and sell it with utterly preposterous promises of 50 zillion percent growth. Jeb Bush promises a growth rate not achieved since FDR started his term at the very bottom of the Great Depression and ended it at the peak of World War II mega-spending. Donald Trump promises half again as much as that.
Marco Rubio has one small change from the usual formula. Sure, he’s got the typical titanic handouts for the rich — incredibly, including the total abolishment of the capital gains tax. But he’s also got new welfare spending for middle-class families. However, in a sad demonstration of the conservative mindset, the poor are deliberately excluded from Rubio’s plan.
Here’s how Rubio’s new welfare benefit works: It’s a non-refundable tax credit of up to $2,500 for people with children — meaning unlike the Earned Income Tax Credit, it gives nothing to people who already have no federal tax liability. This means that the average lower-middle-class family — as Matt Bruenig calculates, ironically including households like the one Rubio grew up in — would receive nothing whatsoever from the credit.
Cutting out the poor is surely intentional, and the reason is obvious: Many conservatives basically think the poor are bad and irresponsible people who have made stupid, disgusting choices — particularly having kids outside of marriage — that put them in the place they are today. Hence, giving the poor welfare will merely short-circuit the process of bourgeois norm-formation at the root of their actual problems. Government handouts will just turn the poor into shiftless parasites.
If you spend much time in conservative comment sections, or among the #tcot crowd, then this idea will be extremely familiar. But even high-minded policy elites will own up to it on occasion. Robert Stein, the original creator of Rubio’s tax credit, told me it is “not designed to encourage fertility in the poor over and above what we already do.” W. Bradford Wilcox, another conservative thinker, wrote that he made a similar tax credit proposal non-refundable to “reduce the possibility that an expanded [child tax credit] might encourage single-parenthood.” Charles Murray has written several books wholly premised on poor-blaming, the most influential of which was probably 1984’s Losing Ground, which argued for abolishing welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, housing subsidies, and disability insurance (a tiny fraction of which might be replaced).
Indeed, until fairly recently, poor-blaming was mainstream Democratic Party thinking, too. Murray’s book was hugely influential on the right, but Democrats embraced it as well. In 1993, President Bill Clinton said in an interview that Murray’s analysis was “essentially correct,” recounting how a classroom of children once agreed with the idea that welfare would increase single parenthood. (I should note that while he pummeled the very poor, to his credit President Clinton also passed a sizable expansion of the EITC, which boosted benefits for poor people a bit higher on the income ladder.) Until the early 2000s, Hillary Clinton would routinely say similar things, boasting about how after welfare reform, recipients were “no longer deadbeats,” or that they had transitioned “from dependency to dignity,” as Buzzfeed News reports.
Now to be fair, Bill Clinton noted that while he agreed with Murray’s prediction about policy mechanics, whether it would be morally correct to starve people out of single motherhood was the more important question. But it turns out Murray was wrong about both points, as he was about just about everything else in his book. Welfare reform did nothing to halt the long decline of marriage, which has been steadily eroding for decades, nor did it decrease the rate of single motherhood. On the contrary, as is seen in many other developed nations, a big fraction of children are now born to cohabiting couples who are neither married nor poor.
Welfare reform, in fact, didn’t do much but snatch money from very poor families with children, increasing the fraction of people living in extreme poverty by 150 percent.
Many conservatives and ’90s-vintage Clintonites imagine that most poor people are an unchanging core of working-age adults who are too busy having constant unprotected sex to go out and get jobs, but in reality, over 80 percent of them are either children, disabled, students, or involuntarily unemployed, constantly churning in and out of poverty. These people are poor because they generally can’t work. In a purely capitalist economic system, such people will always fall through the cracks. Neither work requirements for cash benefits nor Paul Ryan’s goofy “life plan” paternalism will conjure up jobs for 5-year-olds or the seriously mentally ill.
It’s also important to note that traditional welfare was a small program targeted at the very poor — the rest of the welfare state, notably Social Security (by far the largest anti-poverty program), Medicare, and Medicaid, has survived largely intact. So while welfare reform was a grotesque moral atrocity, it didn’t much affect the ongoing war on poverty, which has been a big, if incomplete, success.
But welfare reform does make a good test case. We can predict what will happen if Rubio gets to fulfill his desire to “reform” the rest of the welfare state along Clintonesque lines: The number of people in poverty will explode. And after that, conservative policy hacks will construct convoluted theories about how a decline in traditional marriage norms or something is to blame. The point, always, is to justify and deepen the existing social hierarchy.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, November 3, 2015
“Please Do Not Feed The Animals”: State GOP Equates Food-Stamp Recipients, Wild Animals
On the right, it’s not unusual for conservatives to take great offense to accusations that they don’t like people in poverty. It’s not personal, Republicans argue; their opposition to social-insurance programs is about conservative economic theory and the scope of government. There’s no animosity or ill will.
But once in a while, evidence to the contrary rips off the mask. The NBC affiliate in Oklahoma City reported today:
The Oklahoma Republican Party is under fire after a controversial Facebook post.
In the post, the Oklahoma GOP compared providing food stamp benefits for Americans in need to feeding animals at national parks…. The post has received more than 1,400 comments and 1,600 shares.
The state Republican Party’s message is every bit as offensive as one might think. It began by saying the federal “food stamp program … is proud to be distributing this year the greatest amount of free Meals and Food Stamps ever.”
It added, “Meanwhile, the National Park Service … asks us “Please Do Not Feed the Animals.” Their stated reason for the policy is because “The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will learn to take care of themselves.”
The Oklahoma GOP concludes, “Thus ends today’s lesson in irony.”
Let’s unwrap the argument, because it’s offensive on more levels than one.
First, the Oklahoma Republican Party believes food-stamp distribution has reached an all-time high. That’s factually incorrect. In fact, GOP lawmakers have already successfully cut food aid to the poor.
Second, comparing poverty-stricken families to wild animals suggests that for some Republicans, hostility towards the poor is personal. It is about animosity and ill will. Forget the high-minded explanations about economic theory – equating the poor and wild animals is evidence of contempt.
And third, that’s not what “irony” means.
ThinkProgress noted that the state GOP took down the post, posting a classic non-apology apology in which the Oklahoma Republican Party said it was sorry “to those who were offended” and “for any misconceptions that were created.”
Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin (R) published a Facebook message of her own, adding that she accepts the state party’s explanation “that he was not intentionally disparaging any group of people.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 14, 2015
“The Insecure American”: Members Of Our Political Elite Seem To Have No Sense Of How The Other Half Lives
America remains, despite the damage inflicted by the Great Recession and its aftermath, a very rich country. But many Americans are economically insecure, with little protection from life’s risks. They frequently experience financial hardship; many don’t expect to be able to retire, and if they do retire have little to live on besides Social Security.
Many readers will, I hope, find nothing surprising in what I just said. But all too many affluent Americans — and, in particular, members of our political elite — seem to have no sense of how the other half lives. Which is why a new study on the financial well-being of U.S. households, conducted by the Federal Reserve, should be required reading inside the Beltway.
Before I get to that study, a few words about the callous obliviousness so prevalent in our political life.
I am not, or not only, talking about right-wing contempt for the poor, although the dominance of compassionless conservatism is a sight to behold. According to the Pew Research Center, more than three-quarters of conservatives believe that the poor “have it easy” thanks to government benefits; only 1 in 7 believe that the poor “have hard lives.” And this attitude translates into policy. What we learn from the refusal of Republican-controlled states to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the bill, is that punishing the poor has become a goal in itself, one worth pursuing even if it hurts rather than helps state budgets.
But leave self-declared conservatives and their contempt for the poor on one side. What’s really striking is the disconnect between centrist conventional wisdom and the reality of life — and death — for much of the nation.
Take, as a prime example, positioning on Social Security. For decades, a declared willingness to cut Social Security benefits, especially by raising the retirement age, has been almost a required position — a badge of seriousness — for politicians and pundits who want to sound wise and responsible. After all, people are living longer, so shouldn’t they work longer, too? And isn’t Social Security an old-fashioned system, out of touch with modern economic realities?
Meanwhile, the reality is that living longer in our ever-more-unequal society is very much a class thing: life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot among the affluent, but hardly at all in the bottom half of the wage distribution, that is, among those who need Social Security most. And while the retirement system F.D.R. introduced may look old-fashioned to affluent professionals, it is quite literally a lifeline for many of our fellow citizens. A majority of Americans over 65 get more than half their income from Social Security, and more than a quarter are almost completely reliant on those monthly checks.
These realities may finally be penetrating political debate, to some extent. We seem to be hearing less these days about cutting Social Security, and we’re even seeing some attention paid to proposals for benefit increases given the erosion of private pensions. But my sense is that Washington still has no clue about the realities of life for those not yet elderly. Which is where that Federal Reserve study comes in.
This is the study’s second year, and the current edition actually portrays a nation in recovery: in 2014, unlike 2013, a substantial plurality of respondents said that they were better off than they had been five years ago. Yet it’s startling how little room for error there is in many American lives.
We learn, for example, that 3 in 10 nonelderly Americans said they had no retirement savings or pension, and that the same fraction reported going without some kind of medical care in the past year because they couldn’t afford it. Almost a quarter reported that they or a family member had experienced financial hardship in the past year.
And something that even startled me: 47 percent said that they would not have the resources to meet an unexpected expense of $400 — $400! They would have to sell something or borrow to meet that need, if they could meet it at all.
Of course, it could be much worse. Social Security is there, and we should be very glad that it is. Meanwhile, unemployment insurance and food stamps did a lot to cushion unlucky families from the worst during the Great Recession. And Obamacare, imperfect as it is, has immensely reduced insecurity, especially in states whose governments haven’t tried to sabotage the program.
But while things could be worse, they could also be better. There is no such thing as perfect security, but American families could easily have much more security than they have. All it would take is for politicians and pundits to stop talking blithely about the need to cut “entitlements” and start looking at the way their less-fortunate fellow citizens actually live.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 29, 2015
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