Oh, My, Do We Still Have Poverty?

The grim realities of being poor in America

With the anniversary of Katrina, there has been another blip on the poverty radar screen. It is again fashionable to talk about the poor for this brief, shining moment. The problem is that the American people often seem to think if they anguish over horror stories from the bottom of the economy every year or so, they are no longer complicit in the systems that keep the poor at the bottom.

At other times we like to pretend that things are not really so bad for the poor. E. J. Dionne in today’s WaPo (Perfect Storm for the Poor) brings to light some disturbing figures from the recent census report:

People are considered in deep poverty if they have half or less of the yearly income of those at the poverty line. In 2005 half the poverty line for a family of three was $7,788; for a family of four it was $9,985. (Try living on that.) According to the new report, 43.1 percent of poor people lived in that sort of deep poverty -- a record since 1975, when the government started assembling such statistics.

We also tend to blame the poor for their predicament. Anyone who thinks a person makes a conscious choice to support three people on $7,788 needs reexamine their assumptions. Perhaps it would help us to grasp the realities of poverty to live just one month with an income of $649. At that income level all energy goes to survival, not advancement.

The Republican fiscal policies may actually cause more people to realize that sometimes hard work really does not bring success, as Dionne points out:

What about the middle class? Yes, the median income of American households rose by 1.1 percent last year after five years of decline. But most of the growth was in households headed by Americans 65 and over -- who are helped, rightly, by substantial government benefits. In households headed by people under 65, incomes fell yet again.

Want to know why so many men out there are mad? Check out Table A-2 on Page 38 of the Census report. . . . Adjusted for inflation, men's earnings were lower in 2005 than they were in 1973.

Dear liberals, who worry about the political leanings of angry men, and dear conservatives, who exploit that anger, do you have any proposals to end this income stagnation?

Let’s stop our ritual lamentations over poverty and get to work on these problems.