Tweet
Written by Marianne Møllman for RH Reality Check. This
diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
If you are poor, chances are it is your own fault. At least that’s what Americans thought in 2001. In a National Public Radio poll from that year, about half of those surveyed said the poor are not doing enough to pull themselves out of poverty.
Now, one would think that since the recent economic crisis predictably has led to increased poverty people would start blaming circumstances more than the poor. This has not been the case in the United Kingdom. A recently published survey shows that Brits over time have become more likely to blame poor people themselves for their financial trouble. From 1986 to 2009, the proportion of people who attribute poverty to laziness and lack of willpower has grown to a little under 30 percent, with the proportion blaming “injustice in our society” conversely falling.
People’s attitudes towards poverty to some extent determine sentiments about health care, welfare benefits, and other collective interventions. Not surprisingly, the UK study found that more and more Brits believe government benefits are too high.
In the United States, the picture is, perhaps surprisingly, a bit more nuanced. The 2001 NPR poll shows that attitudes about welfare at that time were determined by the income of the person asked. Those who made more than twice the poverty level were almost twice as likely as those closer to being poor to say that welfare recipients had easy lives and could do very well without the benefits if only they tried.
This difference is significant. Since household income has been declining over time (and proportionally fewer individuals earn more than twice the poverty level), the silver lining of the 2008 crisis might be that more Americans start seeing poverty for what it is: not something anyone “deserves.” This could even help bring about more coherent anti-poverty policies when politicians, many of whom seem to want to appeal to the “poor people are lazy” sentiment as a way to obtain votes, realize their constituents understand reality better than they do.
And poverty is, in fact, becoming reality for more and more people in the United States.
In 2010 more people were recorded as living in poverty than in any of the previous 52 years for which rates have been published: 46.9 million (representing 15 percent of the population). About 17.2 million households were registered as food insecure for that same year, meaning they didn’t have consistent dependable access to enough food. This, again, is the highest number ever recorded in the United States. Even percentage-wise, poverty rates in 2010 were the highest they had been since 1993.
And poverty is not just something people “are,” something that might be inconvenient and often frustrating (though it surely is both of those things in copious amounts).
Poverty is a very real obstacle to exercising human rights, bringing with it substandard housing, under-resourced schooling, lack of health care, and at times unsafe neighbourhoods, as well as many other disadvantages. Children are particularly affected, since years of poorer quality education and potentially unhealthy living has consequences that to some extent continue even after a family pulls out of poverty—which only some ever do.
And not only is poverty an obstacle to exercising rights. It is also, in many cases, caused by rights violations. Four million more women than men live in poverty, and both African-Americans and Hispanics are over-represented amongst the poor. In 2010, women earned 77 cents to every dollar earned by men. For black women that figure is 68 cents, for Hispanic women 59. Unemployment rates fluctuate enormously according to sex, race, and marital status. Women constitute 65 percent of all part-time workers.
To be sure, everyone is ultimately responsible for how they deal with their circumstances, and some individuals pull out of poverty despite multiple odds stacked against them. But many more do not. This is not because poverty is inevitable. It is because it generally requires support for health care, education, housing, anti-discrimination initiatives, and other interventions at least partially sponsored by the government. Without addressing the growing poverty in the United States through collective action based on human rights, chances are that if you are poor you will stay poor. Through little fault of your own.
5 Comments
The Brits have also had to put up with Rupert Murdoch and other right-wingers controlling much of their print and broadcast media for a good two decades longer than we have. If not for the Beeb, they’d have slid into total fascism ages ago.
I don’t know. We spent four months there fall before last and I thought the Beeb–a little bit like NPR–had become pretty damned conservative.
As here, liberals just became smugly conservative along with their news media, failing to notice that their vague consumer affluence was based on other people’s suffering, learning to hate the working class (as these were manipulated by the Thatchers and Reagans) until they had no one left to make common cause with–least of all their own peers.
Beyond the patina of interest in world events and tony delivery, the BBC’s long been an arm of British international policy projection, anyway, not so different from Radio Free, etc.
I think this post will be ignored by the GOP cognitive dissonance increased sympathy for the poor could win us elections if only we had a candidate who would promise jobs and not just say the word hope all the time.
Years ago when I had a long discussion about poverty and unemployment with United States Congressman Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan,I asked him if he wasn’t concerned about how the unemployed people and the poor would vote.
This right-wing conservative Christian Reformed Congressman replied, very callously, “I won’t get overly concerned with unemployment and the poor until they outnumber the people who are working. Until that time I’m not going to worry about you bringing these people out to vote against me.”
That was in the early 1970′s as Wall Street investors were just beginning their shift to high-tech automation while already beginning to move our industrial base to cheap labor markets.
Now, however, Wall Street has just about completed its destruction of our basic industries in mining, steel and auto.
And with this shift Congressman Guy Vander Jagt’s worst nightmare has begun to come true— in states like Congressman Guy Vander Jagt’s Michigan, about half the people are now poor with well over 40% either long-term unemployed, under-employed, working at poverty wage jobs or at jobs where unions have “negotiated” concessions as part of this “new” breed of labor leadership’s idea of “class struggle” which sees many of the auto workers still employed working at poverty wages— and if you are being paid poverty wages you are going to be poor.
It used to be fairly easy for these worthless politicians like Congressman Guy Vander Jagt to speak very callously towards the poor; now, when these bozos get elected by dumb people who think they are smart they, like Wisconsin Governor Walker and Michigan Governor Snyder are facing some major opposition… but, the problem is the Democrats are no better except they pander to the poor for votes by pretending to be concerned; but like with Obama and Minnesota Governor Dayton who pose and posture as liberals at election time they do their duty to their billionaire 1% class and push the entire working class into deeper poverty with most of the real liberals, progressive and the left afraid to challenge these hypocrites by asking the American people:
How is Barack Obama’s Wall Street war economy working for you?
I don’t understand why there is this fear of asking this question? What better question is there to ask American voters as we approach Election Day?
I guess people are afraid to ask this question because they will be called “Communists;” just like they call people who insist the wealth be redistributed through the creation of universal social programs when these phony “liberals” are pandering to this crap that “the free market will solve our problems if we help the entrepreneurs and small businesses.” The problem with this is that these “entrepreneurs” and “small businesses” are paying the lowest of the poverty wages and paying poor people poverty wages sure doesn’t solve the problem of poverty no matter how many jobs are created.
Poor people will continue to be poor and more people are going to become poor until we break ourselves free from Wall Street’s “two-party trap” and we seek solutions to our problems outside of the capitalist “box.”
And it sure doesn’t help matters any to have the wealth of our nation squandered on militarism and wars— as if we are all so rich we can empty our pockets into the ocean.
We had better start to think in terms of massive universal government social programs as the way to rescue us all from poverty while solving our pressing problems.
One example of what we need to do, sooner rather than later, is solve our health care mess by creating a National National Public Health Care System which would create over ten-million jobs providing the American people with world-class health care.
I have never heard anyone except Democrats and Republicans complain about getting a pay-check signed by the government. The irony here is that those like the President and members of the House and Senate get the biggest government pay-checks— well, almost the biggest because those getting the biggest government handouts are the Wall Street coupon clippers pulling their strings.
Poverty may have a different facethan it did several decades ago–now that more people have entered its ranks. I found this essay, “What is Poverty”, painted the picture with the true grimness that PREVENTS the poor from ‘pulling themselves up.’ Yes–some manage to do it, with or without community and/or family support, but they are the exception. The minutiae that so many take for granted are sometimes insurmountable hurdles for the impoverished. Here’s food for thought: https://www.msu.edu/~jdowell/135/JGParker.html