America’s poor are still struggling

I was a bit surprised when I first saw someone asking for alms. It was snowing lightly and we were stopped at a traffic red light on Cambridge Street, Burlington, Massachusetts. A middle aged woman, probably out of sheer despair, came out of nowhere near the window of our car and displayed a placard- “help the poor lady with a dime, please”. Burlington is a small town near Boston city. Later I found out from my personal experience, while travelling through America’s myriad cities and towns that asking for alms is not an uncommon sight in America.

When I dug a little deeper, I came to know that US has in both relative and absolute terms, the greatest number of hungry, homeless, and poor people compared to first world countries like Canada, Japan, and other well-developed European countries. I also learnt that America spends relatively less money on social welfare for the poor compared to other developed nations

Although Americans are far better off economically than most people in the world, poverty is a significant and persisting social problem here. Those stricken by poverty include individuals of all ages, races, religion and region. Poverty, however, is far more prevalent among some groups. 

Children are the largest group; 1 in every 5 children in America lives in poverty. Most poor children live in single parent families usually with the mother divorced, separated or unmarried. Most of the women earn less than men for comparable work, especially in unorganised and non-professional fields. Poverty in America is mainly a woman’s problem, a situation referred to as “The Feminization of Poverty”.

Poverty is also widespread among minority groups. About 27.2 per cent of African-Americans and 23.5 per cent of Hispanics live below the poverty line. About one third of all families with a single mother were below the poverty level in 2014-which includes roughly 15.6 million households.

The government defines the “Poverty Line” as the annual cost of a thrifty food budget for an urban family of four, multiplied by 3 to include the cost of housing, clothing and other expenses. In 2014-2015 the poverty line was set at an annual income of roughly $ 23,850 for a family of four. In total 14.5 per cent or 45 million Americans remain stuck below poverty level. [Census-Bureau Report-2014] Poverty in America is geographically concentrated. Although it is often portrayed as an urban problem, it is somewhat more prevalent and endemic in rural areas. About one in six rural residents, as compared with one in eight urban residents, live below the poverty line. The poverty rate is very high in inner city areas, and suburbs are safe havens for the rich. Since suburbanites are removed from poverty, many of them have no sense of the impoverished condition of what Michael Harrington called “the other America”.

The invisibility of poverty in America is evident in polls that show that most Americans substantially underestimate the number of poor in their country. Yet the US has the highest levels of poverty among the advanced industrial nations.

Many Americans hold to the idea that poverty is a matter of choice- that most low-income Americans are unwilling to make the effort to hold a responsible job and get ahead in life, In his book “Losing Ground” Charles Murray argued that America has a permanent underclass of unproductive citizens, who prefer live on welfare and whose children receive little educational encouragement at home and grow up to be copies of their parents. There are indeed millions such people in America. Yet most poor Americans are in their situation as a result of circumstances rather than of choice. A ten-year study by the University of Michigan research team found that most of the poor are poor only for a time being and they are poor for temporary reasons -- loss of job, desertion by biological fathers and so on.

In the recessionary period of the nineties more than four million Americans fell into poverty as a result of job losses. The same phenomenon recurred during the global recession of 2008-2009, only the number of job-loss had increased significantly.

Unfortunately it is also the case that a full time job does not guarantee that a family with a single earning member will rise above the poverty line. Millions of Americans- mostly household workers, service workers, labourers, and farm-workers are in this very position.

Various american governments have enacted social welfare policies from time to time to tackle poverty. The welfare issue, like all others,  are part of the rough and tumble of everyday politics. In the US, the Republican Party, business groups, anti-tax groups and others have resisted, from time to time, the expansion of government’s social welfare role, while liberal democrats, unions, and minority groups pleaded for its expansion. Former US President George Bush during his tenure in early 2000, slashed billions of dollars from his social welfare budget.[ Govt. Food Stamp, extended unemployment benefits etc] which were helping millions of people. The recent tug of war and fiasco over “Obama Care” bill is an example of this difference in political attitudes.

Nevertheless, Americans’ belief in individualism, which has no exact equivalent in European or any other societies, had played a defining role in shaping US welfare policy. When asked whether it is the responsibility of the government to take care of very poor people, who cannot take care of themselves, only 23 per cent of Americans said they completely agreed, whereas more than 60 per cent of the most of European states held the same opinion. Americans do not necessarily have less sympathy for the poor, rather they place more emphasis on personal responsibility than the people of other countries do. The reality, however, is slightly different. IPA