People, Not a Problem

Following Pope Francis’ visit to Philadelphia, many have been moved by his example of charity toward the disabled, the poor, and the marginalized. It has been a time when many have reflected upon how we treat the disadvantaged in our society.

 

Members of Congress and other government officials likewise ought to assess the way government attempts to help those in need. It is important to have good intentions, but we should all agree that good intentions are not enough. Results matter. Intentions don’t feed the poor; results do.

 

As Pope Francis was arriving, the Census Bureau released their report on poverty and income using data from 2014. Its contents are deeply troubling: a record-high 46 million Americans are living in poverty today. That is more than one out of every eight Americans. The number of homeless children (1.36 million) has doubled since the recession of 2008. Real median household income is still significantly (6.5%) lower than before the 2008 recession.

 

As a country, how have we done? Can we reasonably say that our federal efforts to combat poverty have been successful?

 

It is difficult to make that claim. Let us examine the facts.

 

Until the New Deal revolution, matters of public health, public morality, and public safety were left up to the states in accordance with both the common law tradition and the Tenth Amendment. With the New Deal, the federal government took these responsibilities upon itself, a fundamental shift in the way government tried to help the poor. Solutions all came from one city—Washington, D.C.—and were imposed on the entire nation, regardless of diversity.

 

Fifty years ago, the Great Society doubled down on the New Deal model of doing things. It brought more issues, such as education, under federal jurisdiction, and vastly increased federal government spending. But $22 trillion later, the problem is not solved.

 

The government has clearly been trying, but why hasn’t it worked?

 

Too often government solutions treat problems of education, development, and employment as abstract, as numbers on a piece of paper. But they are anything but abstract to those who are suffering. Prudential calculations are important and necessary, but we must never lose sight of the human face of poverty. So many of the causes and effects of poverty are intangible that subjecting 46 million unique people to one federal formula necessarily ignores important truths about them. We need to stop treating the poor like a problem to be solved, and start treating them like people, equal in dignity and priceless in value.

 

In fact, even the way we define the problem is an example of this bureaucratic thinking. The federal poverty line was the result, not of some self-evident axiom, but from back-of-the-envelope calculations of a single economist at the Social Security Administration, Mollie Orshansky, in 1963, before the Great Society programs began. She invented this line at triple the cost of food. She used this number because, in 1955, the Agriculture Department had said that this was the amount spent by the average three or four-person household.

 

Considering how diverse we are as a country, and how much our economy and our society has changed since 1955, perhaps there is a more accurate measure we can use.

 

Too often, politicians rail against abstract ideas like “income inequality,” (which, incidentally, the Census Bureau data shows is largely unchanged for the past 20 years) rather than the essentially human face of poverty. Income inequality is an idea; children going to bed hungry are concrete, real. We need to put the focus on them.

 

It is often said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in expectation of different results. The defenders of the status quo, and those who would double-down on a broken system, have to explain why there are 46 million Americans who are poor today. Those who are complacent with the workings of our bureaucracy, or who are so narrow-minded as to ignore any other way of doing things than the way we do them currently, owe an explanation to the child going hungry tonight.

 

These new data should call us to action, and to bold, new ideas, not more of the same. If we don’t start this conversation, then we cannot reasonably expect action, so let us start today, for the sake of the poor.

 

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