Category: Poverty

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Something goes on in people’s minds when they start talking about poor people that doesn’t happen with your average middle class person and certainly not rich person. People assume they know the general outline of the poor person’s story which can be whittled down to the person fucked up and somehow deserved the consequences of their mistakes. Poverty and the attendant despair teach a great lesson. How else will they learn? Right. This kind of help has proven itself enormously successful with this nations homeless problem. If anything, the present spirit is that all this mollycoddling we shower on the homeless is part of the problem. There are some people who think we should do even less than the very little we are doing now.

Any way I digress. I was talking to friends about a person who is having financial problems. She lives month to month and needs every penny she can get. More than once in the discussion, people said that her situation was shocking because she was a good person and undeserving of such problems because she worked hard all of her life. Of course, I nodded my head in agreement. Poverty shouldn’t happen to good people.

There is the rub however. If good people shouldn’t be poor, then the unspoken part is poor people are somehow bad. They deserve their fate. They either behaved badly or made bad decisions in order to find themselves in such a state. And because of that, they must pay. Indeed, the most important thing, more important than helping them, is that the poor must realize that they made a mistake and their poor judgement is the reason they are poor and suffering now. If we don’t make them pay, they will just continue making more bad decisions.

If I needed any more evidence of how bad poor people are, earlier in the week I saw the following in Facebook:

God forbid that the poor experience anything other than looking for a job and suffering. You simply aren’t suffering enough if you have a beer and a cigarette. You are a bad poor person and are certainly undeserving of any help if you would spend your money on such luxuries. Give me a break.

Try this on for size. Jeff Bezos receives government tax breaks. This means, he doesn’t have to pay all of his taxes because the Government wants him to invest in his business. But because we give him a tax break, he has more money to spend on drinks, first class hotels and his own god damn airplane. Does he really need those things? Of course not. Yet, he is getting a government handout and he dares to have a good time while getting them. If he needs these tax breaks so badly, he should be only spending his money on his business and nothing else, and certainly nothing that might be considered fun. Both the poor and the rich receive government money but we only police the poor on how they spend this money.

This is because we give the rich the benefit of the doubt. We assume that they are good people unlike those horrible poor people who are bad. They are drug addicts, they sleep on our streets, they beg for money, and, horrors of horrors, they are doing it in front of me. It taints everything we do as country for poor people but we sincerely believe that unless help comes with a healthy dose of disapproval, the poor will never change.

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Konstadinos Moros helpfully reminds us about the source of gun violence. The real culprit, which, of course, was so obvious I am embarrassed to admit I never saw it, but, any way, the real culprit is, drum roll please, single mothers. He found that there is an eerily high correlation between states with above average percentage of single mothers and above average percentage of gun violence.

Yes, it is those irresponsible gadabouts, single mothers, who mindlessly produce children who then shoot up the streets they live on. Now, I think everyone agrees it would be nice to have active fathers involved with their children, on the other hand, claiming that single mothers and their bastard children running amok in the streets are the single most important cause of gun violence is a bit much. Moros even admits that “correlation is not causation” before launching into his case against single mothers.

Moros fails to mention that there is also high overlaps with states that have high poverty rates, high gun ownership, and limited access to abortion and medical care. That these factors might also impinge on the problem is never explored because Moros has already found the villain — single mothers.

And it get’s worse. Moros believes that the one of the root problems of single motherhood is generous welfare payments. The unspoken message here is that society need do nothing to help out the single mother. Helping single mothers only encourages other women to have babies because those babies provide a generous income, so generous, in fact, that the largest age group living in poverty are children under the age of 5. I guess raising children in poverty is an exciting proposition for some women. Who would have known?

So, let me review the problem here. The offspring of unmarried women are shooting innocent people in the streets. They need a present father who will miraculously stop gun violence. This problem is so serious for Moros that we can’t possibly help these women in any way – no family planning and no government assistance — because some of these women will be encouraged to earn an income by having as many babies as possible. In other words, it is a serious problem that will be solved completely by not sending fathers who have committed drug offenses to prison. Which is all very reassuring. A simple solution to a complex problem and no extra tax money is needed in order to bring it about. A nice big bow on that particular package.

The only problem is that Moros is demonstrably wrong. I looked at the states that are the best place for single parents to raise their children and what I discovered is the states that rank best have very little overlap with states who have high levels of gun violence and single mothers. So, if single mothers are indeed the problem, the best way to solve the problem of bastard children running amok in the streets of America would be to help the single mothers dealing with this situation instead of ignoring them.

But, of course, this would mean an outlay of tax money in order to solve a complicated social problem. No Conservative wants to do that, they want cheap simple solutions. Well, you get what you pay for.

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As many in the Republican party continue to remind us, the end of Roe doesn’t end abortion access, it just returned abortion restrictions to the states which suits them quite well. Given the difficulty in changing laws in the United States, at least at the federal level, enough blue states have majorities to block any national abortion policy. This allows Republicans to maintain their faux moral superiority without losing access to abortion. There will be little pressure to change the laws in red states because middle class women will still have access to abortion. Maybe, it is an inconvenient trip but worth it all so that the Republicans can say they protect the lives of unborn babies.

Poor women in red states, however, will bear the brunt of this decision. Poor women will be the ones getting illegal and dangerous abortions and suffering the consequences to their health and from the law. It will be poor women having unwanted children. It will be poor women delivering children with expensive and difficult to care for birth defects.

Since abortion is likely to stay legal in at least some states. What really is accomplished here? Women with financial ability still can get their risk free abortions while it becomes even more difficult and dangerous for poor women to get their abortions. Why are we punishing the poor for their mistakes while the middle class and the rich get away with their’s.

What a strange country we live in. Billionaires can pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes because they are job creators. When, in fact, there is no obligation for them to do so and no one checking to see if they do. While working poor people are kept in low paying jobs and prevented from accessing anything that might liberate them from the burdens they carry. Healthcare is difficult for them to get. Higher education is difficult for them to get. And now abortions are more difficult for them to get.

Perhaps if doyens of business could see poor people differently. The poor are already connected to the market economy and just need a little help here and there to make it possible for them to bring even more dollars to market. This means more money in your pocketbook if you could just see it in your hearts to treat them half way decently. These aren’t just people, they are an untapped market.