Breaking the cycle of poverty (Part 1)

There’s no magic bullet.   But a lot of excuses.

Lack of good-paying jobs.  Teen pregnancies.  Breakdown of the family.   A culture of violence.  Lack of education.  And of course, not enough money spent to help the poor escape poverty. 

There are plenty of reasons why people are poor.  Not a lot of solid solutions to change that. 

Also, we need to remember that "poverty" in America is a very relative thing.  Nobody starves for lack of food here, nor dies for want of medicines and medical treatment just because they are poor. In fact, our sense of "poverty" is far removed from what poverty is in most of the rest of the world. That's not to say there are no poor people here; just that our poverty is not usually a life-or-death situation.

In America, we equate poverty with low income.  "Poverty" is the emotional buzzword.  In reality it's just shorthand for people earning below a government-set income level and getting public assistance; those in "poverty" here aren't clothed in rags and out with begging bowls.   

Our politicians approach the issue of poverty from ideological perspectives, which is part of the problem. 

The Democrats are overly idealistic about the inherent desire of the poor to take advantage of “opportunities” to improve their situation.  Democrats see poverty as a temporary setback that can be remedied and overcome pretty quickly if you push enough money and training to the poor.  They believe much of the problem can be solved by educating the poor about birth control, the benefits of staying in school, improving everyone’s self-image and esteem, giving incentives to businesses to hire the poor and providing alternatives to becoming engaged in violent activities.    

To Democrats, we need to take care of the poor in the meantime and give them a respectable safety net they can use while they pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and move ahead in society.  And no one should be made to feel bad about taking advantage of government benefits in the process.  

Republicans are also overly idealistic about the desires of the poor.  They think the poor want to move out of poverty through their own efforts, and are victims of overly paternalistic – bordering on soft racism – policies that provide second-rate educations, and also disincentives to getting a real job.  The villain in education is low expectations – social promotions, lowered standards, and teachers more intent on building student self-esteem than effectively teaching fundamentals like reading, math and science.  And to Republicans, many misguided programs make it financially more attractive to stay on government benefits than to work hard, get a real education, get married, and escape poverty.     

To Republicans, we simply need to raise the bar across the board, and eliminate disincentives holding back the poor.  Of course we’ll still need a safety net in place for the old, the sick and the disabled, but we shouldn’t tempt otherwise able-bodied people to rely on the safety net.

You couldn’t have two more divergent perspectives on how to solve poverty.  The only common ground the Republicans and Democrats have is that they are both wrong. 

Poverty is not a temporary situation.  There’s nothing you can do right away that’s going to have an immediate payoff.  The only thing that can be done is to try to break the cycle of poverty now, so that down the road you’ve helped to minimize institutionalized poverty in future generations.   That means treating underlying problems, not just trying to deal with symptoms.  Often that also means facing up to some hard truths most would rather not bring up. 

You also can’t be overly idealistic.  At least with the current generations.  People who grew up in poverty, and then begat children into poverty, who in turn begat more children into poverty are probably too far gone.  You can try to modify their behavior, but you’re not going to change it in the short term.    

You might have a chance with their children or grandchildren – if they’re young enough – and if you start now to shape their behavior and beliefs before they fall into the cycle of poverty. 

The parents are probably a lost cause.  They’ve likely been raised on public assistance and really don’t know any other way of living.   We just have to accept that we’ll be supporting the parents and grandparents until they die, much the same way we are now. 

Now any honest attempt to break the cycle of poverty will always be politically unpopular.  Too many interest groups maintain their power and prestige on being “champions” of the poor.  If we were ever able to effectively break the cycle in any meaningful way, they wouldn’t have a power base.  No one would pay any attention to them.  They’d start running out of “victims” to showcase. 

I’m thinking Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, La Raza, and others.  To each of them, their respective constituencies always need the most help. 

So, before I go any further, I need to interject race, and point out the elephants in the room. 

We’ve often heard that there are more whites are on public assistance than blacks or Hispanics.  That is true, in a purely numeric sense.   So it’s not just the cycle of poverty in “urban” areas that we need to address; it’s also that same cycle in Appalachia and other rural environments. Generations of whites – and blacks and others – have been in the same unbroken cycle. 

So don’t think only in terms of inner-city blacks and Hispanics.  Also consider white kids in rural Florida living in a trailer with their 20-year-old mom, with five siblings from four fathers, and an occasional “uncle” recently released from Raiford.   That’s the face of generational poverty, too. 

However the statistics do point out a serious racial divide.  While roughly 38% of the recipients of public assistance are white and about the same percentage are black, whites account for about half the population of the U.S., while blacks account for about 12%.  This means that the percentage of the total white population on public assistance is about a quarter of the percentage of the black population. 

Poverty is a white and black and Hispanic problem, no doubt, but a much, much higher percentage of people in the black community are on public assistance than any other group.  That’s not to make an inference on character or ability, nor is it racist – it’s just statistics.

We can waste time on trying to figure that anomaly out and come up with all kinds of justifications and rationalizations.  The truth is – it doesn’t matter “why” or require us to come up with special programs to address each racial group or sub group; we just need to recognize that it exists. 

If you’re poor, healthy, of working age yet wholly dependent on public assistance, and we don’t want your children to follow the same path, it makes little difference whether you’re white, black, Hispanic, South Asian, or Aleut.  Generally the same stuff needs to happen. 

And everything is linked. 

The seeds of long-term poverty often start at birth.  A single mother in her teens is most likely going to drop out of school and end up in poverty for the rest of their life.  Their kids are statistically destined to repeat that pattern.  So we have to stop that, not with more education about birth control – teens know all about birth control and it’s readily available at any age.

The sad fact no one is willing to confront is that many teens who get pregnant want to get pregnant, either to become “adults” or because they don’t see anything wrong with it. 

We have to make teen pregnancy socially unacceptable and medically impossible.  You can’t stop teens from having sex – we all know that from personal experience – but we can and should stop them from having babies, whatever that takes. 

If you want to use government money for improving society, push the extremists out of the way and fund development of a safe contraceptive that can be administered once – to either males or females, I don’t care – and stay effective for up to five years. 

When you turn 13 you get it, like it or not.  The hope is that when you’re 18, you might be better equipped to make more rational decisions. 

I don’t want to leave the boys out of this.  After all, it takes two.  Any pregnant teen should have to turn over the name of the father to assign financial responsibility for the child’s future needs.  This would have an immediate effect on the rate of contraceptive use by males, and take the bragging rights out of the baby-momma epidemic in a flash. 

All this needs to be coupled with social pressure.  I may disagree with Mayor Bloomberg on his food-police nonsense, and bans on big sodas, but he’s on the right track with his most recent ad campaign against teen pregnancy.  If you haven’t seen it, click here.

We need to start making the point that bearing children is a not a “right”; it’s a privilege with a lot of back end responsibility attached.  If you’re not up to the responsibility, don’t have a child.   

Furthermore, if you are addicted to crack or meth, are in and out of jail, demonstrate a reckless disregard for your children’s safety, or ever put your own kids up for sale the state should move in and take your children away forever.  And I mean forever. 

I wouldn’t be opposed to mandatory sterilization in special cases. 

I am continually sickened by news stories about the abuse inflicted on kids by sociopaths who exercised their “right” to have children.   It’s heart breaking.  Then there are those who try to peddle their kids to the highest bidder.  This morning I learned that some 22-year-old jackass offered to sell her two kids – one 10 months old; the other 2 years old – to raise money to bail her boyfriend out of jail.   The other day another woman was caught trying to market her kids to a known pedophile. 

Just because someone is biologically able to bear children doesn’t automatically grant special privileges to do whatever they want with them.  Or to ignore them and hand them off to a parent or grandparent to care for them.  Or to expect society to support people who repeatedly show a wanton disregard for their own offspring.

That’s cold and perhaps cruel to say, but until we get a grip on babies born to teens and others totally incompetent or ill-equipped to raise children, we won’t be addressing one of the root causes of long-term poverty in this country. 

More to come … next, the role of education.