The poverty-industrial complex …

If you had budget authority in the billions, and the power to spend it however you wished, would you willingly give up all that power?  And would you be willing to throw hundreds of thousands of employees with no other marketable job skills out of their jobs? 

And if you were one of those employees, would you work hard at eliminating your own job?

After spending trillions of dollars over more than 50 years, what is defined as poverty in America is about where it was all those years ago. The percentage of the population deemed “poor” hasn’t really changed.

Part of the reason is that politicians, bureaucrats, and special interest groups keep expanding the definition of “poor” to keep the numbers up on who needs government assistance. As much money as we spend, as many programs we create and staff with community organizers, counselors, case workers, and “outreach” specialists, we’re no closer to ending poverty than we were 50 years ago.   

That’s because there’s no incentive to do so. In fact, there’s an entire industry that’s grown up – and keeps expanding – based on perpetuating poverty and “serving the needs” of the poor. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, are employed in that industry on the Federal, state, and local level. They are busy administering handouts like SNAP (food stamps) and TANF types of programs, providing job skills training, tutoring ex-cons, counseling drug addicts, setting up after-school basketball programs, teaching the poor what to eat, how to breast feed, and more.  

There’s no end to the “worthy causes” we fund.

Money streams out in grants to community-service organizations, church groups and activists, and of course in salaries and benefits to countless Federal, state and local bureaucrats. It’s in the hundreds of billions of dollars each year with nothing to show for it.  

By design.  And that’s the dirty little secret about “poverty in America.”    

There really is a poverty-industrial complex in America. It is not rewarded based on how many people are no longer dependent on its assistance, but on how many people remain dependent. That’s why activists keep redefining what’s “poor” to make it more inclusive and apparently growing; if they didn’t keep showing a growing need, they might get their funding cut.

The poverty-industrial complex is pro illegal immigrant because that means more mouths to feed, more programs to provide, and more people it can employ to serve illegal immigrants’ needs. It embraces growth in what most of us would consider bad things:  unemployment, teen pregnancy, spousal abuse, drug addiction, homelessness, clinical depression, suicidal thoughts, and mental illness in general – the more poor people in need, the more money coming its way. 

And the more job security for its employees.    

If you doubt that, consider how many people here are now on food stamps – 47-million?  Really?  There are 47-million people in America that wouldn’t have enough food otherwise – roughly 13.5% of the population?  Seriously, who do you think keeps inventing new terms like “food insecure” to describe a household that isn’t absolutely certain it has enough food on hand to satisfy everyone?  Or throws out a phrase like “children go to bed hungry every night” to imply that there isn’t enough food to feed kids? Or constantly expands programs to feed school-age kids even on the weekends and holidays – whose parents have enough money to buy the kid the latest $300 sneakers, but not enough to pay for a peanut butter sandwich? 

It’s the poverty-industrial complex. It’s the salaried welfare-rights activists, public assistance agencies, grant writers, halfway house and homeless shelter operators, mural-arts administrators, and others who, while doing some good, are also making a pretty good living at it, too.   

There are people in this country who need help.  No one, especially me, is denying that; I’ve worked with patients just released from mental institutions, and with families devastated by floods. But in doing so, I’ve also worked alongside salaried and well-paid administrators managing those assistance programs. Are they providing a service? Sure. However, they aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts; they are getting paid well for something people used to volunteer to do for free. 

There’s still selfless, charitable work people do for their neighbors, their church, or their schools, or simply because they want to help, such as working in a food bank or a soup kitchen. Yet increasingly the less charitable have found a way to cash in as organizers, administrators and “program leads” who promote themselves as experts to “guide” a program. 

I am all in favor of volunteers. I’m all in favor of charities like The Salvation Army that rely almost exclusively on volunteers and spend virtually nothing on fund raising or paying their executives. They have my enduring admiration – and financial support. They are trying to do good because they’re on a mission to make a difference. They’re not in it for the money or job security.  

Contrast that with the lifers at most public assistance agencies.

They may start out with the best of intentions but after a couple of years that enthusiasm wanes and most become drones simply going through the motions until they retire. In time they learn that what they do doesn’t make much of a difference after all; work is all about filling out forms, keeping your supervisor off your back, playing office politics, and killing time until your next paid holiday or vacation.

That doesn’t make them much different than some private sector employees, except for their unjustified arrogance toward the poor people they are supposed to serve as well as the people paying their salaries. Don’t buy the “public service” BS: they hold both groups in contempt.         

Then there are those who engage in grantsmanship to engineer a job for themselves financed by public money. They dream up ridiculous make-work programs – with them in charge, of course – and look to government to fund their program, and their job.   

Many of these are designed to get unemployed poor people into paying jobs where they’re supposed to help other poor people. The problem is that the people who get hired don’t gain any skills except how to look busy in a make-work job until the funding runs out.  Then they are back where they started: in need of another make-work program. This is a favorite of community activists everywhere.

By now, we’ve gotten used to it.  Which is a shame. We allow thousands of people who are over compensated for what they do and have no skills anyone in the private sector wants, to continue in a bloated, self-perpetuating, self-serving enterprise that accomplishes little of value.  Except to provide them with continued employment. 

Look, there’s a need for programs to help the poor. But these need to show real results or be eliminated. The money we’re spending could be put to much better use to help the poor directly than be consumed in large part by the poverty industry.     

But that’s what we’re stuck with. It would be cheaper and more effective to just pay the poor a minimum guaranteed salary at, say, 2X the poverty level, and let them take responsibility for their own lives and pulling themselves out of poverty.

If we cut out the middlemen, we could easily afford it.