Poverty - America's Other Epidemic
After his ill mother died, East Cleveland resident Albert Pickett returned to his childhood home. She was behind on water bills, so her debt became his. He couldn’t afford the deposit needed for a repayment plan. The water was turned off. A lien was placed on the house, then a foreclosure notice.
Pickett is one of over 38 million Americans who live in poverty. Millions more are one medical emergency or job loss away. In 2019, the United States, with nearly 30 percent of the world’s total wealth, had the fourth highest poverty rate of all forty Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. According to the Census Bureau, 16 million children live in poverty; 26 million are eligible for free/reduced price school lunches. Pickett is African American, yet poverty is an equal opportunity disease.
In Navajo Nation, an elderly man with Parkinson’s could not walk fast enough to make it to his outhouse, so he took anti-diarrheal medication to slow things down. He ended up hospitalized for severe stomach cramps.
Nearly 30 percent of Native Americans and roughly a quarter of all Hispanics and African Americans fall below the federal poverty line. Half of Americans in poverty are white.
Debbie Millard, who is white, earns $44,000 working for a local manufacturer. Her household includes elderly parents, a daughter, the daughter's two children and two other grandchildren. Statistically above the federal poverty line, she is poor nonetheless.
Despite a popular misconception, 40 percent of the poor work full-time; only 6.4 percent do not work at all. Having a job doesn’t necessarily provide financial security. Forty percent of American households have incomes below $50,000 – in a country that has nearly 15 million millionaires. The United States has the seventh largest wealth gap among OECD countries.
Jean Wickham’s minivan parked in line for food bank donations in Egg Harbor, NJ in late April. She’d worked all her life, until COVID19 hit, essentially eliminating the family’s income. “I’m just afraid I’m going to lose my house,” she said.
COVID19 has exposed how close to poverty even many in the middle class are, which was true before the pandemic. Twenty-eight percent of Americans have nothing saved for an emergency and only 40 percent can pay an emergency bill of $1,000. With age, financial insecurity often grows. Twenty-one percent of Americans have no retirement savings; another 10 percent have less than $5,000.
Susan Finley was fired after a decade at Walmart. She had taken one more day of sick leave than allowed, recovering from pneumonia. Losing her job meant losing health insurance. She died three months later after failing to seek medical care. She was using the little money she had to avoid eviction.
In 2018, 27.5 million Americans lacked health insurance. Estimates indicate COVID layoffs have added another 5.4 million. In a 2019 poll, 25 percent of Americans said they or a family member delayed medical treatment for a serious illness because they couldn’t afford it. The medical problems linked to poverty became more visible with COVID19. The hospitalization rate for non-Hispanic American Indian, Alaska Native, and black Americans is about five times that of non-Hispanic whites. For Hispanic or Latino persons, it is about four times higher. African Americans account for 23 percent of COVID deaths; they are only 13.4 percent of the population. Being poor often also means lacking access to good nutrition, living in unsafe conditions, and/or working in low-wage, sometimes crowded workplaces – and the poor can’t afford to shelter at home.
Anger at economic injustice is widespread. It exists on the political right and left. Occupy Wall Street railed against concentrated wealth in the top one percent. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign argued the Left ignored the lack of jobs for rural and Rust Belt Americans. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren charge the Right with destroying the middle class by favoring the wealthy. When voters in red-state Oklahomans approved a referendum expanding Medicaid, against their state’s Republican leadership, they sent a message. When Black Lives Matter protesters demand economic justice as well as police reform, they send a message. When Americans object to cuts in Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and demand access to medical care at affordable cost, they want economic justice too.
Poverty impacts the well-off too as their success requires Americans who can afford to buy their products and services. Poverty also fosters social divides. Over 40 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax mostly because they don’t earn enough, a situation that weakens their civic responsibility as it sometimes enrages those who do pay taxes. Generational poverty and the threat of being plunged into poverty breed distrust in democracy and often each other.
It would be nice if change came from the top. But the poor and near-poor must not count on it. If they want economic justice, they must vote in much greater numbers. Tax cuts, stimulus payments, and insufficiently funded programs are not enough. Nor is philanthropy. These ameliorate but do not fix structural features that prevent widespread upward mobility. Efforts to turn segments of the poor or near-poor against each other through stoking racial animosity or fears of violence mask the shared poverty problem. Government leaders must act not because they fear electoral defeat or public protests but because it is morally right under a Constitution that promises to “secure the blessings of liberty.”
Photo Credit: Matt Artz - unspalsh
