Punishing the Poor

When I was in elementary school, we were living on my mother’s income of 50 cents/hour earned by working in a sweat shop seamstress job after my father’s death when I was two years old. In an otherwise limited and dreary existence, the brightest spot each week was going, in the company of most of my friends, to the double feature cowboy movies, with a cartoon and serial in between, on Saturday afternoons. At a 60th high school reunion I just attended there were numerous references to those Saturday afternoon movies with their preceding yo-yo contests. After the movies – which cost 10 cents - I would spend 15 cents on a chocolate ice cream soda. It made my week!  The 25 cents for my weekly orgy was scavenged by my mother from the $20 total her work brought her. She thought it worthwhile and always found a way. We were never on Welfare, but never far away from it either.

Vincent Van Gogh would have understood. In his youth, Van Gogh was a devout Dutch Reformed Church missionary among abjectly poor coal miners. He felt so passionately about their plight that he sometimes would take clothes off his own back to give to a miner in need. On hearing of this, his Church, which held the stern Calvinist view that the poor were poor because they deserved to be, kicked Van Gogh out, and he became a painter. The great art we admire today was a product of that stern insistence on the unworthiness of the poor. I wish I could say something else good was a product of that attitude, but I can’t.

The Dutch Reformed Church was replaced recently by the State of Kansas, when the Kansas Legislature passed a bill barring people on Welfare from using their money to go to the movies or buy ice cream. Kansas also restricted welfare recipients from withdrawing more than $25/day from their welfare account, even though opponents noted some subsidized rentals were as much as $600/month, which by itself would require $20/day be withdrawn. Going to a swimming pool while on welfare was also prohibited. The expressed goal of legislators was to get poor people to spend more responsibly.

Kansas is not alone. Somewhat similar restrictions are being pushed for by conservatives in Missouri and Yew York. Emily Badger wrote recently in the Washington Post about the double standard that creates, discriminating against the poor. Four times as much is spent by the government on the home mortgage interest deduction as is spent on subsidized housing, but subsidized housing is visible while the deduction appears mostly as a refund regarded as payback of taxes already paid. Welfare payments are visible, but the many subsidies to the wealthy often take the form of items simply not listed as income on the tax return. The result is placing inordinate burdens on the poor. Back when I was looking at the subject some years ago, a $25,000 farm subsidy required a one-paragraph application, while a food stamp application required three pages. Badger calls this the effect of visible versus submerged government spending. We see only the visible, not the invisible.

I have a harsher view. I call it punishing the poor. It is a byproduct of the Protestant Ethic we need to get past, and a direct product of the American Empathy Gap that I’ve mentioned before. In Calvin’s view, being wealthy was a sign that God had blessed you because you were destined for Heaven. By contrast, the poor obviously had moral failings condemning them to Hell and deserved punishment along the way. Our frontier heritage produced the empathy gap with the myth that rugged individuals survive without help from others, and to need help is a sign of weakness not deserving support. We think they are poor because, at the least, they lack good judgment and are incapable of making decisions on their own about when to buy ice cream, and don’t deserve ice cream anyway. The effect of an ice cream cone on the life of a child is not worth considering. The facts belie that. The great majority of the poor become poor because of adverse circumstance, not moral failure, and to think otherwise is simply to demonstrate moral blindness. Somewhere around 50 percent of women who are widowed, like my mother, or divorced have incomes below the poverty level in the years immediately following. We are entering a period as a nation where large numbers of baby boomers will enter retirement without adequate incomes after a lifetime of stagnant wages, the retirement often forced in the form of permanent unemployment. Our needs for community support of the poor will increase drastically and innovative ways of doing it are needed, not harsher punishments. We are a better people than that.