It’s Hard Out There For… A Poor Person

An article in the Houston Chronicle recently highlighted the growing number of families in poverty, both from the national and our local perspective.  The bad news: more folks are poor and need help.  The good news: some people say it could have been worse.  I believe that, but am not sure how much consolation it is to struggling folks to know that, in some sort of parallel universe, their bizzaro self is much worse off.  The Chronicle quoted a few notables like President Obama, United Way president Anna Babin, a struggling single mother and some fake hipster.  (How is that for self-serving?  By the way, I meant to say “not quite below the poverty line.”  I’ve had to tell people that all day, to the point where I feel like Ross from Friends yelling “we were on a break!”  But this isn’t about me.  Overtly, anyway.)

The percentage of people in poverty is increasing, up to 14.3% nationally and 17.3% in Texas.  As the article mentions, almost 3/4 of a million people called the 2-1-1 Texas United Way Helpline last year.  Anecdotally, the agency I work for has seen a lot of folks who have never engaged in social services before – the formerly middle class.  It took a lot for them to call United Way and engage in our services.  But just looking at poverty stats doesn’t tell the whole story, or even a lot of the story.  I have a family of three: my wife, daughter, and myself.  We used to consider the dog a family member but after we had the kid the dog became an afterthought.  Don’t roll your eyes, dog lovers – if you’ve had children, you did the exact same thing.  If you haven’t, you will.  In any case, for my family of three, if I was making $19,000 per year, we would not be considered poor.

Let me repeat that – if I was making $19,000 per year, which is somewhere around $9 per hour, we wouldn’t be considered poor.

Can you imagine living off of $19,000 per year?  Housing, utilities (ac during the summer!), groceries, car/gas/insurance (a necessity in Houston), health care, just to name a few.  And Houston is one of the most affordable big cities in the nation.  Imagine trying to live off of $19K/yr in LA or even Phoenix.  Most folks wouldn’t feel comfortable until two or three times that amount.  Why the heck would I not be poor at $19K/yr?

Mollie Orshansky.

Holla at your girl, Don Draper.

You might remember LBJ’s War on Poverty, which was as futile as the War on Drugs, the War on Disco, and my personal War on Crabgrass.  None of these wars will ever have a Mission Accomplished press conference, although at least one of these wars has an offseason.  When all my grass dies.

To win a war, it helps to know what you’re trying to accomplish (either that or you just bomb the holy hell out of everything), so for the War on Poverty the Johnson Administration adopted a poverty threshold created by an economist named Mollie Orshanksy.  In the early ’60s, food was around a third of a typical household budget, so she based it on what a food plan from the Department of Agriculture cost and multiplied by 3.  That’s what defined poverty in 1965, and still defines poverty today.

Whether this standard of “3 times a market basket of goods” was the best measure possible in 1965, I don’t know.  I was -13 at the time.  It was easy to measure and there probably wasn’t a better alternative.  It sure as heck doesn’t make sense today, when food accounts for a much smaller percentage of the household budget.  Food now accounts for about 1/6 of a budget; everything else got much more expensive.  The poverty line is indexed for inflation, but it doesn’t take into account the difference in regional costs of living.  New York vs. Brownsville, for example.  Even Mollie Orshansky argued later in life for changing the formula, stating, “(i)t’s hard out there for a pimp.  It’s actually hard for non-pimps, too.”

This fact (that the formula is anachronistic, not the subject of the Hustle & Flow song) has been long argued and isn’t really in dispute.  A number of interesting alternatives have been proposed, but the fact remains that is is much less expensive to not count people as poor, whether they are or not.  It’s a political nonstarter, except in The West Wing (the show, not the real one).

Maybe the true number of Texans in poverty is close to 30%.  Maybe 25%.  Maybe 1/3.  Would it make us think differently about “the poor” if one out of every three people you saw was officially designated as poor?  Hard to say.  Whatever the true number is, it means that “poor people” aren’t just “other people”.  They aren’t just the homeless guy on the street or the Bed Intruder guy.  They’re people we know, see everyday, work with.  Most are working hard, trying to make ends meet and create a better life for their children.  It’s hard out there at $9 per hour or at $24,000 per year, when the cost of everything is going up but wages and salary aren’t.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of public policy, especially 1965 public policy.  Mollie Orshansky was wicked smart, plus she played a mean clarinet.  It would probably be political suicide to suggest changing the formula to say that there were 6 million new poor people, each eligible for some benefits that would need to be paid for.  What it does mean is that just because we severely undercount poor people doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  And many of them aren’t who we imagine poor people to be.  Many work, very hard.  ”They” have the same hopes and dreams that “we” do, and “they” might have a better work ethic and resilience than “we” do.  They’re just further behind, for many reasons.

It’s hard to argue for nuance and context when talking about public policy.  Much easier to brush things in broad strokes, on both the far left and the far right.  I’d argue for empathy.  I know that’s a dirty word, but I take it to mean this: if I was making $19,000 per year trying to support my family, would I need a little help?  Would you?