Why myths about poor endure
by Judith McCormack in the Toronto Star
Our perceptions of poor people are full of stubborn myths. The man who picks up his welfare cheque in a white Cadillac, the teenage mother with a flock of illegitimate children, the loafer who works the system instead of a job – these are the stuff of urban legends. The reality of poverty is surprisingly different. To begin with, the proportion of single parents on welfare who are under 20 years old is very small – 3 per cent, according to a National Council on Welfare study. And nearly half of all single parent families on welfare have only one child, with another 31 per cent having only two children. That couch potato with a weak work ethic? Another myth. The grim truth is that more than half of all poor people are working. And even bleaker – almost one-third of people on welfare are children. When the proportion of poor people with disabilities is added to this mix, the picture looks quite different. There is a notable absence of white Cadillacs among the poor as well. Welfare incomes typically hover at around half the poverty line, not nearly enough money for adequate food or housing, let alone a car. Perhaps the most persistent of these fallacies is the idea of widespread welfare fraud. In fact, the evidence suggests that the rate of welfare fraud is quite low.
(cur for brevity)
Of course part of the problem is that it's often very hard to distinguish the deserving poor from the undeserving poor, and I suspect many people personally know of a situation where someone is gaming the system which usually does little to help confidence in the system. Many people will also personally know of someone who appears deserving of more help than the system says they can be given, which further undermines trust in it.
From my experience with the system in the UK, having graduated university in the middle of a recession and taken 18 months to find a job, the system was almost designed to be gamed. At the time I lived far enough from the unemployment office that I could "sign on" by mail. I literally signed a chit that said I was unemployed, mailed it in, and my check arrived in the mail a few days later. Easy as that. And when they called me in for one of their interviews to "make sure they were doing all they could to help" they typically gave three weeks notice - more than long enough to arrange a day off if I had been working on the quiet. Had an employer not been amenable to helping game the system it's enough notice to prepare a fake cold the day before. I often wondered why someone who is unemployed couldn't be contacted by telephone and called to an interview the next day. If you can't make it you'd better have a pretty good reason, since you're supposed to be unemployed.
Then of course government has a vested interest in keeping unemployment figures low because it makes them look good. In the US I believe you have the concept of "disengaged" where someone has given up on even looking for work and therefore doesn't count as "unemployed" any more. In the UK for a time it appeared there was something of a push to get people off the unemployment list, and moving them onto disability was a way to do it. It was a win-win for the government and the claimant - the government's unemployment figures dropped and the claimant got more free money. Never mind the taxpayers who picked up the tab for this act of indulgence.
From what I can see of the way the US system works it seems parts of the system are ripe for gaming by anyone who runs their own company who isn't morally opposed to exploiting the system. Sometimes, just out of a sense of irony, I wonder how easy it would be to have a SNAP card next to an Amex Platinum card, in the same wallet with the same names on them.
To look at a couple of sections in the article:
The myths about poverty often serve other political purposes as well. Defining the poor as lazy or irresponsible creates popular villains for the rest of us to condemn. It panders to a human weakness to feel superior to someone, and provides a handy target for complaints about tax dollars. The same is true when those stereotypes are dressed up in the jargon of "welfare dependency," argued as the reason why poor children sometimes end up as poor adults. The real problem is that poor children have severely limited resources, which often translates into less education and fewer opportunities as they get older. They may indeed end up losing that game of musical chairs, but not because of a particular mindset.
There is a lot of truth in that it's easier to dismiss a poor person as lazy rather than figuring out whether a hand up would help them. Where possible it makes sense to offer a hand up rather than a hand out, simply to assist someone to provide for themselves and achieve a sense of dignity rather than endlessly giving them just enough that they have "something to lose" without ever having enough to break free from poverty. The issue of education is another valid point, although perhaps part of the solution here would be to encourage employers to really ask whether the position they are looking to fill really requires a degree. When we reach a stage where you practically need a degree to mop the floor at McDonalds about the only achievement is that the poorest become excluded from employment, which offers little benefit to anyone except the politicians who can paint the other side as the boogeyman who will take away what little they have, all the while offering them just enough crumbs that they don't revolt.
The truth is that, like the rest of us, poor people engage in a wide range of moral conduct and possess a broad array of personal traits and psychological outlooks. And the way to address a complex problem like economic inequality is from a variety of different angles. Rather than scapegoating the poor, there are a series of practical steps that would have a significant impact on poverty. Several of these steps have been canvassed in these pages – a higher minimum wage, affordable housing, universal child care, a guaranteed income, and accessible education. These measures go to some of the most fundamental principles of civil society: ensuring human dignity and a fair shake for everyone, regardless of income.
"Poor people" as a group are as varied as any other group, as the article says. There's lots of talk about "addressing economic inequality" but there comes a point at which we need to ask whether it should be addressed at all. To give you an example, a guy I know is in his 40s, divorced with two kids. One of his standard go-to lines is "I can't afford it" and yet there's always beer in his fridge and there's always whiskey in his drinks cabinet. He drinks both in copious quantities, it's not as if he buys a cheap bottle of bourbon and nurses it for a year. He shows precisely zero inclination to improve his situation - he'll complain he doesn't know how to do something but won't take the time to read about it, or find YouTube videos about it because he'd rather spend time watching videos of cats falling off shelves or something. Why should there be anything other than economic inequality between a guy like this, and the guy who gets up early, works hard, and spends his free time learning new skills?
It's all very well to talk of higher minimum wages, universal child care, guaranteed incomes etc but the question always comes back to who is going to pay for it all. Usually the mantra is little more than "tax the rich" but without defining "the rich" or quantifying how much more they would be taxed, and indeed evaluating how much of the theoretical gain would actually be realised and how much economic activity would simply stop or move offshore, it's little more than rabble rousing.
But hey, if someone wants to pay me enough so that I don't need to work and can spend my entire life doing the things I want to, that would be grand. I just don't see a very big line forming of people wanting to do that.
