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What’s the Difference Between Being Broke and Being Poor?
Street scene in Bambara, Mali.
In my third year of medical school I spent a week with a traveling nurse who would do home visits in the housing projects of Toledo, OH to check on newborns. Someone would give birth in an inner-city hospital, then in a week or so this nurse would show up on the lady’s doorstep to show her how to take care of a baby. Many poor women don’t breastfeed, so she would make sure they were hooked up with WIC and other government programs.
I had never been in an inner-city housing project, and the police who escorted us around made it extremely clear that I should never come back without their assistance. It was horribly fascinating. The apartments were invariably filthy, and always had three to six women of various ages, watching daytime TV on big screens in high def. There were never any men around. The uninitiated might presume that the men were all at work — I don’t think that was the case. They always had nicer electronics than I. They often had old pizza boxes stacked in a corner nearly to the ceiling. I didn’t order pizza — it was too expensive on a student’s budget. Fancy cell phones, expensive tattoos, etc. My point is that I did not see what I expected to see. I did not see a lack of money.
I had a lack of money – I was a student. I was broke, but I was not poor. I drove a rusted-out Cavalier with non-functioning AC that ran fairly well most of the time (I installed a rebuilt Jasper motor in it myself to keep it on the road a little longer). I lived in a crummy cheap apartment (although it was clean). I ate a lot of rice and beans (which I have not eaten since). I lacked money. These housing project apartments revealed squalor, but not a lack of money.
When I visited my future wife in Mali, west Africa (she was in the Peace Corps at the time) it was the third poorest country in the world. They had nothing. But the women used shrub branches to sweep the dirt in front of their huts every day so it would look neat. They would not have stacked old pizza boxes inside their huts. They swept dirt.
It has been observed that you cannot cure poverty by giving money to poor people. If poverty is not a lack of money, then I suppose that makes sense. And our experience with the “War on Poverty” has proven that to be the case. So what are we supposed to do? No one could look at the dead eyes of those women watching daytime TV for the 1000th day in a row, surrounded by filth, and not feel bad for them. It’s only natural to want to help. So if you really wanted to help, what would you do?
We throw money at this problem to demonstrate our compassion. Not only does it not seem to be helping, it seems to be making the problem worse. So I ask, if you really wanted to help, what would you do?
Published in General
The numbers are so grim its difficult to like this post.
The only problem with affordable housing is that the people that occupy affordable housing are generally Section 8 tenants. You end up with Chicago or Detroit. There may be a few tenants that desire to be upwardly mobile and are striving to become prosperous. But most of the affordable housing seems to be occupied by people that get Section 8 vouchers and food stamps.
So instead of giving someone a hand up, by giving them a handout, you end up destroying previously prosperous neighborhoods. Because most people on welfare are not interested in working to get to a better station in life. They believe the rich people stole the land, stole the money, and that it is only fair they should be getting free money. They feel completely entitled, and are very resentful of the prosperous people they see around them.
I mean really? Why work if the government gives you free money for food, free money for housing, and you can afford an iphone, a car, a big screen TV, and you don’t have the hassle of showing up for work every day?
Some people will work very hard to get ahead, and some people will strive to do as little as possible. I don’t think giving people free money is the right solution.
I grew up in Toledo and my father was a surgeon I private practice there. I really wouldn’t consider any hospital in Toledo to be an “inner city” hospital. I assume you mean St. V’s/Mercy. As for public housing, the choice neighborhoods are around Door and Detroit, or Ashland Avenue, or the Old West End ( usually referred to now as “central city”). The issue in Toledo is the same as it has been for 60 years–jobs. Whether it’s the “old guard,” as my mom called it, or union cronyism, or democrat incompetence, when you have generations of people who live on public assistance, no amount of assistance or education or programs will remedy anything without changing hearts and minds. Fifty years ago lots of people worked at the Jeep plant, or Textile Leather, or Champion spark plug, or Libbey glass. Some of them had union careers at these plants, some of them worked for a week and a half and decided that working on an assembly line was too difficult. Get fired, go on unemployment, all manner of public assistance…and a couple of generations later you are watching The View with pizza boxes stacked in the corner. Toledo needs more Mike Rowe Works and less compassion.
I went to my last two years of college, trained as a chaplain, and lived in Toledo for 18 years. (Worked in Sylvania.) When I worked, I lived in adapted, Section 8 housing for several of those years. Very hard to maintain a work ethic and stay sane…Thanks be for family and church friends!
“Jobs are for poor people. I’m a rich person who doesn’t have any money.” — Jackie Burkhart ,”That ’70s Show”
I’d start by banning television. We ban lots of things these days, such as “cultural appropriation,” but we have so far failed to ban television. It’s time.
The best way for Republicans to set an example is to eliminate corporate welfare, which has a similar effect, except the corporate version of welfare dependence is more harmful and dangerous to our society. Once we have that example in front of us to show how the former recipients can go on to be productive and happy members of society, we can start to cut back some of the welfare in the housing projects.
Darn right!
I think we are in violent agreement but that you misunderstood my comment.
Yep. I lived in the Bronx for a bit when I was teaching remedial English to freshmen (primarily Hispanics) at Fordham University, and I also know a thing or two about life in the ghetto. As you can imagine, being about the only white dude within a 3 mile radius of the room in a boarding house that was renting made things “interesting” from time to time.
I have also have seen with my own two eyeballs what Dr. Bastiat mentioned in his OP. You would be surprised how many welfare peeps have higher end consumer goods than do you and me. Seems that the middle class has to make trade-offs while the welfare peeps do not. Go figure.
When I was a grad student in Boston, our neighbor asked my wife if we wanted any hot goods. My wife, new to the US and especially to this class of folks, hadn”t clue what he was talking about. I imagine that most of those high end goods come with significant discounts. Why do you suppose regular riots are so important?
Well, I agree with part of this. I agree that education is a good way to improve one’s station in life. There are other ways, but education is a good one.
However, I don’t see what this has to do with schools. By the time these kids get to school at age 5 or 6, a lot of damage has been done. Then, they are only in school for 6-7 hours per day, the rest of the time they are in their home environment, surrounded by that which we are trying to change. Then, while they’re in school, if they try hard and do their best, their friends say they’re “acting white,” which is a life changing insult to someone of that background. Then, if they have the backbone to overcome all that, only then does the quality of the schools matter. And you’re right, they’re dismal, but I argue that it may not matter as much as you think.
Their home environment makes the quality of the schools less important than you might expect. Yes, we should work on improving the schools. But first, I don’t think it will help much. Second, the schools won’t be nice for long once some of these kids get there. It’s a really tough issue.
How long ago was this tour of the inner city? I think culture drives incentive. Growing up, my family had one income, and we recycled before it was popular. My aunt drummed into my head, “it’s no sin to be poor, but it’s a sin to be dirty”. Welfare or food stamps were only extreme and temporary, if ever.
I had to help clean, iron, hang clothes outside, paint, do yard work. I never felt lacking in anything. I spent time going to poor neighborhoods informing families of free immunizations through a local program and volunteered at food banks. I would grit my teeth when overweight young women came in driving nice cars and wore gold jewelry and loaded up food. We had to serve all, they had to show a food stamps card.
My sister in social services and others said people today use the system, the more kids, the more benefits. The “father” sleeps on whatever couch he chooses with multiple mothers, taking the benefits. Food stamps are sold for drugs. Free phones, low housing, no follow up if you don’t look for a job. Tracking people for child support cost tax payers millions.
Someone once told me if you have a bottle of ketchup in your frig, you have more than many in third world poverty. That is poor. We enable people to use the system and it needs cleaned up.
Ignorance at home brings ignorance to school… and ignorance follows. Then the rest is just survival, days pass and life goes on and the physical is provided for those who live in ignorance… sorry, it all starts with education, family, faith and friends all are ‘teachers’.
There isn’t a ‘physical’ thing that can be done, it has to happen in your head and in your heart, not in the world.
If you’re right (…and I think you are…) then what can well intentioned people do to help?
Same experience in our neighborhood!
You have raised the question of our times. Compassion……….personal accountability……………..what is the right answer? I don’t know. But we do know which side the media will fall on 100% of the time. It is sadly a discussion that we can not have with any honesty.
Encourage two parent families. Right now we discourage them. Also encourage education, with school choice, so those that want to learn are not stuck in deplorable government schools.
Busy couple!
With so many thoughtful posts in this thread, I hate to be so negative, but the only answer I can come up with is this:
Reduce benefits by a strict 10% per year and continue to do so until the amount of the benefit is for all practical purposes zero. Decrease the level of administrative overhead by the same amount each year. (i.e., Lay off 10% of the government workers administering those programs each year.)
A (very) few people will get the wake up call in year one with the first round when their benefits drop to 90% of what it was originally. More will suddenly consider the benefits of hard work when it falls to 80% of the pre-phase-out level. By the time benefits have been halved those with any hope of escaping the cycle of dependency will already have moved on to some level of self-sufficiency. As for the rest, the riots will at least be spread out a little as each annual decrease drives more of the hopelessly freeloading into the streets.
Obviously, there is no chance of this actually happening. More likely to occur is that the whole economy collapses and we reach the communist ideal of ALL of us being equally poor together. Then the hopeless ones can just go ahead and starve to death, as there will be no one left in a position to be able to help them. I do not state this with any sort of heartless glee, it is just a matter of fact. If I had to feed 50 people on my income we would all starve, whether I liked it or not.
Government charity has produced this “poverty.” When charity is guaranteed by law, what is the incentive for people to behave? Why would they conform to basic standards of decency? They demand my money and don’t care whether I like them or not. How is this just?
I don’t care about them. I honestly don’t. My latest career has me meeting more of them than I care to. I do my best to help them, but I don’t have much sympathy. It’s not that hard, but they refuse to follow basic rules. They see no reason to do so and when their children get taken away, they often don’t understand that it’s entirely their fault. And as they are put through the process to get their children back, they don’t understand how easy it is to get them back, so long as they follow a few rudimentary rules.
Yet, they get virtually free medical care. I pay $1200 a month for my family’s medical care. They get section 8 housing, and act like it’s a god-given right. They live like the pigs you describe, with food containers all over the place, basic hygiene ignored. But they stay with their drug dealing boyfriends and spend a lot of money on hair weaves and metal in their faces. They’ve had four litters of children taken from them and they still keep making more.
I’m sick of it. They stay alive because I am enslaved to support them. I don’t like them, and I don’t really care if they live. I resent being forced to support them. I don’t much care about their children, either. Maybe if we stopped giving them so much of my money, they would die before making more children. That would be more just. Or maybe, just maybe, they would learn to make a living. Nah. Maybe a generation removed might, but they never will.
I apologized for my negative comment, but now I feel like a flat-out Pollyanna.
I can’t really criticize you for feeling the way you do, though. Trying to help people who hate your guts is not easy.
Aren’t we already losing a generation to [putatively/originally] prescribed opiods that graduate to heroin? Maybe a couple generations, if we start with older adults? I was never so happy as I was to get the clearance letter(s) for voluntary withdrawals. You’d think they’d make it easier to get out, but they’re incredulous that you’d actually request that payments cease…Sheesh!
Compensation drives behavior.
If you can keep a roof over your head, food in the fridge, a TV, phone, and the terlet works – and you don’t have to do a damn thing to get all these things – why would you ever get up off the couch?
Think of this like a small child being raised in a household where he or she had no chores, no responsibility, anytime they asked for something they got it, all their needs were being met by others, there was no requirement for them to be responsible for anything, and they were never told (nor did they care) how hard Mom and Dad had to work to provide all those things for junior.
Imagine what that child would grow up to be like. That’s what we get for $20 trillion or so being spent on poverty programs since the 1960s. A permanent dependency class. And a permanent political class, and bureaucracy, that is highly motivated to keep it that way, because votes.
You are such a cynic.
For Progressives that’s a feature, not a bug.
Institutions do not help people. People help people.
Government does not lift people out of poverty. It is achieved by the people themselves, often interacting and working through personal relationships with others who care about them.
The institutions that do help, do so because they create situations where personal relationships grow goodness: think of charities run by churches, schools where teachers are free to connect with an inspire their students. The institution enables the relationship, but it is the relationship that does the heavy lifting.
Charity works when communities and good people do it. It fails when it is conducted by bureaucrats spending Other Peoples’ Money.
It’s worse then that. Even if they want to work, doing the cold calculus of the issue they need to make so much money after taxes it takes a significant income to make up for the loss of benefits.
I only started earning $69,000/year relatively late in my working life.
I’ll say that the “better education” mantra is a very difficult one to achieve without addressing social problems… without having honest conversations about what’s happening in the homes of students.
You see, I’ve taught school where the police patrol the halls with guns, not tasers, and the “free lunch” program eligibility was at almost 100%.
Having a child of my own in school at the time, I knew that Parents’ Night would be standing room only. (This was early in my tenure, you see, before I knew better.)
Like most teachers, I had 100+ kids in my charge, so I fretted over whether or not I made enough handouts, if I’d have enough desks.
So one mother showed up. One. Let me repeat that again. One. That’s less than 1%.
In the year I taught at that school, I saw plenty of dead eyes and lots of anger. It was a trial by fire, so I definitely understand how @skyler feels when working with certain people.
The thing is this. There were children in that setting who weren’t completely gone… who wanted more… who really, really didn’t want to be the people with the pizza boxes.
I cared about them. They absolutely broke my heart, and I still think about some of them with tears in my eyes because I could see their futures, and very few were anything but dim.
I did not have the power or the resources to pull them out of the abyss, and when they started to climb the walls on their own, they always had hands pulling at their clothes, tugging hard at their feet, the darkness constantly wanting to devour them.
Those hands had nothing to do with how well I taught them. Nor was I big enough figure to do much in their lives in the hour or so I saw them each day.
Christ calls us to minister to these people. That does not mean give them I-phones or TVs. But I could not wait to escape that world on some days. (I learned at some point that the teacher I had replaced had gotten into his car and driven off the parking lot at lunchtime one day without a word to anyone else, never to return, not even for his pencil sharpener!)
I finished the year, but I left that environment before my heart hardened.
The problem in those schools is not teachers’ unions, though we hear that all the time. The problem is the student body, and I don’t know how to fix a place in which children were not allowed in the hallways to meet teachers in the afternoons because if they were left to roam on their own, they would PEE off the stairwells.
How do I teach critical thinking to those teenagers?
How do kids who want to do better survive that?
If I had the answers, I’d still be teaching there.