Tag Archives | Americans in poverty
September 13, 2012

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class, Current Events

Marriage as the cure, America’s reality problem

America has a reality problem and it ain’t Snooki, J-Wow and Honey Boo. Americans are stuck in the dreams of yesterday and a place and time where life was a lot more black and white and not the shades of grey that have become the reality of modern day life in America. Our reality problem or rather refusal to look at reality as a collective whole is why we avoid looking at what we have become and working towards real solutions, instead we assess blame and look the other way.

Recent Census data shows that America, the land of dreams and prosperity has taken a terrible detour, we are lost. Yet instead of acknowledging that we are lost, it’s easier to nitpick hence a report I heard on NPR this morning ‘Can Marriage Save Single Mothers From Poverty’ of course folks on the conservative side think that marriage (but only marriage that involves one man and one woman) is the magic cure-all. Sure 40% of all births in the US are out of wedlock, but rather than look at the fact that wages have been stagnant and in the past decade the middle class has been hammered and the poor have been forgotten all while the rich have grown richer, it’s easy to say get married and the number of poor will decrease. Really?

In the NPR piece, Stephanie Coontz, a professor at Evergreen State College, makes a good point, sure women know that marrying a man who earns a good wage probably will be beneficial but the reality is these men with good wages are often not available. In lower income communities they simply don’t exist as wages have stagnated and even in so called good communities, many of these men have watched their own opportunities decrease as evidenced by this piece featured a few weeks ago in the New York Times. Where once solidly middle class men with wives are no longer the breadwinners, instead it’s the wives who are earning the bread. In many cases, globalization has changed the game and in this case, the game has changed for good.

To take a financial issue and turn it into a moral/social issue once again takes the pressure off the powers to be to create real change. It pits neighbor against neighbor and creates a false sense of security for the remaining haves while they cast dispersions at the have-nots. To even link single motherhood to poverty and use marriage as the cure, once again threatens the rights of all women and threatens to take us back to a time when women were less than.

Marriage under the right circumstances can be a beautiful thing, hell I have done it two times and so far seem to be pretty successful at it this second time around. Make no mistake though, more marriages crumble due to financial matters than anything else. If we look at the upper middle class and above and say they have higher rates of marriage and lowers rates of divorce, we can’t ignore the fact that financial stability allows a couple to have less pressures and more access to resources when there are problems. A financially solid couple can see a marriage therapist, afford the babysitters and time away that can keep a marriage on track, all things that are harder to do when you are just trying to keep the lights on.

Until we all have access to financially stable jobs with solid benefits, let’s just leave marriage out of the discussion.

February 2, 2012

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Current Events, Poverty

Safety net…oh you mean the safety string?

Mitt Romney’s foot in mouth moment has inspired me to take a few minutes to post, since today being a half day of school for the wee lass and a full day of work for me means this is a long day. Yet when the guy who looks like he is going to be the GOP nominee starts uttering ridiculous shit, well I have to say something.

In case ya missed it, yesterday Mitt Romney basically stated that his focus is on the middle class, not the very rich (for obvious reasons) and not the very poor because the very poor have a safety net. Really? They do? Mittens you are talking an area where I know the deal, see I guess you’d say I have been in the helping poor people business now for 15 years and let me tell you the safety net is not a net. It’s a few strings at this point.

Can we start off with the fact that half of Americans are technically poor or low income, in other words they are making less than $50,000 a year. Now depending on where you live and how you live, 50G’s will keep you fed and housed but as far as building wealth or any of that shit, it’s not happening.  Thing is a lot of those people in that classification are living off way less than 50G’s a year, hell some may barely have any money at all. Someone asked me the other day, don’t all families with kids get tax refunds, I said no…and it’s true, the earned income credit phases out in the upper $40,000’s but thanks to what I am calling the poorification of the US., it means an whole lotta folks do get these credits and subsequent refunds. They aren’t getting tax refunds because they have kids; they are getting them because they are poor or low income. When so many people with kids are getting tax refunds that it’s perceived that they are obtaining them due to the kids but it’s really because they are broke, that says a lot!

In America we don’t talk money, it’s not polite but the reality is more of us are sliding into economic despair and hardship and frankly a lot of formerly middle class folks are learning we have no nets in this country. The only real net program we have is food stamps or SNAP benefits as they are called these days. Yet guys like Newt Gingrich sneer and call President Obama the “food stamp” president as if Obama is standing on street corners passing out food stamp cards. If more people are on food stamps than ever before it’s because people cannot afford the ever increasing cost of food.

The safety net is barely there, in states like mine the governor wants to cut people off the Medicaid program because we can’t afford it. Never mind most of these people are on it because they for starters they meet the income qualifications which last I knew in Maine could be near $40,000 a year. Sure that sounds luxurious but if you have a family of 3-4 on 40G’s a year and your employer doesn’t offer you coverage, how else do you get it?

When people like Mitt Romney and well-meaning but clueless people say there are safety nets they are talking out of their ass. Government assistance to the poor is limited and drying up, again using my current state as an example; heating assistance to low income folks was slashed and in a state that heats with heating oil that is bad news. Average Maine family will go through at least 800 gallons of heating oil in a winter and with prices starting at damn near $3.50 a gallon and up and the  average allotment of assistance coming in at $300 tops that means someone will be cold. Hell, someone could die.

Programs for housing have waiting lists across the country, when I last lived in Chicago; the waiting list to get on Section 8 was closed, even in Maine it can now take upwards of 3 years to get into subsidized housing. Three years is a long time to scramble for affordable housing. Let’s talk food, even with food stamp assistance; it takes creativity and ingenuity to make your benefits last all month. Despite the tales of carts laden with junk food, steaks and lobsters, the reality is not everyone who receives food stamps gets hundreds of dollars for some it may only be $100 a month; it’s based off individual economic circumstances. For many, local food banks, pantries and soup kitchens are the bridge to eating all month. However they too are hurting. I just took a call a few days ago from a local food pantry asking for help with a food drive, they are now seeing over 100 families a day when they are open, the demand is greater than the supply. I am seeing more hungry kids at my center and there is nothing worse than asking for help to keep kids fed and being met with a lackluster response. Local agencies and churches can barely keep up with demand.

So we have the government who in recent years has reduced its programing to the poor, we have local agencies that simply do not have the means to help everyone and we simply have more people in need of help. Now where is that safety net?

To Mitt and anyone else who thinks like him, I say you need to get off high street and come on down to commoner lane and spend some time talking to people who are struggling. You may learn a thing or two.

September 18, 2011

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class, Current Events, Poverty

Open your eyes…the poor are all around us!

Despite the fact that unemployment is at an all-time high, has been for a while and shows no signs of moving downward. The majority of us who are still fortunate enough to have gainful employment that meets most of our needs seem to think economic hardship is just a conversation and something that happens to others. Never mind that if one actually takes a hard look at those around them, in most cases you don’t have to look far or hard to realize it’s actually your neighbor, friend or acquaintance who has left the middle class and landed in poverty.

National publications have been publishing hard breaking stories for over a year now about folks who have are riding the socioeconomic train downward. Yet unless it happens to us, it’s easy to ignore since for most of us we still have assumptions about what poverty looks like. Well after fifteen years working primarily with low income families and youth it recently hit me that what I am seeing in my work looks a hell of a lot different than what I am used to seeing. The stuff I am seeing lately stays with me day in and day out because unlike the first five years of my work when I worked with single men and women many who faced untreated mental health issues and addictions, I am seeing many folks who used to live where I …they remind me daily how the trip up the class ladder can take years but the trip down and the descent into poverty is rapid and once there your chances of moving back up are harder than ever before.

Due to my job schedule and the flexibility of the Spousal Unit’s work, he is often the parent that connects with other parents, since I am often at my office when the girl child is getting out of school. Over the years of the girl child being in preschool and now in elementary school, we have noticed a shift. It used to be that the hubster was the only dad dropping and picking up a child, but now there are far more Dads picking up and dropping off. Sadly this involvement comes because dad is either unemployed or greatly underemployed as the man has learned when talking to the other Dads. In fact he has been one of the few Dads who are actually employed in his chosen career, many others are trying to hobble together a living or simply on childcare duty while Mom works and this comes from their own mouths.

Back when the girl child was in preschool, the Spousal Unit became friendly with another dad who it turned out was an out of work school teacher who hailed from the Midwest like us, so they struck up a casual friendship since our girls like to play together. Towards the end of preschool, Bob as I will call him landed a job at a local grocery story in the deli section despite having advanced degrees and all that jazz there was no jobs for him. Last night the hubs told me he had run into Bob who mentioned that they had sold their house at a loss and were now living with relatives. Initially this information didn’t register but when it did, it dawned on me that Bob and his family are now part of the 22 million Americans doubling up with friends and family. Doubling up is often the last stop before outright homelessness. Most of us are not going to willingly move in with relatives’ long term unless we have no option, that’s just how most of us operate in the US. No, you leave your house and move in with relatives because you are about to be homeless, no matter how you dress that up. In the families I work with, many are doubling up though for those who have been living with financial scarcity long term, doubling up is harder than for the formerly middle class. In many instances the formerly middle class at least has enough of a toe in that world that the folks they double up with have the room for them. One of my clients right now is a family of 7 living with relatives in a 3 bedroom apartment. Tough shit!

I find that since I have no issues talking about having grown up working class that in the past year or so many people I know both offline and online share their financial plight with me…I often joke it’s an occupational hazard. In some cases I can give folks a lead on resources as I did recently when a woman overheard me talking in a café about work and shared her story with me and I was able to guide her towards some agencies that might help her. All while sitting in a lovely upscale café! Think about that.

In America we don’t talk money, at least good middle class and above folks don’t, its gauche, so we avoid it. Yet when we do that, it means no one sees who needs help. So we can continue to assume the poor are the raggedy, the folks living in subsidized housing, the addicts, etc. instead of seeing that the poor are our friends and family members. I keep thinking that if more of us actually knew we know real people struggling we might get more pissed off and demand justice. Instead the formerly middle class hold onto a few vestiges of their former life be it the car, the iGadget or even the coffee at Starbucks they nurse for hours while using the Wi-Fi connection to look for work. So because we see Susie and Bob still looking more or less like us we don’t bother to dig deeper and shame keeps Susie and Bob from telling you they have lost it financially. Instead they use creative language and euphemisms to describe their downsizing but if we would just open our eyes we will see the poor are not others, they are us.

July 19, 2011

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class, Random babble

Poverty, the ultimate destroyer of dreams

In recent months both here on my blog as well as on Twitter I have been pretty vocal about my need for a career change. After 15 years in the non-profit/human services sector I am burnt out. This is my second stint as an Executive Director but in 15 years this is the first agency that I have been with where the work I do is emotionally and mentally heavy. I started my career off back in Chicago working with women trying to escape the exploitative world of prostitution. From there I spent most of my career working with homeless men and women, occasionally working with folks formerly homeless folks once they got into housing. But it’s the past three years of working with low income youth that has just taken my soul and everything good and lovely that I believed in and turned it into coal.

While I am prone to joking about my work and my kids as I call the families we serve, the truth is it’s not the kids themselves that have burnt me out. It’s the system, its society, it’s the fact that so many of us have too damn much and some of us don’t have enough and seeing that great inequity day in and day out is killing me.

I am tired of seeing people with no teeth, children who don’t have good shoes to play in or adequate clothing to play in. I am tired of begging people with too much to support those who do not have enough because we with a few rocks are in a position to decide if those poor people are worthy. I am tired of going home and talking to friends who have more than enough bitch and moan about their lack because they can’t get the newest and latest iGadget when I know kids and family who struggle literally to have enough to eat. Because the reality is monthly SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) really aren’t enough to feed a family of 4-5 three nutritious meals a day despite everyone’s anecdotal story of the welfare recipient with a cart piled high with Porterhouse steaks and Chips Ahoy.

Most of all I am tired of seeing kids that by age 13 have given up hope, whose largest dreams now exist in procreating themselves if nothing else for the temporary joy new babies bring into all families regardless of economics. Tired of the fact that my generation might have been the last one to be born poor or working class but could work hard and move up. More importantly just tired of feeling like I am no longer an agent of change for my families but instead I have become a human misery minimizer because all I can do in the end is minimize the misery that people living in poverty face…Poverty sucks because in the end it robs those stuck in it of the ability to dream and without dreams, what do we have? If it wasn’t for dreams, a little girl born in the early 1970’s in Chicago back in the free hospital (Cook County) to teenage parents wouldn’t be sitting here typing this piece.

April 25, 2011

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class, Current Events, Random babble

The latest war…the enemy? Those pesky poor folks.

Somewhere along the way maybe while we were all sleeping, it seems yet another war has been started. Unlike the previous wars of this past decade or so, some of us don’t even know a war is going on. Hell, some of us actually are complicit and think this war is a great idea until our own luck changes and then we too will learn that the powers to be have decided to wage war on the poor. War on the poor, you ask? Perhaps you think I am being a tad dramatic but after reading about the fella down in Michigan who wants to save a few pennies by only allowing foster kids used clothes, talk of changes to the food stamp program, and closer to home here in Maine talk of drug testing all recipients of Maine Care the state of Maine’s Medicaid program. I say this is starting to look like a war.

Yet the only folks who are aware of this war are the folks at the bottom and those of us who work with them who are being asked to do more with less. I don’t know about you but I sort of like the idea of living in a nation that provides for the least fortunate among us, since fortunes in these turbulent economic times can change like the wind in my hometown of the Windy City.

I can’t help thinking that our culture of silence around discussions of all things related to money and class unless we are showing off our bling bling is part of why people assume that the poor are those “other” folks. Here in the United States outside of a few select areas the face of poverty can be quite surprising, I mean today’s welfare recipient might carry a Smartphone, drive around in a decent car and be reasonably well dressed and live in a house that doesn’t scream poverty! So we take these outward signs that well folks are just gaming the system, but are they?

A few years back, the Spousal Unit had a lousy year professionally and our income nose dived and we qualified for the state Medicaid program, barely. In fact had our income been about $500 more it would have been a no-go. Despite my own misgivings and pride, I was happy as hell to have access to health insurance for that year because it allowed me to get the double hernia repair surgery I needed as well as the oral surgery my daughter needed. Oh, I am sure there were medical staff who did a double take and a few times I did find myself explaining that my job does not offer health coverage and my husband is self employed and had a bad year. Both my husband and I are college graduates, we live in a house and own a decent car. Yet due to circumstances beyond our control we needed help and I for one was fortunate to be able to access that help. I know others just like me, yes during that time we had cellular phones which are needed due to our jobs, again…we had jobs, and they just didn’t pay enough. Yet I am sure there are some who will say you could have done XYZ rather than using state assistance.

My point is that since the Great Recession, folks are leaving the middle class by the droves and those folks need help, some will move right back into the middle class and by making sure we keep suitable safety nets available, we are making sure that folks who use the system now will be able to pay back into it. However if we cut the safety nets all we are doing is making sure that we are creating a permanent underclass in this country that ultimately does more harm than good.

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September 17, 2010

1



class, Current Events, Money, Random babble

The New Amerikka

Perhaps it’s because of my professional work, but the latest report that poverty is on the rise in the US doesn’t surprise me at all. One in seven Americans are below the poverty level, for many reading that figure was a surprise. Why? I suspect that for most of us clinging to the illusion that there is still a middle class in this country and living in spaces with people who still plop down $4 for a Pumpkin Spiced Latte from the local coffee emporium and are seen carrying the latest piece of iGadgetry it may be hard to fathom. Yet as someone whose work puts them down in the trenches, I see folks daily struggling to meet ends meet. I see members of the formerly middle class asking for help with their kid’s school supplies, asking for help for food and the list goes on. It’s not just in Maine either, the shelter where I served as a program director back in Chicago now has a waiting list. A waiting list for a homeless shelter! Where does a homeless person go once they lose their housing and the shelter has a waiting list? Food for thought.

The truth in my opinion is that America is literally in the midst of a shift, the gap between the have rocks and the have no rocks is not a gulf but a fucking ocean. Shit, it might even be two oceans. As a provider of social services, I am inundated daily with people who have needs that the current social service net does not begin to address. Even small non profit faith based agencies such as the one I head are simply being overwhelmed with needs we cannot meet. I chuckle when I think of this because conservatives often say agencies such as mine should be the ones to help those in need yet we are woefully underfunded. Perhaps they think the angels and fairies are the ones that replenish our coffers. Interesting tidbit from 15 years in this sector, but at many of the small agencies that I have worked at both in Maine and back in Chicago the staff salaries weren’t much above poverty themselves. I used to have a coworker back in Chicago who often ate at the shelter we worked at because he often ran short of food. Yet people like him are never counted in these poverty rates.

Today’s post really has no point, but between the report that poverty is on the rise and interviewing folks for an opening at my center where multiple applicants told me they were nervous about taking the position should it be offered because it might impact their unemployment compensation benefits. I really have been wondering what the hell is happening to this country? So many of us are just struggling to survive and racked with fear that one wrong move might turn us into the real poor. For many if we at least have a roof over our heads, food on the table and the occasional want we like to believe that we have access to the American dream yet a nation where there is 1 job for every 5 applicants does not sound like a dream but more like a nightmare.

At the end of the day while the talking heads want to put the blame on certain political parties truth is in some ways we have all contributed to this new America. An America where we value low cost and quantity over making sure our neighbors are taken care of. I am not that old, yet I remember a time when a hard working person didn’t need a college degree to make a living wage. I remember the days of my grandparents who worked in plants that paid true living wages and benefits, I am also old enough to remember when we allowed the powers to be to take those jobs and send them elsewhere. So is it really a surprise that now the poor get poorer and the middle class get poor too? Only folks truly doing well are the few who hold the bulk of the wealth in this country.