Three Lies Conservatives Tell About Poverty

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Three Lies Conservatives Tell About Poverty

Three Lies Conservatives Tell About Poverty
by Charlotte Hill May 03, 2010 08:30 AM (PT)
http://uspoverty.change.org/blog/view/three_lies_conservatives_tell_about_poverty

Have you ever tried to enter into a conversation with someone about poverty, only to find that you spend all your time correcting their false assumptions about low-income Americans? Ever been told that poor people in the U.S. should be grateful for what they have? Ever suffered through an endless diatribe about how the poor should just pick themselves up by their bootstraps (after all, Oprah did it)?

If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions, this piece is for you.

1. Owning a TV doesn't make you rich.

Neither does owning a car or a cell phone. Material goods can be an indicator of wealth, yes, but they don't tell the whole story. First, some goods, like cars and cell phones, are absolutely necessary components of modern life, regardless of income level. Does a poor person have less of a need to drive to work every day? Does she not require a phone to call her family and friends like everyone else? Likewise, entertainment is hard to come by for low-income families; compared to eating out or going to a movie theater, purchasing an inexpensive TV can be the most cost-effective way to destress. And for those mothers who cannot afford daycare, television unfortunately also acts as a makeshift babysitter for young children.

There's a reason why the updated federal poverty line focuses on the costs of health care, utilities, rent, childcare and nutrition, to the exclusion of minor material goods like TVs and phones; these are the day-to-day essentials that every working family should be able to afford. If someone owns a color TV but can't pay rent on a one-bedroom apartment, they're not well-off (and no, selling the TV won't radically improve the situation).

Yet conservatives love to suggest otherwise. "In terms of the items people have ... it amazes me the number of people who are at or near the poverty line that have color TVs, cable, washer, dryer, microwave." Those words, spoken by Michael Cosgrove, a right-leaning economist at the University of Dallas, are emblematic of the Heritage Foundation-esque failure to see the forest for the trees. This is cherry-picking at its best, implying that a microwave oven somehow compensates for unaffordable college tuition, for environmental injustice or for terrible health.

2. Comparing U.S. poverty to international poverty is pointless.

It's rare that a child dies in America from lack of food or preventable disease. In Somalia, a man may live on less than $1 a day; in the United States, we classify poverty for a family of four as under $22,050 each year. As the Heritage Foundation reports, low-income Americans eat "nearly four times as much meat as the average Brazilian" — a testament, apparently, to the protein-rich diet of our country's poorest citizens.

What conservatives need to realize is that when we talk about poverty in America, we activists generally aren't focusing on absolute poverty. Who, after all, could dispute that the poorest American is probably better off than the poorest Ethiopian or Afghan? Rather, we focus on the poverty of opportunity plaguing our nation. Contrary to the ideals set out by our founding fathers, all Americans don't start out on equal planes. The color of our skin, our sexual orientation, the historical wealth of our families and our geographic location all play major roles in the cards we're dealt.

We realize that poverty is a life-and-death struggle in many areas of the world. But that doesn't negate our struggle for equality of opportunity here at home.

3. Poor people don't deserve their poverty.

Ever heard of the meritocracy myth? It goes thus: in America, you are what you make of yourself. Work hard and you'll make money. Slack off and you'll end up on the streets. According to Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the foundations of this myth lie in Calvinism and, more broadly, the Protestant tradition. Calvinists believed that God bestowed material wealth on his chosen elite; therefore, if you had money, you were in God's favor. Similarly, if you were poor, you were a sinner, a non-chosen one. Wealth became a sign of exceptionalism in the eyes of God, poverty a mark of damnation.

Protestantism as a whole took it a step further: working hard was the key to heaven. Hard workers earned money, a sign — once again — of God's affection. In short, work plus money equaled moral superiority.

Alas, blaming the poor for their poverty is as fashionable as ever. Just look to — you guessed it — the Heritage Foundation, which claims that child poverty is caused by parents, not by flawed government programs, unregulated capitalism, or deeply-entrenched remnants of racism and sexism: "The main causes of child poverty in the United States are low levels of parental work and high numbers of single-parent families," the Foundation concluded in a 2004 report.

Unfortunately for conservatives, the meritocracy myth is just that — a myth, a false perception of reality. Poor families work just as hard as rich ones (that is, if they can secure a job at all); they just don't reap the financial rewards of the capitalist system the way the top 1 percent of Americans do.

So there you have it: three common mistakes conservatives make about poverty. What other false arguments have you heard about low-income Americans, and how do you respond to them?