The Nation’s Greg Kaufmann dispels the myths about poverty in America and the politics behind it
According to the last census, there were 46 million Americans
living in poverty — more than the entire population of California. But despite
the large mass of people struggling to get by, they hold little political
clout. Instead, these millions are often ignored or openly derided by
politicians, who eagerly slash poverty-support programs. And in the national
press, the impoverished are frequently either given a cursory glance or treated
with outright derision.
One exception is Greg Kaufmann, who writes the “This Week in
Poverty” blog for The Nation magazine. Kaufmann, a former speechwriter for
Democratic campaigns, uses the blog to examine under-covered policies and
politics that affect the most economically vulnerable Americans. He also uses
the platform to give a voice to people who would otherwise be completely left
out of the national conversation.
“I don’t consider myself an expert on any of these things,”
said Kaufmann. “I talk to the experts, and I talk to people who live in
poverty. When you talk about the myths, one of the biggest myths is that people
in poverty can’t speak for themselves. If you take the time to talk to people
about the issues, they understand them and know what we need to to.”
Jake Thomas: We have so many people struggling
economically. Why do you think we don’t see more elected officials making an
issue of this? Why is poverty not a mainstream issue?
Greg Kaufmann: It’s a question of who votes, and it
seems that people in poverty don’t vote in large numbers. I think that there’s
a history in this country of bashing people in poverty and blaming them for
their problems. So politicians are afraid of being sympathetic or empathetic —
that they are going to lose by doing this. There’s this idea that middle-class
Americans who do vote are not receptive to that message, and I think that’s a
mistake. More middle-class people and formerly middle-class people can see that
we all have a lot of the same issues in common, especially when it comes to
access to the basics like food, housing, health care, education, jobs with good
wages. I think we can do a lot more speaking to lower-income and middle-class
people.
J.T.: Covering issues of poverty, what do you
think is the most under-covered issue?
G.K.: I think you hardly see anything about people
with disabilities in poverty. I’m not a numbers guy, I don’t have a lot of
statistics. I mean the figures for people with disabilities living in poverty
are pretty astounding. And what’s even more concerning, I think, and you saw
this with the NPR report on this, is treating people with disabilities is the
new welfare queen; they’re the new people to bash. So there’s this long series
on NPR suggesting that people are just taking advantage of disability
assistance and that got so much play in the news. We could go into why that
report was so flawed and really downright misleading, but it’s a real problem.
We seem to be going in a direction when there is coverage questioning people
who need assistance.
J.T.: Tell me more about that. What flaws did you
see in the NPR report?
G.K.: Well, for one their whole thesis was, oh my
god, look at this spike in people receiving disability insurance. And if you
look at what the actuaries in the Social Security Administration predicted in
the mid-90s, this is exactly where they said we would be — because of the baby
boomers aging and reaching an age where they have more disabilities and more
women having entered the work force and paying into the disability insurance
system.
Seriously, they said that we would get to this point like a
year sooner than we did. We knew this spike was coming, but the report implied
that the rise is due to people manipulating the system or because it’s harder
to get TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), so people are turning to
the disability system. They even have a graph on their website showing the rise
in disability recipients, and the fall in TANF recipients, as if they are
linked. But the people who aren’t receiving TANF are mostly single mothers with
children. Those aren’t the people getting disability — the typical recipient is
a woman in her late 50s. They’re comparing apples to oranges.
They also implied that the standard to get disability is
low, and they looked at Hale County, Alabama, and they said, look at all the
people getting disability. But in the rules it says the SSA can consider the
number of jobs the claimant can do that exist in the region and the national
economy — along with your age, education, and impairments — in determining
whether you qualify for assistance.
So, in a lot of former mining or forestry areas, for
example, your body’s been worn down from decades of physical labor, you don’t
have skills beyond the ones you’ve needed to do your job your whole life, you
have limited education—you can’t just up and transfer to some job just like
that. That’s why you see outliers like Hale County where more people are on
disability.
They took all these things we knew and twisted them, and
they didn’t talk to anybody who had a more, I would argue, deeper understanding
of the system.
J.T.: How do you think Barack Obama will be
remembered on poverty? What do you think his legacy will be on that?
G.K.: I wouldn’t say it’s a complicated answer; I’d
say it’s almost a schizophrenic answer. If you look at the Recovery Act (the
stimulus), it did great things for helping homeless people and helping people
who would have otherwise been homeless, with people getting access to food
stamps, subsidized jobs.
There’s lot of things in the Recovery Act where, in
retrospect, you say, I can’t believe that happened. You can’t get anything
nowadays. Since then, he rarely talks about poverty, and I think that’s
important because it enforces why people
don’t talk about poverty. If the president were leading on that it would help
change the conversation. He said some good things in the inauguration and in
his first State of the Union, where he wanted to raise the minimum wage and
pathways to the middle class. But he doesn’t use the phrases poor people,
people in poverty, but people who aspire to the middle class. The semantics are
less important than the policy.
Other than that, he seems to be really focused on
pre-kindergarten expansion and child care and Head Start and early childhood
education. If he can get that through, that will do a lot for the way people
view what he did or did not do for low-income people. But you know, to my mind,
his focus and willingness to discuss issues related to people in poverty has
been very wanting, and his legacy, right now, with the exception of the
Recovery Act, and that’s an important exception. It’s a lot of missed
opportunities.
J.T.: You write a lot about TANF, which was
created by the Clinton welfare reform in the 1990s. What do you think the
legacy of the Clinton welfare reform has been?
G.K.: Well, on the one hand, the positives have been
the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, but what everyone really
associates with welfare reform is TANF and the work requirement and the time
limit.
So, it’s great in terms of the Earned Income Tax Credit, but
TANF, and the biggest part of the policy, is a disaster. We have 50 different
welfare systems because the states can basically do what they want. So in some
states like Wyoming, almost no one gets assistance. It varies wildly. There is
no thought to the individual what barriers they might have to work. They push
them into low-wage jobs or training for jobs. Most states don’t allow for a
path to create going to school or doing course work that’s going to earn you a
living-wage job. So really, it’s a disaster. The Recovery Act added money
through TANF that states could use to have subsidized jobs. It would be great
to bring that back, but state by state, the time limit varies. State by state,
who gets it varies. Is that what we’re saying: that we can’t set a national
minimum bar of what we expect to do for people who are struggling? I have
nothing really positive to say about TANF.
J.T.: Barack Obama called for a raise in the
minimum wage. But how much would that really help? Even if you raised it to $9
or $10 an hour, it’s still hard to get by on that.
G.K.: From what I’m seeing, you’re right. There are a
lot of people who say it needs to be $15. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.,
said it needs to be something like $20. I don’t know what the hourly wage is
you need to do this, but my thought was that the minimum wage was enough to
raise a family out of poverty in the 60s and 70s, and that’s what it still
should be doing. It’s not enough, and we need other work supports to really
make a difference, like access to child care, access to affordable housing. So,
I agree with you that more needs to be done. We might need to start higher and
negotiate down. It was good that he said it, but you know, setting a higher
wage floor is important, but much more needs to be done.
J.T.: You had a post on your blog about a study
put out by Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions claiming that the federal government
spends more on poor families than many middle-income families make in a year.
What are some of the biggest myths out there about people living in poverty?
G.K.: That people in poverty don’t work. That’s one
of the biggest ones. That people in poverty are drug addicts. You have these
drug-testing laws. Florida sought to drug test unemployment recipients, but
studies show that there is no greater incident of drug use for people who are
unemployed and receiving benefits than other people. So courts found that it
amounted to an illegal search and seizure. There’s the welfare dependence myth
that people live comfortably on welfare. People have no idea what the real
benefit level is.
J.T.: What is one thing that would really fight
poverty?
G.K.: A living wage. That’s the biggest thing. Let’s
set a minimum wage, but a minimum wage where we can afford the basics, and if
we’re not going to set a minimum wage that does that let’s look at the work
supports, like childcare and access to training for a living wage and schools
that aren’t segregated and funded from local property taxes so that they’re not
separate and unequal. But if we could set a living wage, that would go a far way.
J.T.: What are the long-term effects of having
such a wide gulf between the haves and the have-nots on society?
G.K.: It’s not sustainable. You have people who can’t
afford homes or eduction or even consumer goods. Even from a selfish point of
view, it’s not good for sustaining the economy of this country. You have an
incredible waste of human potential. We’re already seeing that by relegating
people to a life without access to making the most of themselves and
contributing to their communities because they’re just struggling to survive.
It’s bad for democracy. You’ve got people who aren’t invested in a system that
doesn’t care about their interests and their aspirations. I think it’s amazing
to me that there is not more social strife, and as this chasm grows, there’s
got to me a lot more social strife. People will do whatever they need to do to
take care of their kids, and if the system is turned against them, then you
would expect there to be more crime and demonstration and conflict.
J.T.: Do you have any positive news that gives you
hope?
G.K.: Somebody did a guest post for me about TANF.
There are people at the state level trying to do things to change TANF, like
give people access to education, to get rid of some of the time limits and more
flexibility. Some states don’t even want to say what they’re doing because
they’re afraid that there’s going to be a Republican backlash.
There’s a lot of nonviolent action right now against banks
and against Wal-Mart. There are people organizing to show the injustices of our
economy, and it’s hard to measure what that’s doing and what positive effect
that’s having, but I think it will.
The only positive from sequestration is that when they
quickly fixed the parts that affected airlines, you saw a bunch of articles in
the mainstream media saying that Washington can fix that, but they can’t fix
Head Start funding or WIC (a nutrition program) funding or housing-assistance
funding. So it seemed like at least from a national media standpoint, people
are starting to get it. It really crystallized what the values in Congress are.
So depressing. I wish I had some
more positives I could just reel off. Again, this is not measurable, but I
think there are growing numbers or people fighting to preserve and expand the
safety net, fighting for better jobs, fighting for fair immigration, fighting
for schools where success isn’t measured by test scores. I think that those
groups, which are often separate, are going to coalesce more and more. I think
that change is happening even if it’s hard to see sometimes.
