On May 13, 2013, Dylan Matthews writes on Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog in The Washington Post:
But it’s worth keeping in mind that even the richest countries haven’t completely eradicated extreme poverty. That’s the key takeaway from the work of sociologists Kathryn Edin (Harvard) and Luke Schaefer (Michigan), who for the past few years have been trying to nail down the incidence of extreme poverty in the United States. Theirlatest research is set to be published in the journal “Social Service Review” next month. They use a slightly different measure, defining extreme poverty households as those living on less than $2 a day per person; that’s also a World Bank measure, derived from the average poverty line in the developing world, rather than the average in very poor countries.
The results are astonishing. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a Census program that tracks samples of tens of thousands of households across 2 1/2 to 4 years, Edin and Schaefer estimate that in 2011, 1.65 million U.S. households fell below the $2 a day per person threshold in a given month. Those households included 3.55 million children, and accounted for 4.3 percent of all non-elderly households with children.
That sounds unbelievable, but Schaefer explained that the research was prompted by qualitative work Edin did in households like this. “Kathy and I were talking and she mentioned that she felt like she was going into more and more homes where there was really nothing in income,” he said. “They were surviving on food stamps, or in some cases on nothing at all.” So they set about investigating whether or not these households showed up on the SIPP. And they did.
So how do these families survive? The safety net is a big part of the story. If you take food stamps, housing subsidies and refundable tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) into account, the number of households in extreme poverty is 613,000, or 1.6 percent of non-elderly households with children (compared to 1.65 million and 4.3 percent without transfers). So taking government aid into account reduces the extreme poverty population by 62.8 percent. Then again, there are limits to treating aid as equivalent to cash. As Schaefer said, “You can’t eat a housing subsidy.”
Millions and millions more are destined for poverty subsistence.
We need, going forth, to recognize that tectonic shifts in the technologies of production will increasingly replace human labor with non-human means of production, and without extending equal opportunities to own (not equal results but equal opportunity for capital credit) more millions and millions of Americans will be displaced from their jobs and not be able to find a job, especially a job with decent wage or salary earnings to support a family. Then what? The hoggist greed of narrow minded, money-focused own-at-all-cost hoarders, needs to be confronted and opportunities for FUTURE private, individual ownership of FUTURE economic growth dramatically expanded to enable EVERY American to become a capital share owner in the assets of the major corporations that produce the bulk of our products and services, all financed using insured capital credit loans that will pay for themselves.
See my article “The Path To Eradicating Poverty In America” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/the-path-to-eradicating-p_b_3017072.html and “The Path To Sustainable Economic Growth” at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/sustainable-economic-growth_b_3141721.html, and the article entitled “The Solution To America’s Economic Decline” at http://www.nationofchange.org/solution-america-s-economic-decline-1367588690
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
