Laura Fritz, 27, fills out a form at the Jefferson Action Center, an assistance center in the Denver suburb of Lakewood. Fritz grew up in the Denver suburbs in a solidly middle class family, but she and her boyfriend, who has struggled to find work, are now relying on government assistance to cover food and $650 rent for their family. (AP Photo/Kristen Wyatt)
On September 18, 2013, John Light writes on Moyers & Company:
Census data released this week show that after yet another year of anemic “recovery,” the number of Americans living in poverty last year remained stubbornly unchanged.
But what is “poverty” as measured by the federal government? Experts argue that the official measure is outdated, and doesn’t take important economic realities into account. Are those with incomes slightly above the poverty threshhold not “poor people,” as most of us would understand it?
In 1999, a single mother struggling with this question sent an email to the Health and Human Services employee whose job it was to calculate the federal poverty line. She wrote:
“I am a single Mother and work two jobs which equal about $18,000 per year. We barely afford rent, electric, cable, phone, water, food, taxes and vehicle expenses. [But] the federal poverty level is $11,060. My daughter and I have zero, no, zilch money left after paying the bills for medical or clothing. How on earth does the Federal Government expect us to pay for cars….There just is NOT enough money left at the end of the month for a car payment….Please tell me…how they expect people to live on under $20,000 per year.”
The poverty line in the email, $11,060, was the federal poverty guideline in 1999 for a family of two. Today, that figure is $15,510 — still less than what the woman was struggling to get by at the time.
That raises a crucial question: why is the federal poverty cutoff so far off?
Right now, many of those who study poverty are not overly hopeful that the U.S. will implement a new poverty measure in the near future. It’s a difficult topic, especially in today’s fraught political environment. Conservatives argue that the measures cover too many people, including many who are lifted out of poverty by government programs like the EITC. Liberals argue that the poverty measures don’t take expenses into account realistically.
Those who work with the U.S. poverty line often look to the U.K.’s system of measurement as an alternative model the U.S. might follow. There, federal agencies use multiple measures of poverty to create policy.
“It would be good for both the left and the right to say, ‘There is no single best way.’ And maybe we could adopt sort of a suite of measures along the U.K. line,” says Fremstad. “And some of those could be more conservative, more absolute, and some of them could be more relative, more liberal. And then we could argue about which ones are the best. But at least we’d have a few — three or four measures that were all good, that Census and the federal government put out and that narrowed the debate.”
Sadly, the Great Recession or Depression continues and the reality is that 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.
We talk a lot about the conditions of poverty but we continue to fail to address why people are rich and thus have more income than those who are not. The reason is that rich people are OWNERS of significant wealth-creating and income-generating productive capital assets reflected in corporate organizations invested in productive land, buildings, human-intelligient machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.
The growing income inequality is all fundamentally an economic problem and the result of CONCENTRATED OWNERSHIP of the non-human means of production embodied in corporate assets that are replacing the need for human labor with “machines” of all characterizations, OWNED by a wealthy few.
Prior to and from 1929 to 1980, the production of products and services was largely labor based and produced in the United States, but exponentially tectonic shifts in the technologies of production began to take hold of the American economy and global economies as increasingly the non-human factor of production––productive “thing” such as human intelligent machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerized operations, etc.––replace the need for labor. The OWNERS of the productive capital began to reap tremendous wealth and non-labor income as this transition occurred and continues to occur. The reality in today’s technologically advanced societies is to either OWN or BE OWNED! This is why we need to provide equal opportunity to EVERY American to acquire individual ownership in FUTURE wealth-creating, income-generating productive capital assets and pay for their acquisition using insured capital credit loans whereby the investments generates the income to pay for the initial creation of the assets. In this way over time EVERY American can acquire a viable capital estate income source without taking from those who already OWN, because the focus in not on redistribution of wealth but on the FUTURE creation of wealth and new capital owners.
Support the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm
See my article “The Absent Conversation: Who Should Own America?” published by The Huffington Post at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-reber/who-should-own-america_b_2040592.html and by OpEd News at http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-Absent-Conversation–by-Gary-Reber-130429-498.html
Also 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
