In the coming weeks the country will once again be subjected to an exercise by the Republican Party in phony handwringing, bloviating and posturing--this time over the issue of poverty:
House Republicans, led by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, have convened a series of hearings on poverty, including one on Wednesday, in some cases arguing that hundreds of billions of dollars of government spending a year may have made poverty easier or more comfortable but has done little to significantly limit its reach.
Taking center stage in this
debate, with its battle lines predrawn, will be the
obligatory pronouncements from the Republicans and their
media megaphones that poorer Americans today enjoy a degree of material comfort unimaginable in the distant past. Exhibits "A, "B" and "C" to this argument are always the same--the flat-screen TV, The Smartphone, and the Automobile. In the
Republican formulation, possessing any one of these material objects automatically
exempts you from the throes of poverty, and "next question, please?"
Conservatives point to spending patterns, saying consumption is a better indicator of living standards than income. Using that metric, the nation's poor are living better than they have been in decades, enjoying many of the amenities that the middle class have.
"People are not as badly off as you think," said Aparna Mathur, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning organization.
This is the way the Republicans
and their think-tanks like to frame poverty issues which, quite simply, are not at all a concern of their donor base. But insofar as attacking Federal programs to alleviate poverty provides Republicans a window to cut taxes more and deregulate even further for their multimillionaire corporate patrons, then it's a discussion worth having for them. As long as we keep the flat-screen TV, the smartphone and the automobile front and center in the debate.
Republicans like this formulation because it sets the goalposts from the start. By focusing on "flashy"material possessions at the outset, they imbue them with an outsize significance. The implicit corollary being that if you want to be considered poor you'd better not have any one of these items. This is an appealing and easily digestible argument for their base who don't consider themselves "poor" but are inclined equate "poor" with black or brown people and welcome any argument that suggests these same black and brown people are really just freeloading off their hard earned tax dollars. And if the base is happy, it makes the Republicans' work so much easier for the folks who really matter.
The way the Republican Party frames "poverty" is illustrated in a front-page article in today's New York Times entitled "Changed Life of The Poor: Better Off, But Far Behind":
Is a family with a car in the driveway, a flat-screen television and a computer with an Internet connection poor?
Americans — even many of the poorest — enjoy a level of material abundance unthinkable just a generation or two ago. That indisputable economic fact has become a subject of bitter political debate this year, half a century after President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty.
The fact is that poor people's rate of consumption, one measure of poverty, is closer than ever to that of middle-class Americans due to such assistance programs as Food Stamps. Because as it turns out, when people are are permitted to
eat, they try to live like other "normal" people as best they can. That's basic human nature. And that is what gives the Republicans fits. According to Republican logic, poor people are simply
too lavish with their spending habits:
As a result, the differences in what poor and middle-class families consume on a day-to-day basis are much smaller than the differences in what they earn.
“There’s just a whole lot more assistance per low-income person than there ever has been,” said Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That is propping up the living standards to a considerable degree,” he said, citing a number of statistics on housing, nutrition and other categories.
Conservatives like to point out that in spite of their "higher living standards" the poor haven't made much economic progress as a result of subsistence programs like food stamps. But rather than focusing on ways to create better paying jobs for the poor, they insist that the problem is really the social programs themselves. Ryan's and the House Republicans'
solution is to cut Federal spending on domestic anti-poverty programs to the bare bones, gut food stamps, relying instead on an imaginary "network" of charities and churches to pick up the slack.
But I digress. The real issue here, as the Republicans continually point out, is the flat-screen TV, the smart phone, and the automobile. Unfortunately, as the Times article points out, it isn't lavish spending that's brought these amenities into the lives of the poor. It's the same relentless, race-to-the-bottom globalization and technological "advances" that took away their jobs and futures in the first place:
[A]nother form of progress has led to what some economists call the “Walmart effect”: falling prices for a huge array of manufactured goods.
Since the 1980s, for instance, the real price of a midrange color television has plummeted about tenfold, and televisions today are crisper, bigger, lighter and often Internet-connected. Similarly, the effective price of clothing, bicycles, small appliances, processed foods — virtually anything produced in a factory — has followed a downward trajectory. The result is that Americans can buy much more stuff at bargain prices.
Seen in that context, we again turn to the standard Republican bogeymen:
The Flat Screen TV:
Pretty much all new TV's today are "flat screen." The price of a 32-inch screen TV can be as low as $150, assuming you want a new one. 150 dollars is the same price Paul Ryan and his wife will pay at a decent Washington D.C. restaurant for a meal with appetizers and a bottle of wine. It's also about the going rate for a good new tire on Paul Ryan's Congressional staff car. The cost is also equivalent to about 25 hours of work, at the current minimum wage, before taxes, of the person who washes Paul Ryan's Congressional staff car.
So the argument, as I understand it, is that by owning this 150 dollar, mostly plastic device made in China, that costs the same as one meal Paul Ryan had last week, poor families have elevated themselves into such an echelon of luxury and comfort that they can no longer consider themselves truly "poor." Am I getting that right?
But then again, maybe the argument is really that the luxury of watching television itself is such a hallmark of the bourgeoisie that anyone caught watching television cannot possibly claim to be poor. Picture a family of these so-called "poor" people lazily sprawled on the couch, staring at "Dancing With The Stars." They couldn't possibly be poor doing something like that, could they? After all, they can pay for electricity, right? The lights are on, there's cold milk in the refrigerator---no poverty here! So is that the argument?
It is true that having a television is "luxury." It's not something we're born into the world with. Under this formulation, though, to be poor by Republican standards poor families must first commit to spend their entire evenings staring at the wall or reading a book (Good luck with that, poor parents!). All forms of media entertainment, i.e., anything that cannot be conjured out of thin air (playing cards or board games come to mind), must be eschewed. And any news you receive from the outside world--such as, for example, the weather--must apparently be delivered by word-of-mouth. Otherwise, you're not truly poor.
The Smartphone:
Ever try to apply for a job? They ask you how they can contact you. They're not going to want to send a letter. They're not going to dispatch a courier to find you. They're going to want a phone number that you can be reached at. Or an email address that they can contact you at. Or both. So if you don't have a phone you can pretty much kiss your chance at any employment goodbye. If you have children and they go to a public school, the school will want to know how they can contact you if your child gets sick or hurt. They don't want to send a letter, or dispatch a courier. They want a phone number.
Now admittedly you could get a phone without any internet access. Then you won't be privy to innumerable financial incentives companies use to get you to conduct your affairs online, but someone will at least be able to contact you. You may not get through to anyone else who you associate with (they'll have smartphones, emails, and texting) but you're poor so that shouldn't be a concern for you. Communication with others is apparently a luxury reserved for the well-to-do.
So at this point were sitting in our apartment (because someone who owns a home can never be poor), isolated, staring at the wall, waiting for someone to call us on our vintage 1998 flip phone. Are we poor enough for the Republican Party? No.
Because we can't be poor and have an automobile.
The Automobile:
Unless you're blessed by living with a short walking distance to work, it's become increasingly difficult to get anywhere in American society without an automobile. While mass transit caters to most urban areas the reality is that vast numbers of American working poor do not have such access, particularly if you live in the South:
While the overall rate of nonmetro poverty is higher than metro poverty, the difference in nonmetro and metro poverty rates varies significantly across regions. The nonmetro and metro poverty rate gap for the South has historically been the largest, averaging 5.1 percentage points over the last two decades. In 2012, the South had a nonmetro poverty rate of 22.1 percent—nearly 7 percentage points higher than in the region’s metro areas. The difference in poverty rates in the South is particularly important for the overall nonmetro poverty rate because an estimated 43.1 percent of the nonmetro population lived in this region in 2012
* * *
More than 35 percent of the people living in completely rural counties live in high-poverty counties and more than 26 percent live in persistent-poverty counties.
So unless people in rural areas are somehow able to walk to work, owning an automobile--whatever its condition, whatever its cost or upkeep-- in order to make a living is a necessity, not a "luxury." These figures also don't take into account that the cost of automobile insurance in those "metro" areas where one might be expected to take mass transit is often prohibitive for someone living at or near the poverty line.
While Republicans are eager to bring up these so-called "luxury" items in arguing that the poor aren't really so poor after all, what they never mention is the exorbitant cost of housing, rent, health care, and child care, let alone the cost of higher education:
The same global economic trends that have helped drive down the price of most goods also have limited the well-paying industrial jobs once available to a huge swath of working Americans...[.]
Many crucial services, though, remain out of reach for poor families. The costs of a college education and health care have soared...[.]
Child care also remains only a small sliver of the consumption of poor families because it is simply too expensive. In many cases, it depresses the earnings of women who have no choice but to give up hours working to stay at home.
These are the real "luxuries" priced out of reach for the poor in this country, not "smartphones," "flat screen TV's" or "automobiles." Using these paltry material goods to distinguish between the poor and the middle class is simply an insulting exercise in magical thinking, and a deliberate distraction from the real issues affecting low-income Americans, including the fact that thanks to the GOP they can't make a living off their wages. These so-called "luxuries" don't separate the "poor" from the middle class--in many cases they simply separate them from the homeless.