By Dan Weinstein
There’s never a better time to reflect on need than around the holidays. Poverty seems particularly horrific during the season of giving. Nevertheless, as another semester begins – be it for the first time or, if you’re like me, the 15th time – it’s something that easily slips our minds.
The unpleasant reality, however, is that few people think honestly about need. Starting with a definition, poverty is the lack of choice, and ultimately, the lack of a chance. Some conservatives reading this might stop here and claim that this isn’t society’s responsibility. If the poor want to work, they should go get a job, get an education, and advance through the American meritocracy. The standard reply: this sentiment is also a myth.
The poverty rates for American workers vary noticeably by race and gender. For whites without a high school diploma, the percentage living in poverty is 11.1 percent of men and 13.6 percent of women, and among college graduates, 1.6 percent of men and 1.2 percent of women work and live below the poverty level. As for blacks without a high school diploma, 25 percent of black women and 15.4 percent of black men live and work in poverty. Among black college graduates, 2.6 percent of black women and 1.9 percent of black men were educated, employed, and still live in poverty.
What do those numbers mean? Simply that meritocracy – a popular American belief that hard work, diligence, perseverance and ingenuity will herald unlimited riches – is not the whole story. In a meritocracy success is theoretically awarded based only on ability, but it seems that equally educated members of different minority groups do not all have an equal chance at prosperity. Some conservatives paint a skewed picture of aid recipients, saying that the unemployed have children to milk more money from the system, and that they’re so lazy they would use their own offspring as a means to an end. This is in many cases a vicious falsehood, completely counter to fact.
Without society’s help, the poverty cycle is indeed nearly impossible to break. As indicated by the statistics above, impoverishment is not synonymous with unemployment. The federal minimum wage, for example, is set at $5.15 an hour, and has been at that level for the last 10 years. You don’t need to be an economist to understand that, given inflation, a fixed minimum wage carries less purchasing power with every passing year. In fact, a recent study done by the Living Wage Resource Center concludes that, in order for one adult to support a family of four, he or she needs to make $10.11 per hour, working 52 weeks at 35 hours per week. That’s nearly twice as much as our government is willing to guarantee in pay.
The poverty cycle is real, and it has been trapping generations of families, swallowing the opportunities and dreams of human beings just like you. In a world of plenty, this is too much.
