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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26782 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty...

My proposed solution is to pick an absolute standard of what "poverty" is and try to solve that. When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, the problem simply cannot be solved. I believe this is intentional, but it doesn't really matter to the point whether this is just a mistake or not. If we can define "poverty" by absolute standards of access to the basic necessities of life, I think we will find that the United States has already solved poverty or needs to do very little to fill in the last couple gaps.

If, instead, "poverty" just refers to having less than the median, well, the poor we'll always have with us, I suppose.

When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, the problem simply cannot be solved

I'm confused; wasn't there a brouhaha about this specific point just in the last year? Where some folks on the right said the census bureau was cheating as they redefined poverty to include food and housing aid, to make it seem like we've made progress eliminating poverty when really all we've done is increase government handouts?

I remember a number of articles like this one:

In the late 1950s, the poverty rate in the U.S. was approximately 22%, with just shy of 40 million Americans living in poverty. The rate declined steadily, reaching a low of 11.1% in 1973 and rising to a high of nearly 15% three times – in 1983, 1993 and 2011 – before hitting the all-time low of 10.5% in 2019. However, the 46.7 million Americans in poverty in 2014 was the most ever recorded.

Also articles like this. Apparently there's also absolute and relative poverty. Oh well.

Regardless, the fact that definitionally 49% of people will be forced to earn sub-median incomes isn't necessarily a reason to shrug away poverty and/or the degree of income inequality in society. As evidenced by the last decade of politics. Do you think that the anger at elites is unfounded (given nobody falls below your definition of poverty anymore), more related to status than income (although definitionally 49% of people will also be sub-median statuswise...) or are you more sympathetic to discourse around income inequality than poverty?

Where some folks on the right said the census bureau was cheating as they redefined poverty to include food and housing aid, to make it seem like we've made progress eliminating poverty when really all we've done is increase government handouts?

Supplemental poverty is the alternative measure that includes transfers.

Conservatives and progressives both seem to vassilate on what exactly they mean by poverty when it's convenient to do so. Conservatives claim that transfers don't work because they haven't pulled everyone up to a middle-class earned income, but they also note that America's "poor" are housed, clothed, fed, and have entertainment budgets. Progressives claim that transfer programs work and we can tell because supplemental poverty figures tell us we've pulled people up, but then insist that tens of millions are "food insecure". To the extent that the concern is actual material impoverishment, welfare spending works and we do a lot of it.

I do try to be consistent - I occasionally get annoyed by the size of these programs, but the reality is that spending $183 billion per year for the hungry instead of for space has resulted in Americans having entirely too much to eat rather than any issues of "food insecurity".

Do you think that the anger at elites is unfounded (given nobody falls below your definition of poverty anymore), more related to status than income (although definitionally 49% of people will also be sub-median statuswise...) or are you more sympathetic to discourse around income inequality than poverty?

I am completely unsympathetic to inequality discourse. Part of the reason is that it's often couched in the language of poverty, insinuating that the relatively deprived are absolutely deprived. Really though, I just generally don't buy that inequality is a real problem. I'm fine with anger at specific elites for specific reasons, but some fuzzy claim that Jeff Bezos just has too much money because Amazon is wildly successful is just annoying to me.

The problem I have with the measures that don't include transfers is they're often used to justify more transfers. Which is a nice broken feedback loop since by definition more transfers won't reduce that measure of poverty.

It’s disgusting that the rich get richer each year while leaving 50% of people below median in wealth.

When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, t

Wow, that's worse than I thought. It doesn't just exclude food and housing aid, it also is before taxes. Public assistance is not taxable, so someone who gets $x in public assistance is considered poorer than someone who gets $x after taxes from wages.

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