Invisible Americans is a straight-forward introduction to childhood poverty in America. It looks at the successes of various poverty alleviation programs, while shamefully highlighting our shortcomings as a society to protect those who are most vulnerable. Maldrick also argues in favor a monthly cash payment for each child under 18. Bills with this proposal have already been drafted in both the House and the Senate.
The numbers are stark and should be a call to arms. By (flawed) official statistics, roughly 12 million (15.6% – 17.5%) children live below the poverty line. 6 million live in families with under half the poverty line, which is ~$11,000 annually for a family of three. By many estimates, “well over one in three American children live in a household with a significant deprivation: inadequate food, lack of access to medical care due to its cost, seriously overcrowded housing, and so on. These children are well aware of their poverty, and they live not merely in deprivation but also in shame. They see themselves as irredeemable outsiders.” The current Covid-19 outbreak will makes these numbers dramatically worse.
Time and again, this country wakes up to the immense poverty in our midst and mobilizes efforts to eliminate it. It wasn’t that long ago that the working poor won rights we now consider basic, like employee safety, the 40 hour workweek and healthcare benefits. I first learned about Invisible Americans at a lecture at the Henry House Settlement, a holdover from the settlement movement (led by Jane Addams, whose biography I’m now reading) that tried to bridge the class divide in the US at the end of the 1800s.
In the 1960’s, President Lyndon Johnson launch the War on Poverty, partly in response to the growing moral outcry that intense poverty existed in America while so much prosperity had been created during the post-WWII boom. “Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the cash welfare program for the poor that started under FDR in 1935, was sharply expanded in the 1960s to include black mothers, who had been largely restricted from aid originally.” The War on Poverty launched Medicaid (not to mention Medicaire and an expansion of social security), Head Start, funds for schools in impoverished neighborhoods, made food stamps permanent and more. Through the 1960s, starvation still plagued the United States. Particularly in the rural South and South-West, bloated bellies were prevalent, a tell-tale sign of starvation often associated with famine-stricken parts of the developing world.
The War on Poverty eliminated that level of food insecurity. Moreover, the poverty rate went down by 50% (from 22.4% or 40 million people in 1959 to 11.1% or 25 million people in 1973) in the decade following the launch of the War on Poverty. Of course, economic growth played a major role as well. Still, the reduction in poverty, particularly among vulnerable populations, can largely be attributed to the creation and expansion of a social safety net. That success, among others, should be celebrated. It should have been the foundation for a further, expanded safety net targeting our most vulnerable (the poorest of the poor, children and the elderly).
Instead, in the years following, Raegan and like-minded politicians dubbed the War on Poverty a failure, scaling back the social safety system. Raegan went so far as to say that the War on Poverty had created more poverty and dependence on the government. As evidence, he used exaggerated anecdotes. Only the elderly (also recipients of significant benefits from the Johnson-era) were spared from this ideological attack
In response to attacks on the War on Poverty, Democratic and Republican politicians alike supported two major changes to the social safety system. The first was work requirements for welfare programs. “Culminating in 1996 with the adoption of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF…the new program, replacing Johnson’s welfare policies and [FDR’s] program for poor families, established work requirements for all who received benefits.” This meant, among other things, that the poor needed to be actively looking for work in order to receive support. This doesn’t sound onerous at first blush, but on closer examination it has detrimental impacts, particularly on those who need help the most. As a simple example, how is a single mother without income meant to get child support so she can look for a job to satisfy work requirements?
The second major change was moving away from direct cash payments to programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit. “These two programs combined are the largest anti-poverty programs for children, aside from Medicaid.” Tax credits, like the name suggests, offset tax payments. They are designed to offer larger rewards to families who work as opposed to those who make no taxable income. For example, “families with no tax liability received only a $1,400 credit per child…To qualify for the full $2,000 [Child Tax] credit, families had to earn at least $12,000 a year. For those whose tax liability is less than their credit, part of their credit is refunded in cash” (emphasis added).
The net-result of these policy decisions is that the poorest of the poor are increasingly shut out from our social welfare system. “Low-income children in particular became the victims of minimal federal aid. Now the benefits of the three major welfare programs that affect children, other than Medicaid—the EITC, the CTC, and TANF—depended on parents’ finding work.”
Maldrick provides persuasive detail that work requirements are ineffective. In the end, their primary results is to add bureaucracy and friction to the delivery of support. This drives away people who are most vulnerable, for whom there are insufficient job opportunities to begin with. But in my view, that discussions is actually a distraction from the key point.
Scholars Hilary Hoynes and Diane Schanzenbach found that “social spending to officially poor families with children fell from 87% of social spending in 1990 to 56% in 2015.” They write, “On net, resources have shifted away from the lowest earnings levels and moved up the income distribution.” These families also deserve government assistance, and neither I nor Maldrick advocate against assistance to these families, Rather, the point is that much more needs to be done for the poorest of the poor.
The moral responsibility of society is to take care of our most vulnerable, our poor, our downtrodden. Our current social welfare system is failing at that goal, and the result is millions of kids who are hungry, sick and traumatized. These impacts are all the more severe because children will carry the consequences of their poverty into adulthood: lower education, poor health, emotional trauma and more. We need to fix the crisis of child poverty in America, urgently.
People are poor for many reasons, but there is one obvious reason that is rarely discussed – as Maldrick points out. People are poor because they don’t have money. Poverty can be a trap, and a lack of stable income makes financial hardship even more likely. It’s impossible to make good financial decisions if you’re uncertain when your next pay check will be and how much it will be. Financial hardship can have many self-reinforcing effects. The government can and should mitigate that with direct, monthly cash donations to the poor.
There are, of course, other causes of poverty which are significant. One common refrain heard in the media and from politicians is that the high rate of child poverty in America is due to the rising trends in single parent families. “One reason there are more poor children than adults is the high number of single-parent households, often headed by women, whose poverty levels are particularly high, in part because there is only one income. The proportion of single-mother households in Europe is almost as high as it is in America, yet their child poverty rates are far lower as a result of adequate social programs.” In other words, other countries are in a similar situation. They just do more to lift mothers and their children out of poverty. It is not our demographics that drive poverty; it is the policy choices we make in response to vulnerability.
It is impossible to talk about poverty in America without taking about racism. Many other books do a better job treating this subject — Evicted and The New Jim Crow jump to mind (please let me know if you have recommendations). Racism, and America’s legacy of racism, contribute significantly to poverty rates, which are higher (as a percentage) among African Americans than other demographics. Generations of economic exclusion, segregation, red lining, mass-incarceration, policy abuse, insufficient educational opportunities and more are at fault. Our society may not have invented poverty (it has always existed) but our policies and approach have kept more African-American children in poverty. This fuels the urgency with which we must address the problem.
Cash donations to the poor, at around $300 monthly per child ($350 for child under 6) have three benefits. Directly, they provide much needed cash to help feed and care for children. Parents could use these funds to supplement food stamps (which usually run out before the end of the month or to pay for a doctor’s visit). Indirectly, they provide increased financial stability and predictability, which in a world of increasing financial instability is absolutely crucial. Finally, they put the parents in charge of how to use funds. Parents know what their families need best. Obviously this increases the risk of mismanagement by families, but that risk is more than offset by enabling families to make the decisions that are best for them. An additional benefit is reduced administrative costs.
The recent $2.2 trillion stimulus package for Covid-19 includes $500 per child, slightly higher than the recommended monthly amount supported by Maldrick, members of Congress, and other policy experts. Bills in both the Senate and House have been drafted proposing $300 monthly checks for each child in a family ($350 for children under 6). The estimated cost of this program is $100 billion annually and it can move 43% children above the poverty line. This is a massive step, and I support such policies.
The time for such a policy is now. The current Covid-19 crisis will undoubtedly impact the poorest and most vulnerable in this country most significantly. More children will go hungry and forgo medical attention as parents lose their jobs or are furloughed. Now, more than ever, is the moment to consider passing such a policy (especially since the price tag pales in comparison to other acts being considered).
It is a moral outrage that so many children go hungry in a country that can afford to mitigate, if not eliminate, the problem. We must do better. We have policy proposals on the table that can address the problem. Instead, we let 1 in 3 children in this country grow up living a life of poverty.
