carnes@gargoyle.UChicago.UUCP (Richard Carnes) (12/22/84)
--- Alien Wells's article contains a lot of nonsense for a mere 65 lines: >Yes, there are some people who just haven't had a chance. However, there >are a lot who wouldn't know a chance if it bit them in the face. And all >the social programs you dream up won't help them if they won't help you help >them. This is an expression of the Blame the Victim ideology with which the American middle and upper classes comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. It goes something like this: The blame for poverty clearly does not lie with our lovely selves; we work hard for our income and pay high taxes for welfare programs; we have nothing but good will toward the poor. Therefore, by elimination the fault must lie with the poor themselves. If they just lived like us decent, sensible people, they wouldn't be poor. More on this below. >Leaving food stamps out of the poverty line calculations basically says that >someone with food stamps is no better [off] than someone without them. No it doesn't. The poverty statistics measure pre-transfer (i.e., pre-welfare) income for various governmental purposes. It is my understanding that roughly 60% of the pre-transfer poor are lifted above the poverty line by such programs as Food Stamps, Medicaid, AFDC, and Social Security. The poverty statistics are a measure of the NEED for welfare programs or other relief for the poor, not a measure of their effectiveness. >First, poverty in the US is not as bad of a problem as some people would >want you to believe. Possibly. God forbid some demagogue should persuade us to actually do something serious to help America's ~40,000,000 poor. On the other hand, it is certain that poverty is a much more serious problem than some people, e.g., the Reagan Administration, would have you believe. For example, there is a huge population of "undocumented" workers in the US, as many as 10 million by some estimates. These people do not care to be identified by the federal government and do not appear in the official statistics. >Clearly, 8.5% is not as bad as 22%. The official poverty level is currently in the neighborhood of 16%, as I understand. There are very few people who would place the level at 22% or more, as far as I know. >Did you ever stop to wonder where those 22% were? I mean, if there were >that many, wouldn't you know a lot of them? No you wouldn't. How complacent can you get? They don't work in your company, live in your neighborhood, go to your school, or go to your church. Do you live on an Indian reservation? Do you live in Appalachia, in the rural South, in the Texas Valley, in the South Bronx? I didn't think so. I invite you to take a stroll through Chicago's south side and explain your views on poverty to the local residents--you'll get to know a lot of poor people in a very short time. >Second, although many of the Great Society programs were stupid and >wasteful, nevertheless they have had some effect, especially the Food Stamps >program. Yes, but the most effective has been the expansion of Social Security, especially Medicare, since the 1950's. This has significantly reduced the incidence of poverty among the elderly. To be continued. Richard Carnes, ihnp4!gargoyle!carnes