From Chris Rhomberg, sociology professor at Fordham University, is this editorial “We Forgot to End Poverty“. In the season of Toys for Tots, soup kitchens, and in-the-spirit-of-Christmas altruism, it’s important to figure out why the United States still has tens of millions of its people living in poverty. As he writes:
Both sides attempt to “reform” poor parents to push them into the low-wage labor market, but neither side questions the failure of that market to provide families a secure way out of poverty.
Even as unemployment edges downward, millions of Americans remain poor, exposing a basic flaw in the TANF approach: the lack of jobs that pay a living wage.
It comes down to this: there are two ways that welfare ceases to exist. Either poverty is eradicated and people no longer need state assistance, or welfare is gutted or transformed without dealing with structural problems in labor and education. The United States with the bipartisan welfare reform bills in the mid-1990s, assistance was capped and shortened, continuing to shrink in its scope and amount in the past two decades. This would make sense if welfare reform was getting rid of poverty, but it hasn’t. Escaping poverty requires jobs that don’t exist and wages that are not offered- plenty of people in poverty work full-time.
So policy needs to keep in sight the major social problem. If the goal is to reduce welfare, make it cheaper and more efficient, you can do that. But that requires a narrow view that ignores why welfare exists in the first place. Never lose sight of the core problem. Welfare is the symptom of an underlying illness. To erase welfare does not cure anything, merely remove a way that we are reminded of poverty’s extent and persistence.
Unspoken Politics 