Greg: "The Poor are Just Lazy" and Other Devilish Lies

“So wickedly, devilishly false is that common objection, ‘They are poor, only because they are idle’.” - John Wesley, 1753

Jack,

There is so much to address here.  I feel like we are juggling a dozen topics all at once. Part of the reason I take so long in replying is because it always seems like such a daunting task to write on this wide set of issues.  So, for the sake of clarity and to keep this exercise more enjoyable for myself, I will respond to only one or two of your points right now.  Perhaps we can cycle back around to some of the other ones at a later time.

In this post, I want to state why I disagree with your contention that government programs aimed at poverty alleviation actually make matters worse.  First of all, conservatives just love to point to the worst abuses of the welfare system, medicare, etc. in order to justify their opposition to providing a just and robust safety net for those in need.  To be sure, you can find examples of those who abuse the system -- plenty of them.  But is this as widespread as you and many others claim?  I do not believe that it is.  Not long ago one of my research professors investigated the welfare system and found that, at the time of his study, of those currently on welfare, 70% had been on it for less than two years.  Another 20% or so had been on it less than five years.  And only 7% of those on welfare could be considered "chronic abusers" of the system.  To hear some conservatives talk, you'd think the inverse of these figures would be true.

The fact is that the majority of those Americans who are caught in poverty genuinely desire to work and would prefer to have a job as opposed to receiving a handout.  My own experience as a pastor and community organizer in the inner city for four years confirmed this fact for me.  Far from the picture that many paint of the poor as lazy couch potatoes who would prefer to draw a free paycheck instead of doing an honest day's work (and there ARE those people, but they are a very small minority -- 7% is about right according to my own encounters with hundreds of people), most are eager to work and are even willing to do menial tasks or hard labor -- tasks that I would personally hate to do -- for a minimum wage paycheck if it were available to them.  In fact, whenever I announced a job opening at our weekly food pantry, I would have people lining up to ask me about how they could apply.  One time one of my co-workers announced a free class would be offered to help people acquire basic employment skills such as learning how to dress for an interview, what businesses look for and expect from their employees, etc. and we literally had to keep going back to make more copies of the flyer we had created because the demand was so great.  And when I managed to acquire a database of business in the area that hired felons, I ran out of copies of the list on a weekly basis.  No matter what the talking heads may say about the poor, no one will convince me that they are a mass of leeches on society unwilling to lift a finger to help themselves.  Instead, a whole host of factors contribute to chronic unemployment in the inner city.  Allow me to offer just a few scenarios/factors from real life:

- Teens (and adults) who want to get a job but literally have nothing presentable to wear to an interview.  I knew a teenage girl whose mother would sell her daughter's clothes for drugs.  The girl kept wanting to apply for a job, but every time we'd buy her a set of clothes for the interview, they would be gone by the next morning.

- Being geographically located in an economic desert in which jobs are simply unavailable.  And being unable to find transportation every day to the suburbs or downtown where businesses are actually hiring.  Public transit is the best option for most of in this situation, but even coming up with bus fare on a daily basis can be very difficult for the unemployed.  And it doesn't help when local politicians keep cutting funding for public transit.

- Inadequate access to computers and the internet for the purposes of finding job listings and submitting applications.  Some have called this the "technology gap."  Middle and upper class families take for granted the tools they have in their own homes for research and communication.  Job hunting is immensely more difficult when you have no internet, no computer, no phone, and sometimes no electricity at home.  (This is one reason I fought so hard to keep our local public library branch open in our neighborhood.  Our Republican mayor wanted to shut it down -- along with five other branches in inner city neighborhoods -- but together we raised such a fuss that he had to back down.  Interesting that he didn't propose shutting any libraries down in the wealthy suburbs.  If you're interested in this, here's a link for you: NUVO article )

- Lack of basic social skills make employers less likely to hire people who speak with improper grammar, who are unfamiliar with protocols of etiquette that middle class folks learn by osmosis, who struggle with issues of literacy, etc.  Not to mention racial discrimination which is still a very serious issue even in 2013.

- If the only job you qualify for is manual or physical labor (and it usually is if you're a high school drop-out), then what do you do if you deal with chronic pain?  Or if you've been restricted from lifting anything over 10 lbs by your doctor?  This automatically eliminates you from a huge percentage of the jobs available in your area.

- Young adult males who can make ten to twenty times as much money selling drugs on the corner than competing for that one position that just opened up at the Dollar General down the street.  Capitalists are right about this:  human beings are rational and will do what they need to do to survive.

- Felons who are immediately disqualified from 95% of employment opportunities before the interview even begins.

- The woman whose husband has abandoned her with three children that she alone must care for and who somehow must find a way to job hunt and hold down a full-time position that will actually be profitable after deducting the costs of childcare.

- Middle aged workers whose parents require constant medical care and attention and who cannot afford the expense of a nursing home or elderly living facility.

These are only a few examples of the obstacles that the poor face when seeking employment (and I'm sorry they are so roughly written -- I'm typing this all very quickly because otherwise it won't get done).  Of course, the government is not the answer to all of these problems.  No one is saying that.  But some of these issues can either be exacerbated or alleviated according to how as a society we choose to address them.  

I submit to you that the "invisible hand" does very little to rectify much of what I've listed above.  Guided purely by self-interest and the pursuit of profit, a business owner will simply not choose to locate her business where the threat of break-ins is constant, where the workforce is uneducated, where the base of consumers have little to no disposable income, where real estate prices are in free fall, where the broken down infrastructure makes "importing" and "exporting" supplies through the economic desert a hassle, and so on.  If businesses are to be located in the inner city in order to provide jobs for the urban poor, the business owner must be motivated by more than the bottom line.  They must see it as their mission.  (There are examples of this being done in our country -- often by Christians -- and I applaud those efforts.  But they are far too few.)  The invisible hand does not provide that sense of mission.

Meanwhile the government can actually address some of the issues in productive ways.  We can provide cheap (or free!) public transportation.  We can maintain a robust and well-funded system of public libraries in order to lessen the technology gap.  We can ensure that the poor have basic healthcare so that a freak accident like a broken arm doesn't cause a family to go bankrupt.  We can fund our schools and pay our teachers adequately so that every child in our nation can learn to read and excel academically.  We can provide funds for counselors, psychiatrists, and social workers who want to address the complexities of poverty on an individual level and bring healing to damaged minds.  We can fund summer lunch programs in the park so that children don't have to go hungry three months each year.  We can provide re-entry programs for rehabilitated felons seeking to enter the workforce.  We can provide programs like Jobs for Life that equip unskilled workers with basic tools to make themselves more employable.  I could go on and on and on.  But here's the thing:  doing these things costs money.  Money isn't the ultimate solution, but it is an important part of the equation.  And the question I am asking is this:  As the richest nation that has ever existed in the history of the world, can we find enough money to make sure that our poor are given ample opportunity to work themselves up and out of poverty?  Will we collective address on a system-wide level the systemic causes of poverty in our nation?  And when people do hit hard times due to loss of a job or major medical issues, will we provide a safety net to catch them when they fall and see them through until they can get back up on their feet?  I believe we can.  And as a Christian I believe that we have a moral obligation to see that it gets done.  

Next time I write, I want to address this frequent claim by libertarians and conservatives that taxes are theft.  But I think I should wrap up this post for now.  I'm enjoying this dialog so let's keep it up. My replies may be somewhat infrequent in coming months due to how busy my Ph D work is keeping me, but I will reply eventually.

Be Well,

Greg