Rambling thoughts on poverty

So I'll probably need to make a list for confession. Recently, I have been imbibing in some rather mean spirited YouTube videos. They are feeding my judgy side. They are about a kind of people found in my ethnic group in my country who are a result of what happens when you have the Sexual Revolution and the Great Society running hand in hand in the sunset. The only good that has come from this, and I'll need to tell YouTube to stop having them appear, is they are a good reminder of why a guaranteed income is probably a bad idea.

When I first heard of a universal guaranteed income I thought it was a good idea. The idea being, get rid the various government agencies for the poor and just give the poor the money. I liked the idea of smaller government and believed that the robots will take our jobs. But then I was reminded of the negatives and the road to Hell the negatives paved with free government money.

The problem of growing single mother headed households is one. This I will put at the feet of the Great Society, which provided the financial incentive, and the Sexual Revolution which took away the shame. Yes, no one is going to get rich on welfare and food stamps. And yes, we should have a safety net. However, both have made my ethnic group suffer. Too many Black children are being raised by single mothers, which makes them poorer (spiritually and financially) than children with both parents and siblings where they share the same mother and father. I have recently become a mother and I don't think I could do this well without my husband. This is especially true when are darling little boy has deprived me of precious sleep and I am not fully functional.

What does this have to do with Christianity? Well Christ mentioned that the poor will always be with us. No generation will have the luxury of not having to deal with the poor. Besides making sure they don't starve, we do a disservice when we discourage the things that will get them out of poverty (good schools, teaching skills that are actually in demand, etc) and encourage things that make their life worse (broken families, passing students on to the next grade without the skills, excusing behavior that makes them unemployable).

What is poor?

I'm reading a book "The Beautiful Tree" about private schools for the poor in Africa and India. I've gotten to a part where logic is tested. There are people telling the author that there cannot be private schools for the poor because the poor are too poor to pay, thus there cannot be schools where the poor are paying to send their children. When the author found schools where the poor were paying to send their children to school, then the nay sayers said those people aren't poor. Never mind that they have no electricity, running water, work as fishermen, live in one room shacks with tin roofs, and make about $1 a day. No, if they are paying for schooling, they aren't poor.
There is more I'd like to write, but I am not done with the book. But there is a attitude that I am disliking, and it is the author's bias, but development people seem to fail to acknowledge that the poor have agency. Yes, the poor make bad decisions, but it's their decision. Another thing, I'm also sensing international poverty pimping. Send millions of dollars to support middle and upper class bureaucrats to make reports and studies about the poor and call it helping the poor, though the poor see a little of the results, and get little ownership of the process or the results. How many abandoned clean water projects dot the world?

Income inequality=poverty?

Taken by Steve Day

Is it me or does it seem that poverty is so uncool that the kids are talkin' income inequality these days. From what I've heard the two are not the same, it includes the poor, but you get to talk about the middle class too. It sounds like the old we must put down the rich* to help the poor mess, just wrapped up in new clamshell packaging.
A few months ago I heard something inspiring. A missionary was in some random African village and wanted to help women whose children were starving. He was thinking of all sorts of programs he could start, but then he noticed not every woman in the village had starving children. So he went to a woman whose children were well fed to see what she was doing and to see if he could get the women with the starving children to emulate her. For him the point of the story was that he, white western guy did NOT have all the answers and to make a comment about Americans and European aid efforts. To me, it was see what is working in an area with real people, and use that as a model.
What does this have to do with income equality? Not much, but as you might notice it does have something to do with poverty.
Bono, the rock star worldwide-poverty activist admitted that aid was just a stop-gap. The income inequality being bantered about sounds like more stop gaps as the solution. And then the problem is there is no solution, no end. We shall always have poverty with us, but we can try to change the image of it, so that there are fewer starving people, and more of G-d's justice.
Despite many decades of people saying the middle class is doomed, and income inequality is an excuse to steal some poverty limelight for the middling classes, I think the middle class is doing okay. We have photos in our dining area of our family. My grandmother with her kin, when she was younger, my grandparents, his great and grand-parent-family (it is a group picture), and my aunts and uncles. They are a lovely reminder that we come from peasant stock. In the early and middle 20th Century we were lumberjacks living in log cabins and North Carolina sharecroppers. In the early 21st century, we work in climate controlled offices where we ignore texts on our cell phones. So I think we've done alright. Not everyone made it to middle-class-dom, but I have some hope for the next generation of those who didn't. For the next generation, we hope to be the example of how you do it, how you get out of poverty, like the woman in the village, and none of it involves the rich suffering.


*Does not include all wealthy. Just the one's who are in the spotlight.

Rooming House Memory

I have this in my vague memory. When I was in elementary school, I made friends with a girl whose family lived across the street from the school in a two story boarding house, which was also across the street from Long's Grocery, one of those pitiful horrid southern groceries in a converted house. Come to think there were several of those types in the neighborhood, groceries, not boarding houses. And for those of you just joining me, this is a black neighborhood in Florida in the mid to late 1980s.
Her family lived in a dark single room on the bottom floor, of the place. She lived with her mother, father, and I think a sibling or siblings. Thinking back to yesterday's post, that housing option would not be available. They didn't live in public housing, because on another side of the school campus were "the projects," garden style apartments like the Section 8 one my sister used to live in. Those existed but for some reason, this family did not live in them. They didn't live in a mobile home park, and the city had a bunch of those for a time (which would get wiped out by an act of nature with whatever hurricane ran through). Nor at the time did they live in some falling down shack like my parent's house (which is why I want to set the damned thing on fire), of which the black neighborhood of my hometown has tons of, still. They did eventually move, because we weren't friends no more. Did they move to a better option than a bunch of people crammed into a stuffy room? Hopefully, but if they existed today, they might be homeless, since hurricanes and the city eliminated most of the cheap living arrangements between on the streets and subsidized/public housing.
Looking at Google maps I see that Long's is still there, but the rooming house is no more.

Ending poverty and stuff

I heard recently the mayor or the city council plans to end homelessness in DC. That's nice, but if history is any guide, they won't succeed. They may wind up creating more jobs for an educated middle class, which as a member of the educated middle class, I give a snarky thumbs up.
Part of me believes that the Lord told us that the poor we shall always have with us because we as individuals and society should always be obligated or responsible to those on the bottom, and there is always a bottom. The bottom may be in the gulag, hidden in the country, warehoused in public housing, but there is always a bottom. I find it hard to believe when a Western European person declares that in their country, with their social safety net, there are no poor. I just wonder if they haven't been looking hard enough. Maybe that's what America, cities in the US, are aiming for, making the poor so invisible that we think we've ended it. 
Anyone remember LBJ's War on Poverty? I know we are too busy fighting the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism to think back that far. I'm not going to attack Medicare or Medicaid, as they are a bit out of my area. No, I'm going to hit at urban renewal, which succeeded in warehousing the urban poor and disinvestment from the urban core so much that it was ripe for gentrification. Housing policy has favored the homeowner and caged the poor in housing outside of the free market with pyrite shackles. What do I mean? There was a crazy long waiting list to get into DC public housing. By focusing on getting into and staying in public housing or local Section 8 housing, people have little incentive to leave the area in search of work. Our predecessors were poor black folk who left/escaped the South for better opportunities, housing programs like DC or Chicago public housing are like fly paper that disincentivize people from looking outside their immediate area, because moving means losing the housing they waited so long for.
I believe you can end a certain type of poverty. Having fat poor diabetic people who watch WWE! is better than having poor people who constantly die of malnutrition. We can feed the world, provided that corrupt leaders stop using food as a way to control their people. I'm looking at you North Korea.
Back to DC. Can DC end homelessness in the city? I don't think so, for various reasons. For one, not all of our homeless are homegrown. The city is better at providing services (typically run by the educated middle classes, who are paid by the government) than say Fairfax or other surrounding jurisdictions. So we'd probably attract more homeless. Next, without a plan to address the whole person, regardless of if the whole person wants to be addressed, is problematic. Sometimes the problem is mental illness, sometimes the problem is serious dysfunction (can't hold a job), or addiction, or disability, or anti-social behavior. Providing a bed does not get at why the person cannot provide their own housing. Lastly, (because I need to finish this) we have made illegal free market housing for the poor. Some people can't maintain or afford more than one room. We (the middle class voters) do not like people crowding into small spaces, nor do we want to live near housing for the poor. We (the middle class voters) don't like trailer parks, so we make them illegal (my hometown did this). We don't like rooming houses, so we zone them out of existence. We don't like people sleeping in every room of a house or having too many people in one structure, so they are housing violations. We don't let people build huts or shanties, because the city will bulldoze those structures. I know the good reasons of why these things are illegal in DC but the cost of these is less housing, regardless of quality.