37.9 million. That's the number of
Americans currently living in poverty, accounting for
11.6% of the total population. That's despite
the fact that America ranks first as the richest nation
in the world in terms of GDP. The United States is known
for having this great abundance, and at the same
time, alongside that abundance, there is
widespread poverty and economic insecurity. Sometimes you question, you
know, we're in the United States of America, how can
the citizens be going through such an issue? We always boast that we're
superpower, that we are the richest in the world and
things just don't make sense. Poverty in the US had been
steadily improving over the past decade. From a height
of 48.8 million people living in poverty in 2013
to 34 million in 2019. That was until the
pandemic changed its course. COVID absolutely had a very
deep impact on the access to employment and
long-term employment for a number of families that
were already vulnerable for various reasons. Prior, it was myself and my
two older brothers, along with my stepdad, that
constantly worked to provide for everyone in the house. But after COVID 19 and the
whole lockdown, we were laid off. And ever since then,
we have had issues finding a job. Poverty is expensive. About 11% of the federal
budget or $665 billion goes to economic security
programs. Child poverty alone is
estimated to cost the US over $1 trillion based on
the latest research from 2018. There are also really high
costs on an individual level . Poverty leads to more
anxiety. It leads to more stress. It leads to more health
problems, all kinds of things that amplify the
effect of poverty. The feelings that you would
usually encounter when you're in this position is
mostly depression. Why can't I find a job? Why are we in this
situation? You know, we're trying our best and
sometimes it's just falling back down on our face. So how did poverty become
such a big issue in the United States and why is it
so difficult to end it? Income inequality is one of
the big reasons why the US suffers from such high
rates of poverty. The income for the top 10%
was more than 13 times higher than income at the
bottom 10%, according to the US Census. We unfortunately in the
United States are at the very high end in terms of
income inequality. And so what happens is when
the distance gets further and further away, the rungs
on the ladder get further away and it's harder for
people to climb those rungs out of poverty into the
middle and to the upper class. The pandemic has made
inequality worse. The Gini index, which
measures the nation's income inequality, rose for the
first time in a decade by 1.2% in 2021. The reason the pandemic has
made that worse is because when you talk to large
organizations, corporations, what they saw was that
staff was leaving, but they had a response to that,
right? Their response was, let's
give bonuses. Let's give raises. Many organizations, many
small businesses, government, they don't have
that luxury. So inflation has kept up
with the money that most people in the 1% have made. But it has deepened and
widened the gap between those that have money and
those that do not. Research by MIT estimates
that the living wage in the United States is $24.16 per
hour for a family of four. But the federal
minimum wage is set at $7.25 per hour. This means that a
typical family of four needs to work more than two
full-time minimum wage jobs to earn a living wage, and
single-parent families need to work significantly
harder. We worked at a banquet hall. Any sort of party, we would
set it up, come early, set the tables, dishes, plates,
silverware, everything, you name it. We worked for $15
an hour. It was really bad. I would say we were really
overworked. 13-hour shifts sometimes. We were really frustrated
with where we were, but at the same time, it was like,
what do we do if we leave? You know, we were at
that stage of like, yeah, we hate this job, but we have
to keep it to continue going. Problems with wages are
especially worse for workers of certain races. If we're looking at the
broader population of people who are poor or low income,
meaning one emergency away from being poor, we're
talking about approximately 140 million people. Out of the 140 million, well
over 70 million people, well over half of that
population are people of color. The US also suffers from a
lack of social safety nets that protect Americans from
poverty. If you look at, for example,
the amount of cash that people might get if they're low-income, it's very, very
minimal. Right now we receive welfare
and it's roughly around $250 for my household of
seven and it actually has helped us a lot. Sometimes the numbers
really don't make sense because how can a large
family just live off a couple hundred dollars,
especially now in this day and age where you go to the
grocery store, you spend and a few items are $100. Most countries, for example,
European countries, have what's known as a child
allowance, where if you have a child, you get a certain
amount of monthly income to help raise that child. That's pretty common. But in the United States,
we don't have anything like that. And in the United
States, we don't have universal benefits, for
example, health care or child care. It's also a system that many
times is pervasive in actually
creating poverty situations. So I'll give you an
example. If I'm eligible for Medicaid today and I'm also
eligible for cash assistance and I'm also eligible for
SNAP, if I get a job that provides me even a little
bit closer out of poverty, I lose all those benefits
immediately, which means that I'm incentivized if I
need health care for my children and I have a job
that's not going to provide it right away to not look
for employment that is going to pay me an amount that's
going to make me ineligible for certain benefits,
right? So while people are working
really hard for upward mobility, the systems that
we have in place don't give them the grace to be able
to come out of poverty and provide their own agency to
actually create the opportunity for upward
mobility. The official poverty measure
in the US today is based on calculations from the
mid-1960s. It's calculated by
comparing pretax income against a threshold set at
three times the cost of minimum diet In 1963. A large number of federal
programs still rely on this measure to figure out who
is eligible for assistance and welfare. The researcher, whose work
became the basis of that measure, never intended it
to be used in the way that it currently is, both as a
widespread measure of poverty, but then as the
basis of all of these different social welfare
programs and allocations of resources towards those programs. It doesn't take certain very
obvious indicators into consideration. To start, it
looks at pre-tax income, which is not what I'm
taking home every day so that doesn't make sense. It
also doesn't look at different family
compositions, which absolutely impacts how a
family may spend money. If I am the type of family
that has both of my parents living with me, I'm going
to spend more. It doesn't look at expenses
around food or child care. So in many ways, it's
incredibly out of date because it has not kept up
with the way life has changed for most Americans. As a response to these
criticisms, the supplemental poverty measure was
developed in 2011 as an improvement over the
existing measure. It incorporates into the
measurement both the cost of basic needs like food,
clothing, utilities, but also government transfers
and programs. So you could see the effect
of government programs in addressing poverty and
economic insecurity. It also takes into account
geographical differences. So the supplemental poverty
threshold is more of a range depending on where you
live, your household size and what your housing
status is. So it is more comprehensive
. In that way, it's an
improvement on the official poverty measure. But some experts argue that
even the supplemental poverty measure isn't a
perfect method. While it looked to close the
gap on certain indicators that the original poverty
measure was not taking into consideration, it did not
go far enough. Food is one of those places
where we are still not taking into account what
food may cause in a state like New York versus a
state like Mississippi. So if you have a universal
brush for the whole country, you're going to miss a
number of people that are either at risk of falling
into poverty or are already technically living in
poverty but are not counted by the measure. The Census Bureau told CNBC
that both the official poverty measure and the supplemental poverty measure provide a consistent data
of poverty measurement and that the Bureau continually
strives to innovate and improve the design and
measurement of their well-being statistics. This difficulty in
measuring poverty has also led some experts to argue
that poverty isn't as serious of an issue as it's
made to believe. Poverty in the United States
and the way it's normally understood is not a big
issue at all. It's deliberately
miscounted. So the reality is that we
have poverty in the United States because the Census
Bureau ignores the entire welfare state when it goes
to count poverty. You count poverty by
saying, well, a household has an income, say less
than $26,000 a year, but all the welfare benefits or 95%
of the welfare benefits are not counted, and they also
undercount earnings by about 50%. Therefore, you have a
lot of poverty basically because most of the
resources that these folks have are not counted. Unless we can get an
accurate number of just how prevalent poverty is in the
United States, attempting to eradicate it is close to
impossible. When we don't have those
numbers. A lot of folks who are making policy decisions
are flying blind. Whether I'm a large
corporation that is looking to invest in an
organization or in a city, or whether I am a public
official that is trying to figure out how much SNAP is
enough SNAP. If I don't have a baseline,
there's no way I'm ever going to be solving the
problem. If COVID has proven
anything. Poverty is an issue that
can be resolved with the right policy. Government assistance led
to a significant decline in the supplemental poverty
measure, lifting 45.4 million Americans out of
poverty during the height of the pandemic. Policy, I would say, is one
of our strongest tools in fully addressing and
eradicating poverty. It is where we can define
what the problems are, accurately measure what the
problems are, and then design and implement the
programs we need to address the true extent of poverty. A really good example that
I'll use is that of the elderly. This is the one
real success story in the United States as we've
really been able to reduce the poverty rates amongst
the elderly as a result of primarily social security
and Medicare. So if we didn't have those
programs today, poverty rates for the elderly would
go from about 10% to 40%. And that shows you the
dramatic impact that government programs and
policies can have on reducing poverty. Figuring out a more accurate
method of measuring poverty is a vital step in
eradicating the issue. I would begin with changing
how we define and measure poverty to include the full
extent of economic insecurity. Another way of measuring
poverty, and this is a way that European countries and
other countries use is what's known as a relative
measure. And so they say if you fall
below 50% of median income, then we're going to count
you in poverty. So if the median income was
$70,000 and you fell below $35,000, you'd be counted
as being in poverty. More targeted social
programs could also have a significant impact on the
impoverished community. Some of those programs may
include an expanded child tax credit, the kind of
which we saw in 2021 when it was expanded during the
pandemic, raising the minimum wage immediately to
at least $15 an hour, but then moving towards a
living wage and guaranteeing that everybody who wants to
work can work as a guaranteed ability and
access to a good paying job. I think a really
straightforward solution that people have been
talking about more recently is the idea of a universal
basic income. So here the idea is that if
poverty is a lack of income, then a very straightforward
way is to transfer some income. Here's the analogy
I would use to get people to shift their way of
thinking, and it's the analogy of musical chairs. Let's say we have ten
people playing and eight chairs available. Now, who's going to win and
lose at that game? Well, if we focus on the
individual level factors, people that were in a bad
position when the music stopped and so on. But if we focus on the
structure of the game, then two people are going to
lose out regardless of the individual attributes. And that's what's going on
here in the United States. We're focusing on, people
aren't working hard enough. They're not doing this.
They're not doing that. When really the problem is
that there aren't enough chairs in the game.
