Millions of American households with children are living on less than 2$ a day. If that number seems to have a particular sting, it should. It is how extreme poverty is measured on a global level. It is still a number that shocks first world people. While it isn't pretty, or healthy, you can get by on a few bucks a day in a place like Haiti. I'm not so sure it's possible in the USA, without ending up in jail. On the street,in societies as diverse as Venezuela, Israel and Haiti have a stronger sense of community than the US. You can go to your neighbor for a bowl of rice, and talk about how you can maybe get a job. I'm afraid wandering on the neighbor's property to beg for some rice in parts of the US may get you legally shot. Sleeping in the streets will land you in jail. And as to the inherent stress of all of this cracking up your mental health... well just pray you don't end up in the wrong mental healthcare facility because you could easily end up bankrupted as well. These facts are not exagerations; they are the realities of everyday American life for millions of young families.
Everyone, even our oblivious politicians, realize that raising children in poverty creates problems. But as far as our political rhetoric goes there have basically been two solutions proposed by our mainsteam politicians neither of which is viable. From the right wing there is the culturally conservative solution: marriage. And from the left side: increased government spending on welfare. Neither one of them is an adequate solution to a mounting crisis, or what is actually keeping many American families alive.
Let's start with marriage. Truth be told, marriage is more and more a mark of upper middle class socioeconomic status. Save some certain Latino populations where traditions hold strong; marriage happens less and less for poorer women. There has been an investment in certain parts of the country to push marriage. Even in liberal New York City, you can't avoid subway adds showing a black woman beaming about marriage sponsored by some public health campaign. But marriage in the lower classes is not always healthy for women.
I was recently reading an article about how Indian women end up as surrogates. The article talked about how lower class men are a bunch of unemployed drunks and mental cases who abuse their wives and expect them to make the money for the family. I found it strange was that the article mentioned these facts as if these women had some rare exotic disease like African sleeping sickness. The truth is most of the American women in my family could tell you about such relationships because they were married to men just like that. I though of the time my own civil partner had once been so drunk he blacked out and couldn't remember urinating in my closet the night before. For some of the men I saw get into my family the problem was drugs, for some mental illness; but the same basic pattern was there, and it always seemed to end in a messy expensive divorce. I guess that's what the middle part of lower middle class buys you...the ability to afford a lawyer.
I'm not claiming every poor man is a drunken fool. But let's be honest: men with problems like substance abuse and mental illness tend to drift towards the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. So do men with prison records. Together, these groups make up a lot of the available men in some areas. In these places the dynamic around marraige shifts. Marraigable men have very little incentive to marry. As much as Republican lawmakers blather on about marriage, they still pretend to respect our freedoms. At no point soon will they be taking masses of poorer women and assigning them second wife status to actual marraigable men- that is pretty much what it would take to actually create the fantasy of marriage as a poverty alleviating solution. With three or four incomes per child, we just might have a fighting chance. With just two incomes, most families fall further and further behind these days.
To their great credit some democrats, like Elizabeth Warren, have realized this phenomenon of the current unaffordability of family. Lots of her academic work addresses the paradox that the average normative American family has added a worker, and lost financial stability. Housing, education, quality nutritious food and healthcare, exactly what you need to get a kid on a stable path in life, have become too expensive for normal families to handle. We have enough welfare money floating around to give families in extreme poverty access to healthcare, but not much else. We throw vulnerable families into roach and mouse infested shelters, and feed them Spam. We take away their children if they stay in their subpar living arrangements. Just go ask some of the parents who recently lost their kids in the Detroit Water Debt fiasco. Whatever the reasons, it's painfully obvious that the welfare state is now in reality contracting, not expanding. And in the current political climate there is little hope for a real lifeline coming from the government in the next three years.
Under these conditions taking on debt to stave off being one of the desperate families in a shelter or broken up by officials seems logical. But everyone can see that modern forms of credit have a way of distorting markets. It happened in the housing market. To a large extent the same phenomenon has happened with higher education. Credit subsidized by the government created a lot of largesse and nonsense at ever inflating prices. A recent JAMA Dermatology edition had an article about the availability of tanning beds at colleges. It's not enough that our tax dollars are supporting creating a class of indentured servants. Now we must give some people melanoma too. Universities probably claim high end amenities are there to make them money. But what happens when the tan look is unfashionable for a few seasons, or the new gymn doesn't create the revenue projected, or enrollment in Urban Semiotics drops? Somehow it all seems to get rolled into ever higher prices that can only be financed through debt. Why am I so sure? Well, let's take my own experience: I'm a Columbia alumni. Through my years as an undergrad the administration talked of enlargement and enhancement. Having taken a few economics classes, I assumed this was about economies of scale. Adding a few seats to liberal arts lecture halls costs a lot less than students are paying for those seats. As long as not all students head off to lab intensive science training; the project should have been an obvious net gain for the University. I was expecting that by the time my own kids would apply to Columbia, the price would have fallen. Ha, ha, and ha.
I am not an economist, but I have a suspicion we are in a vicious downward spiral that will eventually hit bottom. Debt drives up prices of basics for families, which makes families take on more debt, which drives up prices, which makes families take on more debt....and then one day, there is some breaking point. But I suspect that breaking point is already here for very low income families. As families descended into the debt spiral they took on more and more usurious forms of debt. Or they just went delinquent. If you look at a map of average delinquent debt by state or even county it almost perfectly matches a map for not only childhood poverty but also many indicators of poor child health. You would be mistaken to think all of the arrows flow one way from a beginning of poverty in this schema. Connections spring up in all directions. Childhood illnesses bring medical bills parents can not handle either monetarily or in time off from work. Or unaffordable housing pushes families into asthma inducing, toxic structures inhabited by leptospirosis carrying mice. Or a thousand other tragedies of poverty go on day in and day out, and all seem to spell a trajectory of doom for children. If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider that the only way I got my own middle class area of the Bronx landlord to take responsibility for my apartment's mouse population was to bring the full medico-legal implications to the attention of my local health department at the same time I brought it to his. All around my floor lived low income Latino families who told me mice, as well as several other health hazards I listed, were "the way it is." Some of these young families even old me how proud they were to have moved out of even worse neighborhoods. These families were in fact the American conservative dream families. They were avoiding welfare, joining the army, marrying young, going to church, and certainly not blowing their money on conspicuous consumption. Unlike the Albanian families around the corner, they were fully assimilating into the mainstream of American society. But if our own militaries statistics are to be believed, these patriotic assimilating American families are sinking further and further into debt just to keep the lights on and food in the fridge.
Groups like Strike Debt have fought to take the moral language away from issues of debt for good reasons. The story spun by the mainstream press is that we debtors have hung ourselves due to our lack of self control. We were out partying like crack whores, and now we must pay the price. This is, according to such a narrative, a classic Greek tragedy at best and a morality play at worst. But what if that really isn't the story? In a few days I'll be posting some guest posts from Nicholas T. Dahlheim. He is a young sociologist and educator who has been writing about morality and debt in a way informed by philosophy. I can't see past my looming debt problems enough to consider the morality...but someone has to. The way I see it justice is actually on my and most debtors side. We don't need to avoid talking about morality. We need to get into discussion about the ethics of how debt should be shaping our lives. I'm unsure if I'll agree with Dahlheim's writings...but I hope they will be informative for anyone reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment