Poverty is Expensive | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

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Poverty is Expensive

On the 50th Anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that researchers went off track decades ago when they decided that fixing poverty was a matter of diagnosing and remediating the supposedly dysfunctional culture and flawed characters of poor people. These researchers assumed that the poor stayed poor because they choose immediate gratification over long-term planning, or addiction over sobriety, or promiscuity over lawful marriage, and therefore needed moral uplift in the form of “chastity training” and other behavior modification programs. Not surprisingly, the only people who improved their economic status were the consultants who charged taxpayers big bucks for ineffective and degrading programs. 

Ehrenreich thinks it’s a lot simpler than that: The working poor don’t rise out poverty because wages are low and being poor is insidiously but ruinously expensive. As Ehrenreich discovered while researching her book Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, if you don’t have first and last month’s rent to put down on a new apartment, you can find yourself stuck in an overpriced residential motel that costs far more per month than you would have paid in rent if only you’d had the cash to put down the deposit. Ehrenreich found poverty “surcharges” on everything from convenience store groceries to high-interest payday loans. Between the hidden high costs of making do on minimum wage and stagnant wages, it’s no wonder that so many poor people find themselves unable to get ahead.

 

[Photo credit: kersy83, Creative Commons.]