David Batstone of Sojourners, in an article that is e-mailed by subscription and thus unlinkable, criticizes the Bush administration for aiding the wealthy while the poor languish:
The editors of The New York Times sounded that alarm this past week in an editorial: "Despite the Bush-era expansion, the number of Americans living in poverty in 2005 - 37 million - was the same as in 2004. This is the first time the number has not risen since 2000. But the share of the population now in poverty - 12.6 percent - is still higher than at the trough of the last recession, when it was 11.7 percent. And among the poor, 43 percent were living below half the poverty line in 2005 - $7,800 for a family of three. That is the highest percentage of people in 'deep poverty' since the government started keeping track of those numbers in 1975."
Standing alone, these backward slides are disturbing. Put into the context of our current political realities they are downright immoral.
I'm not sure what he means by "current political realities", but before I can agree with him that the numbers he cites reflect some moral flaw in our society I have to ask a couple of questions.
For example, in order for these statistics to reflect a moral fault in our body politic the people who are mired in poverty must be able to work and willing to work, but prevented from working against their will by some sort of institutional or social hindrance. Mr. Batstone evidently believes that there is such an impediment standing in the way of people who would otherwise make their way out of poverty, but he doesn't tell us what it might be.
What might the hindrance be? One possibility is that there just aren't any jobs, but this seems unlikely given that the economy is at almost full employment and that illegal immigrants are streaming across our borders, presumably because they know there's work to be found here.
Another reason why the people in Mr. Batstone's statistics might be victims of an immoral society is that they are largely minorities and perhaps they are being discriminated against on the basis of their race. However, if Mr. Batstone has evidence that racial prejudice lies behind the poverty numbers, he should adduce it, but he doesn't.
A third possibility is that these individuals are trapped in poverty because the government cut back on welfare in the 1990s, and these individuals, who would work if they could, for sundry reasons not their fault cannot work. Thus they're living in poverty without sufficient government assistance. If this is what justifies Mr. Batstone's charge of immorality then he needs to show us the data that support the allegation, but again, he doesn't. He simply points out that there are more poor now than previously, declares that to be an immoral state of affairs, and lets it go. This is just too facile.
What he doesn't seem to consider is that perhaps a lot of the people in poverty today are poor because of choices they themselves have made. Many people are not just unemployed but unemployable, and many of the latter are unemployable as a consequence of their own choices in life. Some people, for example, have chosen not to take advantage of a free public education and are thus unsuited for good jobs. A high school dropout will earn annually only 65% of what a high school graduate will earn. Other people have chosen to have children out of wedlock and are unable, as a consequence, to work enough to get ahead. Some people have chosen to abuse drugs and alcohol and/or to indulge in other dysgenic activities which make them a liability in the workplace. Some people have chosen not to develop good work habits and thus have trouble keeping a job, much less build a career.
How many of the individuals in Mr. Batstone's 12.6% fall into one of these categories? What responsibility, if any, does government have to these people? Again, we're left in the dark. Mr. Batstone gives us no reason to accept his claim that somehow the poverty situation in the U.S. is "immoral". If he can provide us with some reason to think that these people are poor because of the deliberate actions of others who know that their acts will prevent people who want to earn their way out of poverty from doing so, then he'll have a case worth heeding.
Until then there's little reason to consider his vague and unsubstantiated allegation of immorality as anything other than rhetoric.
