Qu'ils mangent de la brioche

It’s hard for me to understand why someone would bitch and moan about giving poor people fish.

One of my Facebook friends posted about how poverty in Michigan has increased 50 percent in the last decade. Discussion ensued about whether politicians are to blame – my belief – or whether more systemic issues are at play.

Then some angry little twit wrote, “OK, now that we know that poverty is due to ‘systematic issues’ and politicians, never poor individual choices or lack or work ethic, let's just continue to expand the Free Money Store, because giving people fish is always better than teaching them to do it. The dole, the dole, the dole - the only way out.”

I can’t believe there are ignorant, divisive, myopic human beings like this walking around out there.

According to the New York Times, “another 2.6 million people slipped into poverty in the United States last year, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday, and the number of Americans living below the official poverty line, 46.2 million people, was the highest number in the 52 years the bureau has been publishing figures on it.”

Poverty has also swallowed more children, with about 16.4 million in its ranks last year, the highest numbers since 1962. This means 22 percent of children are in poverty, the highest percentage since 1993.

Median household incomes fell last year to levels last seen in 1997, and state and local governments have made deep cuts to staff and to budgets for social programs, both likely to move economically fragile families closer to poverty.

Harvard economics professor Lawrence Katz points out, “We think of America as a place where every generation is doing better, but we're looking at a period when the median family is in worse shape than it was in the late 1990s."

"We're risking a new underclass," added Timothy Smeeding, director of the Institute for Research and Poverty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

In light of these facts, how is it that anyone can feel justified in demonstrating such callousness and nastiness toward struggling, low-income individuals? Do people really think poor people “on the dole” are sucking “their” money away? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: corporate welfare is far more costly and offensive than public assistance. And like it or not, we’re all in this together.

The Global Action and Information Network points out that while “social welfare is concerned with the needs of children, the elderly, and those in society who cannot fully care for themselves, corporate welfare cares for businesses and industries that are often not only developed, but actually stable and quite self-sufficient.”
Corporate welfare in the form of subsidies cost taxpayers billions of dollars. And tax breaks to corporations, including those that are foreign-owned, decrease government revenues so there’s less available for the rest of us.

We can debate the extent to which poverty is caused by politicians or “systemic issues,” whatever that means, until the cows come home. That won’t change the fact that poverty is not a lifestyle choice and it’s getting worse.

And teaching poor people to fish doesn’t help when the lakes have all been emptied or polluted by the Fat Cats.



Sources: New York Times, Global Action and Information Network.