The Poverty of Nations

A. Barton Hinkle

“What ever happened to poor people?” asks Katha Pollitt in The Nation. Everybody talks about the middle class these days, she writes, and nobody talks about the poor.

She’s not alone. A few weeks ago radio host Tavis Smiley teamed up with Princeton prof Cornel West for a 16-city “Poverty Tour” whose aim was to “insert the word poverty into the American public sphere (where it rarely appears).” This is a common refrain on the left. If it’s not NPR’s Lynn Neary opining that Hurricane Katrina taught America we had been “ignoring poverty,” it’s The New York Times reminding everyone about America’s “forgotten poor.”

Pollitt wrote her piece shortly after the latest Census Bureau report showed a jump in poverty. Maybe you saw that story. It certainly was hard to miss. It got front-page treatment from The New York Times,The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and plenty of other papers, and the equivalent from TV.

Hmmmm. Maybe only the East Coast liberal elite pays any attention to such data. Then again, maybe not. “Census Shows High Poverty Levels in Peoria,” reported the Peoria Journal Star. “More Residents Sinking Into Poverty,” noted the Seattle Times. “SD Children Impacted by Poverty,” reported KDLT News in South Dakota. Those were just some of the more than 2,000 news stories on the Census report.

And yet the myth that America pays no attention to poverty lives on.

On the Daily Beast, you can read about “Women: The Invisible Poor.” “Poverty Rising in America: Where’s the Outrage?” asks Public Radio International, which reports that “the poor have become invisible” and approvingly quotes David Shipler, author of The Working Poor: Invisible in America.

Well, okay. If you want to get all technical about it, maybe the poor are not totally invisible. But they are faceless, right?

Wrong. We know what the poor look like, thanks to “Faces of Poverty” (CNN Money), “The Faces of Poverty” (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel), “Poverty in America: Faces Behind the Figures” (CBS News), “The New Face of Poverty” (USA Today), “New Faces of Poverty in Florida,” (WFTV Orlando), “Faces of Poverty Changing” (Los Angeles Times) and many other efforts to put—you guessed it—a human face on the cold statistics.

And when Americans aren’t reading about poverty statistics or the faces behind the statistics, they often are reading about awareness-raising “Homeless for a Day” projects like those that have taken place in Newark, Orlando, Richmond, Lubbock, Norfolk, Miamisburg, and too many other cities to name.

Americans also can pore over the latest academic study of poverty from Harvard’s Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program. And the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality. And the Joint Center for Poverty Research at Northwestern and The University of Chicago. And The University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research. And the West Coast Poverty Research Center at the University of Washington. And. . . .

And yet, we are told, nobody thinks about the poor.

Not long ago The Huffington Post reported that roughly 170,000 U.S. families are living in homeless shelters. Who set up those shelters? Elves? No, countless caring individuals and charitable groups did. There probably isn’t a decent-sized church in America that doesn’t have a program to help the poor. Countless more Americans contribute to secular anti-poverty nonprofits, from well-known ones such as Habitat for Humanity and the Children’s Defense Fund to more obscure ones such as Hopelink and the Food Not Bombs movement.

And still we are told that “nobody cares about the poor.”

The other day Cornel West showed up at the Occupy Wall Street protest with a sign reading, “If only the war on poverty was a real war, then we would actually be putting money into it.” Funny. But the premise is flat-out wrong. In 2009 alone Washington spent $591 billion  on means-tested anti-poverty programs. (Others, such as Medicare and Social Security, are not means-tested.) By comparison, 2009 federal appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were $130 billion. Since the War on Poverty began, Americans have shelled out more than $13 trillion to fight it.

They also give a lot of money on top of that. Moreover, as Arthur Brooks found in Who Really Cares, conservatives donate a higher percentage of their income to charity than liberals do. They also donate more time and give blood at higher rates. (Brooks set out to prove otherwise, and couldn’t.)

And yet despite this—despite 122 federal anti-poverty programs and hundreds of nonprofits and thousands of soup kitchens and millions—billions—of voluntary contributions—despite all this, Americans are constantly being lectured about what a cold-hearted, mean-spirited, greedy, selfish bunch they are: “There are still poor people in America, or haven’t you noticed?!” Americans have, and they do a lot about it.

Maybe more liberals should notice that. Perhaps, if they are ever struck by a fit of generosity, they might even say thank you.