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By VELIA GOVAERE -  Professor UNED

Social distress has become a daily protagonist of news coverage. Its existential manifestations are the basis of a democratic deterioration that has become a universal scourge. Discontent, which often leads to street violence and indiscriminate repression, is accompanied by a crisis of political representation, polarization and left and right-wing populism.

In all horizons appears the contrasting look that Percy Shelley gave us, when in 1821 and contemporary with the independence of Central America, he wrote that "we have more scientific and economic knowledge than we can apply to the just distribution of wealth that their contribution multiplies".

202 years have passed, and those words are still as true a reflection of reality as they are today. With that plea, Percy reproached the emptiness of social ethics in public affairs. Matthew Desmond is more contemporary, but his study is no different from Shelly's civilizational contrast. In a recent article (NYT, 9/3/2023) he said that since 1970, science achieved the mapping of the human genome. Smallpox was also eradicated, the infant mortality rate dropped 70% and in the most advanced countries the population gained more than ten years of life.

The Internet was born, social networks proliferated and, with them, translation machines universalized the individual's ability to communicate with the entire planet. Global warming was discovered and with it a new existential threat. Like Shelley, we can now also say that the multiplied capacity of wealth production is only comparable to the equally multiplied deficiency of its distribution. Desmond makes a Shelleyan contrast between these advances in science and economics vis-à-vis social life: "On the problem of poverty, however, there has been no real improvement, but a long stagnation".

Desmond refers at this point to the official poverty line statistics of the U.S. federal government. It shows that in 1970, 12.6% of the U.S. population was poor. By 1990, poverty had even risen to 13.5%. No wonder that a period of pristine introduction of neoliberalism brought poverty up to 15.1%, in 2010.

Since then, and not to mention the ravages of the pandemic, in one of the countries that dealt with it the worst, nor the passing relief of subsidy packages, the graph of poverty in the United States is like a line of gently rolling hills: "...it curves slightly up, then slightly down, then up again over the years, remaining unchanged through Democratic and Republican administrations."

Obviously, as the years have passed, living standards have varied. Certain consumer goods, once considered to be luxuries, such as cell phones, television and microwave ovens, are now virtually universally available. That does not mean, however, that their easy availability has lowered the poverty line. On the one hand, this has a lot to do with globalization and the massive importation of products from China, which are now more affordable. But, as Desmond notes, "Having a cell phone does not guarantee housing, medical and dental care, or child care. Nor, I would argue, does it guarantee food, quality education and, in the United States, heating in winter. Thus, while real wages have not increased since 1980, in the last 20 years fuel and utilities have risen 115% in price in urban areas.

In fact, there is a striking contrast between the cheapening of consumer goods and the rising cost of essential goods and services. One way of describing this civilizational paralysis of social ethics was made by Michael Harrington, already 60 years ago: "In America it is much easier to be decently clothed than to be decently housed, fed or groomed".

I, like many others, and also Desmond, would have thought that the stagnation of poverty would be directly related to the Reagan-Thatcher aegis of the 1980s. That period marked the international rise of market fundamentalism, tax cuts and subsequent fiscal weakness to maintain social investment that suffered drastic cuts. According to this line of thought, the budgets allocated to the fight against poverty would have decreased in the United States. It was obvious, wasn't it? Well, it was not.

Contrary to some of the cuts, during the eight-year Reagan administration, poverty alleviation budgets grew steadily until now, with a 237% increase in the year before Joe Biden took office. Let us understand that we are not talking about contributions in absolute terms, but in per capita welfare assistance, which went from $1,015 to $3,419 per person. And if the public contribution did not decrease, but rather increased, how can we explain the paralysis of the poverty needle?

One of the big causes is rooted in the expropriation of anti-poverty assistance by religious ideologies. Since 1996, the old model of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), controlled by the federal government, was turned over to state control and transformed into block grants given to states that could decide how to distribute the money.

Desmond gives us examples of this ideological piñata against the poor. "Arizona uses welfare to pay for abstinence-only sex education. Pennsylvania diverted funds to anti-abortion centers. .... Maine used the money to fund Christian summer camps." As an overall result, in 2020, out of every dollar of TANF poverty relief, the poor received only 22 cents in the entire United States.

That doesn't explain everything, because there are programs that do reach people like the famous food stamps or subsidized health care, Medicaid. There are other more structural factors such as housing, the difficulty of unionization with its consequent impact on the ability to negotiate wages, deindustrialization, territorial gaps and so on. But all the structural obstacles to alleviate poverty, which would demand another reflection, do not manage to hide the formidable scandal of the ideological piñata that expropriates from the poor the aid that is due to them.