Understanding the Poverty Line

Official Poverty Line

• It is calculated based on a minimum family market basket consisting of a low-cost food budget with a minimum level of nutrition.
• The food budget is multiplied by 3 to account for nonfood costs.

Problems With The Official Definition of Poverty

• Poverty is unique to social and physical environments, varying between regions like rural and urban areas.
• The official poverty definition may have been more relevant in 1965 than in 2001 due to the declining cost of food as a proportion of the family budget.
• It fails to keep up with inflation.

Relative Measures of Poverty

• Fifty percent of the median income is a relative measure of poverty
• Relative poverty exists when people can afford basic necessities but cannot maintain an average standard of living.

Feminization of Poverty

• Women are disproportionately represented among individuals living in poverty.
• It is the most important explanation for child poverty.

The Old-Poor, The New Poor, and The Poor-Poor (Severely Poor)

• The old poor had hopes of escaping poverty, or for their children to escape it, with work available even for the unskilled.
• The new poor are more trapped in poverty compared to previous generations, facing little need for hard physical labor.
• The severely poor, or poor-poor, have incomes below half the poverty line, comprising 39% of the poor population.

Child Poverty

• Children living in poverty often come from female-headed, rural, and mostly white families.

Progress in Reducing Child Poverty

• One in five children are poor in the United States.
• Child poverty reduction is possible, as demonstrated by other industrial countries.
• Wealthy children in America fare better than wealthy children in other countries; however, poor children in America fare worse than poor children in most industrial countries, except for Ireland and Israel.
• Other countries reduce child poverty through more expansive government programs including broader child tax credits, guaranteed child care, health care, and child support.

Myths About Poverty

• Refusal to work is a myth
• Welfare dependency is a myth

Welfare

• It is government monies or services provided to aid the poor.

Wealthfare

• The greatest amount of government aid going to the nonpoor
• Most government expenditures for human resource programs, including public education, Social Security, and Medicare for the elderly, go to the nonpoor.

Hidden Welfare Systems for the Wealthy

• Tax expenditures and loopholes allow wealthy individuals and corporations to pay lower or no taxes.

• Money saved through tax breaks is four times larger than all funding for low-income housing.

• About a quarter of Americans in the top income bracket receive these tax breaks.

• Corporate assistance comes as direct subsidies and credit assistance to corporations, banks, agribusiness, and defense industries. The Poor Pay More

• The poor pay more for many services

• They pay more for everyday products like milk

• Have a harder time getting insurance and loans.

High-Cost Commodities

• Inner-city poor pay more for food and commodities due to the location of discount "club" stores in the suburbs.
• Poor individuals must buy from neighborhood stores that have near-monopoly advantages.

Inflated Interest Rates

• The poor are not offered the kinds of financial services which are provided to people in the middle class like bank loans.
• Financial services available to the poor charge extremely high interest rates.
• These services include rent-to-own companies, loans from pawnbrokers, finance company loans, and quick payday loans from check cashing services.

Regressive Taxes

• The poor pay a greater percentage of their resources on taxes for purchased items compared to the wealthy.
• Sales taxes are regressive.

Cultural Inferiority: The Culture of Poverty

• Oscar Lewis coined the term "Culture of Poverty" which suggests poor people share deviant cultural characteristics that perpetuate their poverty.
• Eitzen and Baca-Zinn argue that the Culture of Poverty implies defects in the lifestyle of the poor perpetuate poverty, passed down through generations, making it hard to escape.
• Characteristics that typify the Culture of Poverty exist across a variety of racial and ethnic groups and are highly stereotypical.

Characteristics of the Culture of Poverty

• Parents are more permissive and less verbal with their children, displaying authoritarian tendencies.
• Children raised in poverty have different life orientations, with an absence of childhood and early initiation to sex.
• Families often form based on free unions or consensual marriages, contributing to female-headed homes.
• The poor are more fatalistic, believing in "what will be will be."
• They are less apt to defer gratification, with the poor subculture having a present-time orientation.
• They are less interested in formal education.

Culture of Poverty Theory

• Argues that the characteristics presented enable the poor to adapt to poverty, such as the lack of childhood due to early work.
• A strong disposition toward authoritarianism is necessary because of the hard choices that poverty provides.

The Moynihan Report

• Examines the Culture of Poverty through a functionalist approach, assuming a "right" culture.
• The Moynihan Report (1965) studied African-American poverty, aiming to explain continued poverty in the 1960s.
• Much of the poverty associated with the black community was due to a history of slavery and economic oppression (unemployment).
• Moynihan ultimately focused on altering the characteristics of the Black family rather than the system of oppression.

Critique of the Moynihan Report and the Culture of Poverty

• It blames the victim by placing the burden of change on the poor rather than society.
• The culture of poverty perspective views poverty as the fault of the poor due to their culture, not social injustice.

Negative Emphasis on Female-Headed Families

• The culture of poverty thesis places a negative emphasis on female-headed families
• Female-headed families do not ensure a life of poverty as there is no evidence single-parent family children do not perform well in school or have greater problems with mental health.
• Poverty generates social problems, not single-parenting
• Single-parents are usually women who are placed in economically disadvantaged positions because women only 68 percent the salary that it pays men.

The Attack on Divorce

• There appears to be an attack on divorce in culture of poverty theory.
• There is no evidence that divorce, itself, causes poverty.
• Divorce can sometimes lead to better social adjustment
• There has been a rise of happiness in marriage to 80 percent since 1957, as divorces have risen.
• The extended family supports single-parent families by providing grandparents, aunts, and even friends.

Most Black Families Are Not Poor

• The majority of Black families are not from broken homes.
• The poverty rate for Blacks is about 30 percent
• 70 percent of black families are above the poverty line.
• The Moynihan Report does not attack aspects of the social structure that put one group at a disadvantage.

Poor People are Not Radically Different

• The families living in poverty do not have radically different outlooks than middle-class families.
• Most poor people, attempt to live by society's values
• Poor people would prefer to escape poverty via a good job, but good jobs that poor people are eligible for are rare.

One-Way Adaptation?

• Culture of Poverty proponents argue that the poor adapt to a lifestyle which allows them to deal with poverty.
• Once these lifestyles have been adopted, they become institutionalized with poor culture making it very difficult for the poor to escape the culture of poverty.
• It might be easy to adopt to a poverty lifestyle, that it might be just as easy to adopt to a middle class lifestyle once that lifestyle is provided.

Structural Theories

• Explore the social arrangements that create poverty.

Institutional Discrimination

• The poor are poor because they were born to the wrong parents, in the wrong section of town, in the wrong industry, or in the wrong racial or ethnic group.
• Institutional discrimination is embedded in the the customary ways of doing things, prevailing attitudes and expectations, and accepted structural arrangements, working to the disadvantage of the poor.

Education

• Poor students tend to not score high on assessments tests because of, among other things, lower expectations of teachers and administrators.
• The poor cannot afford to send their children to college.

Health Care

• The poor get sick more and stay sick longer due to not being able to afford preventive medicine, improper diets, and being unable to get proper medical care when they get sick.

The Political Economy of Society

• A basic tenet of capitalism promotes poverty.
• Who gets what is determined by private profit rather than collective need.
• Employers are constrained to pay their employees at little as possible in wages and benefits.
• By maintaining a surplus of labor, wages are depressed.

The Elimination of Poverty

• Poverty is a social problem and the source of other social problems, therefore, it must be eliminated.
• Poverty can be eliminated in the United States.
• Poverty is caused by the lack of resources, not a deviant value system.
• Poverty is not simply a matter of deficient income and poverty results from other inequalities in society
• Poverty cannot be eliminated by the efforts of the poor themselves.
• Poverty cannot be eliminated by the private sector of the economy.
• Poverty will not be eliminated by an expanding economy.
• Poverty will not be eliminated by volunteer help from well-meaning individuals, groups, and organizations.
• Poverty will not be eliminated by the efforts of state and local governments.
• Poverty is a national problem and must be attacked with massive nationwide programs financed largely and organized by the federal government.