The Poor Are Invisible

Go shopping at the grocery store. Order a burger or a taco. Buy clothes at the department store. Go about your normal life.

There are no poor people. Or just a few, as you drive by the homeless shelter, where a few people might be smoking outside. Or you see someone in ragged clothes shuffling around downtown. Maybe someone asks you for a quarter.

So there’s a few poor people, but not many, not enough to make more than fleeting impressions on your day.

The newspaper doesn’t show poor people, either. There’s no poor person explaining how they get along on page 1, no reports on policies in Washington that take poor people seriously. Poor people don’t make the sports or culture or society pages and are even unlikely to appear in the obituaries, which cost money.

Students at prestigious universities won’t see poor people in their classes. Most poor young Americans, aged 19-22 and in the bottom 20% of incomes, are not in college. Those who are don’t show up at the famous private universities, where, for example, all our Supreme Court justices were educated. Many of those schools enroll more students from the top 1% than from the bottom 60%.

But you have been surrounded by poor people all day. More than 1 in every 8 Americans lives below the poverty level, over 40 million Americans. The greeter at Walmart, the young woman taking your food order, the shopper looking for day-old bread – they might all be poor.

You just don’t know they are poor. You don’t know about their struggles to put food on the table for their families, about how poverty causes health problems, about how they choose between paying rent and getting health insurance. You don’t see them buy clothes at the thrift store, because you only ever go to the side entrance to drop off things you don’t need. You don’t see them at the emergency room, because you can schedule an appointment with a doctor and pay a quarter of what an uninsured person would be charged. You only see their neighborhoods through car windows and don’t have to think about how they got that way.

Adding to their invisibility, the poor are more concentrated in rural America than in cities. One-quarter of rural American children live in poverty, somewhat more than the one-fifth of urban children.

Poverty has many causes. Some are personal choices, like drug use, while others are bad luck, such as an accident. But the level of poverty in a nation is a consequence of political choices. The United States has more poor people than all other countries with similar economies, because of decades of political choices. More than 1% of Americans, that’s over 4 million people, live on less than $1.90 a day. Among the 10 countries with the highest per capita income in the world, the United States has by far the highest proportion of very poor people, more than twice as many.

Poverty is an inherent part of the American economic system. Over the past 40 years, the American economy has boomed, but the number of people living in poverty has grown steadily with our population. The boom helped the rich, not the poor. In that period, the incomes of the top 1% doubled, while the incomes of the bottom fifth grew a total of 4%.

Conservatives have made poverty into a liberal cause. Anyone could advocate for the poor, but conservatives in America have chosen to blame the poor for their plight, depicting the poor as venal, lazy spongers. Ronald Reagan picked out a singular woman con artist as a “welfare queen” to illustrate his view of everyone who was on welfare. FOX News regularly offers “evidence” that the poor live comfortably from welfare. Paul Ryan compared the safety net to a “hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency”.

Americans who are conservative tend to blame the poor for being poor. More than half of Republicans believe that people are poor because of a lack of effort, true for only 19% of Democrats.

Poverty is more than twice as likely for blacks, native Americans and Hispanics, than for whites. So white Americans tend to greatly overestimate the connection between poverty and race, which feeds into the conservative tendency to blame poor people, who are assumed to be minorities, for their poverty.

Those attitudes explain Republican efforts to cut holes in the safety net for the neediest Americans. The Republican tax reform paid for huge cuts for the wealthy by reducing health care funds for the poor.

It’s easy to ignore the poor, to pretend there aren’t very many of them, that they get what they deserve, that they have nothing to do with us. None of that is true. No child deserves to get poor medical care or to have to miss meals every day. The poor do the jobs we don’t want and their low wages mean we can afford more of what we don’t need.

The poor don’t live off of us – we live on them.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, September 25, 2018

The 2018 Election So Far

The long primary season is over. Tens of millions of Americans voted. Nobody has been elected to office yet, but there is much to learn from those votes.

Primaries don’t show which party will win in November, although they offer hints. They do tell us what each party represents, what kind of government Democrats and Republicans offer. Maybe they show where American politics are headed.

Many new names will appear on November ballots, because incumbency’s power was frequently defeated by non-politicians. Women and minorities, under-represented in politics since the founding of the US, won an unprecedented number of primaries.

In both parties, moderate and more extreme elements clashed. Among Republicans, Donald Trump often helped to tip the scales toward the extreme candidates. Kris Kobach in Kansas and Ron DeSantis in Florida both won primaries for governor due to Trump’s intervention.

Among Democrats, no person of that weight could put a finger on the scales. Instead organizations, some old and some new, mostly on the more liberal side, used traditional tactics on the ground to push activist candidates ahead of experienced incumbents.

The extraordinary female energy behind the Women’s March on Washington the day after Trump’s  inauguration translated into record numbers of women candidates in 2018. Many more women ran for Senate and House seats, with the increase all among Democrats, and more women won their primaries than ever before. Sixteen women will be major party candidates in governors’ races in November, 12 Democrats and 4 Republicans. The previous high was 10.

In Illinois, there are record numbers of women candidates in November, from statewide offices to Congressional seats to the Illinois legislature. The great majority are Democrats.

In New York City, first-timer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated 10-term House incumbent Joseph Crowley. That victory generated much comment, because she belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America.

Three black Democrats won primaries in governors’ races: Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Ben Jealous in Maryland, and Andrew Gillum in Florida. Jealous and Gillum could be the first black governors in their states, and Abrams is the first black woman ever nominated in any governor’s race. African Americans won many less prestigious primaries, including these firsts for black women: London Breed for mayor of San Francisco; Deidre DeJear for Iowa Secretary of State; Vangie Williams for Congress in Virginia.

Ayanna Pressley, a black Boston city councilor, handily defeated Democratic 10-term incumbent Mike Capuano. She will probably become Massachusetts’ first black Congresswoman. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat, will become the first Muslim woman in Congress, since she is unopposed in Michigan’s 13th congressional district. Sharice Davids in Kansas and Deb Haaland in New Mexico, both Democrats, could be the first Native American women elected to Congress.

The 7^th Congressional district in Texas is an example of the forces in play across the country. Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a lawyer and first-time candidate, won a crowded Democratic primary. She has worked to support Planned Parenthood in Houston and has been involved in social justice organizations. She faces incumbent John Culberson, a Republican who has won 9 elections in this district since 2000. He voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and has taken a hard line on immigration. The district is nearly one-third Hispanic. The result will depend on voter registration drives and how well Fletcher can introduce herself to her district.

The power of incumbency shows up in an ongoing NYTimes poll in the district. Culbertson leads slightly as I write this, even though nearly two-thirds support a federal ban on the sale of assault-style guns, and a majority opposes a border wall and disapproves of Trump.

Primaries in New York State reveal the strength and limits of activist liberalism among Democrats. Governor Andrew Cuomo easily defeated actress Cynthia Nixon, who criticized him from the left. But insurgent candidates for the state legislature defeated a group of conservative Democratic incumbents, who had been voting with Republicans. The successful challengers represent the diverse Democrats who have won this year: two white women, one Latina woman, one Asian-American man, and two black men defeated five men and one woman.

The unprecedented success of female and minority candidates among Democrats comes from efforts to turn out voters who were absent in 2016. More than 4 million voters for Barack Obama in 2012 did not vote in 2016. More than half are Americans of color. Many millions more never registered: about 30% of potential voters are perennially not registered. After a majority of primaries had been held in late July, turnout compared to 2014 had nearly doubled among Democratic voters and increased about 25% among Republicans.

In November, Republicans offer mostly white male candidates, who support a white male attitude toward political policy. Trump disdains the popular movement against sexual abuse, his administration has backed away from efforts to fight lingering racism, and his political supporters say little about his obvious prejudice against Hispanics.

Democrats look different and support active policies to empower women and minorities. They argue that policies which address race and gender will also attack deepening class inequalities.

Which way will America go?

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, September 18, 2018

Only The Best People

No President can govern alone. George Washington picked a few of the most prominent revolutionary leaders for his Cabinet, including Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Now the federal government directly employs over 2 million people, and pays millions of others, such as our soldiers.

Candidates tell us they will get the best people. For most of our history, it was assumed that the best meant white men. After Emancipation of the slaves in 1865, black men began to be hired in Washington, encouraged by the early Republican Party. President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, reimposed racist criteria on federal hiring early in the 20^th century. Only since Lyndon Johnson’s efforts at desegregating American society in the 1960s have African Americans again held important offices in our government.

The first woman to serve in the Cabinet was Frances Perkins, appointed Secretary of Labor by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. President Dwight Eisenhower made the next female appointment in 1953, Oveta Culp Hobby as head of the new Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. As the women’s movement intensified in the late 1970s, Jimmy Carter appointed four women to his Cabinet.

Although women have almost as many jobs in the government as men, they are concentrated at lower pay and responsibility. In all departments, the salary pyramid narrows strongly at the top in favor of men. So Milt Romney talked awkwardly about “binders full of women” in 2012, to show that his version of best included women.

Donald Trump constantly repeated that he would bring in “the best people” or “the best people in the world”. He said, “I know the best people.”  “You’ve got to pick the best people.” He boasted about how good he was at finding the best. Because he rarely mentioned anyone in particular, we never found out what he meant by “best”.

Now we know a lot more.

On August 21, one of his campaign managers was convicted of tax and bank fraud, and his personal attorney of many years pled guilty to similar financial crimes. In Trump’s first 18 months, 8 Cabinet secretaries had to resign, often for spending outrageous amounts of our tax dollars on themselves, a record turnover. The constant changes, including many firings, of Trump’s larger senior staff are “unprecedented”: 4 communications directors, 3 national security advisors, 2 chiefs of staff.

National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and campaign adviser George Papadopoulos both lied to the FBI.

Trump drew people near to him who excelled at defrauding others, private and public. Then he evaluated them with a single criteria: do they love him?

Trump explained his hiring policy in a nutshell, after he got mad at one of his best people. He hired one of his reality television co-stars, Omarosa Manigault, as director of African-American outreach for his campaign. She responded by saying in September 2016: “Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump. It's everyone who's ever doubted Donald, whoever disagreed, whoever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.”

Now she’s gone. Trump says that she is a lowlife and a dog, but he hired her “because she only said GREAT things about me.”

Omarosa was one of the small number of women hired for senior positions in the Trump administration. Despite GOP boasts about how many women he has hired, in fact, his administration is “the most male-dominated federal government in nearly a quarter-century”.

Does he care about crime? After Manafort was convicted of stealing money from banks and from the government to support an outrageous lifestyle, Trump called him “a brave man ... a stand-up guy”. All that mattered was that Manafort had not yet cooperated with prosecutors. Not yet, but maybe soon.

Trump is outraged that the first two House members to endorse him both are under indictment for financial crimes. Not outraged at their apparent crimes, but at the fact that their indictments might hurt Republicans in the elections.

Trump does have some of the best people working in his administration. They have proven themselves by long years of accomplishment, doing the work of running our government in the most non-partisan manner they can, serving Presidents of both Parties, and bringing wisdom and ethical behavior to our federal government.

But there aren’t nearly as many as there were just two years ago. Trump and his appointed Cabinet, his version of the best people, have performed so badly, so incompetently, so corruptly, that thousands of career public servants have quit their jobs. More than half of the top-ranking diplomats in the State Department had left by January 2018, and applications to join the foreign service have fallen by half. More than 700 people left the EPA by the end of last year, including 200 scientists.

Trump’s best people are corrupting American government at all levels. It may take a long time for us to recover.

Steve Hochstadt

Springbrook WI

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, September 11, 2018