By Shel Horowitz
This post is in three parts:
My Personal Poverty Story
What’s Wrong Right Now
Prescription to End Poverty
7000 bloggers are joining together today to talk about one issue: poverty. I’m proud to be one of those 7000.
My Personal Poverty Story
Poverty is something I know something about, first-hand. In the 1970s and early 1980s, I was desperately poor, and for a portion of that time, on food stamps. I jokingly refer to those years as the “research phase” for my e-book, “The Penny-Pinching Hedonist.” But I didn’t just pinch those pennies. I squeezed them so hard it might have drawn blood, if pennies could bleed.
When I got a job as a VISTA Volunteer community organizer, with the princely salary of $82 per week (and they let me keep getting food stamps), it was a major step UP the economic ladder for me; before that, I’d been working a single day a week in a neighborhood fruit store. I seem to remember that I earned $15 for those shifts, but that would have been below minimum wage even then, so it must have been more like $26.
I do know that I thought long and hard about every discretionary purchase other than food; with the food stamps, I didn’t have to worry about that, at least. But if I could get around New York City by bike instead of subway, I did–all over Brooklyn, where I was living and where I was charged to build the local Gray Panther chapter, and lower Manhattan, where my community organizing office was. If I could find clothing at a thrift shop, I did–even if it didn’t fit quite right. I found entertainment like poetry readings, that didn’t cost anything. I read the books and listened to the records I already had, on a stereo I’d bought used while a college student.
Even then, I knew I was lucky. All around me, I saw people who were trying to support a family; I had no dependents. I saw people being forced out of rent-controlled apartments so that landlords could quadruple the price under vacancy decontrol; I had found a small apartment in a warehouse district that I shared with a friend; my half was only $150, which meant that once I got the organizing job, I was able to earn back the cost of housing in less than two weeks and have the other two weeks’ pay to live on for the month. Before that, I’d been paying the rent out of small and precariously dropping savings since losing the entry-level corporate job that had brought me to New York. And even during that time of unemployment, I scraped by enough that I didn’t have to deal with the intimidating and humiliating welfare bureaucracy; the food stamp office was far more humane, according to my friends who’d been through the welfare system.
Gradually, in the 1980s, I moved out of the city, started the business I still run, and eventually got to a living wage, and then out of poverty.
What’s Wrong Right Now
But I still get very angry when I hear politicians and toxic talk show hosts who have no first-hand knowledge of poverty ranting about welfare cheats while passing out massive subsidies to their friends and funders at the very top of the economic ladder.
And it shocks me that we’ve allowed the disparity between the poorest and the richest to go totally haywire, much like the Latin American dictatorships we always heard about in the 1970s and 80s. CEOs take home nine-figure compensation packages, while poor and middle-class people lose their homes. This is not fair or just, and I’m hoping the current world-wide financial crisis will lead us to change those percentages. What would life be like if no CEO got more than 25 times the wages of a full-time employee making minimum wage, or for that matter, 25 times as much as the check that a welfare mom is supposed to live on while she supports her kids?
Some companies manage to get by paying their CEOs much less than that! There are companies where the CEO makes only eight or ten times the lowest paid employee, and others, collectively owned, where every worker makes the same salary. Somehow, they survive and thrive and attract great talent. Because they have a mission they can believe in that’s not just about lining their own pockets.
Okay, so I’m the one ranting now.
Prescription to End Poverty
But this is Blog Action Day. I’d like to finish with some action steps that we can take as a society, steps that address some (by no means all) of the systemic causes of poverty, and whose adoption will lift up the bottom. Changing these could take whole communities from poverty to abundance.
Switch to sustainable, renewable, nonpolluting energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, and small-scale (non-invasive) hydro. Surely, if we can find $700 billion to pump into the financial system, we can find a few billion for a Marshall Plan-style initiative that would eliminate dependence on foreign oil, slash carbon emissions, create thousands of jobs, and put money in the pockets of rich and poor alike.
Retrofit all buildings with proper insulation, water-saving plumbing, and other sustainabiity measures. Again, this lowers costs, creates jobs, and reduces carbon as well as dependence on oil imports (and thus global warming).
Decriminalize the petty offenses that fill up our prisons, taking away income-earners, making it harder for them to get jobs again when they get out, and leaving their families with a huge financial burden. We have no business throwing people in prison for using drugs or feeling forced into prostitution. Dealing is one thing; it harms society. But using harms only the users and their families, as long as they don’t get behind the wheel or operate dangerous machinery.
Revitalize mass transit. Poor people get to work on buses and trains, and the more places transit systems reach, the more job opportunities for poor folks. Added benefits once again: reduced carbon, reduced foreign oil imports, reduced traffic congestion.
Urban community food self-sufficiency: an organic garden on every flat roof and in every vacant lot! Lowers food costs, boosts nutrition, freshness, and flavor, builds community, reduces carbon and more.
Adopt, finally, the sensible system of government-salaried doctors not beholden to insurance companies that has allowed almost every other industrialized country in the world to make health care a right, not a privilege. This is something we advocated for when I had the community organizing job with the Gray Panthers almost 30 years ago, and it’s still a good idea–and long-overdue.
Oh yes, and save poor and middle-class lives as well as vast boatloads of dollars by getting out of the illegal and unconscionable war the Bush administration lied its way into in Iraq. the $700 billion per year saved could provide seed capital to fund all the rest of it.
So there you have at least part of my prescription to create jobs, reduce costs, lower pollution, and shift our country’s trade and overall deficits. What are your ideas? Please post them, and let’s get started!
While this post is copyright 2008 by Shel Horowitz of https://www.principledprofit.com, I hereby grant permission to reproduce the post in its entirety in any medium as long as attriubtion is included, and to link to the post without restriction.
