Personal perceptions of poverty, part 2

My best and very good friend had some perceptive e-mail comments, and sharing, about my original “Personal Perceptions of Poverty”
post. He noted that he brought at least some degree of similar background to the table, but that his perceptions moved him in a politically more conservative, then more religious, direction.

First, I think it shows the diversity of human nature.

With me, the religious moving was for other reasons, as far as the direction I moved; the political was at first, at least in part.

Second, while I told him I didn’t consider myself “cynical,” I did identify myself as a skeptical liberal on the header of this blog.

Third, I said I did agree with him in part on how the government can at times perhaps contribute toward the intergenerational intransigence of poverty.

But, that said, does government make poverty worse? There, I’d disagree.

Here’s my thoughts in more detail. From Social Security, first, then Medicare, it’s hugely clear that government CAN do a very good job ameliorating and lessening poverty. Senior citizens have a lower poverty rate than the nation as a whole, and by a noticeable margin.

Second, are government cash payments the best way to ease poverty? No, of course not, at least not in every circumstance. And with seniors, even, that’s not what always happens. Medicare doesn’t give them cash to buy an insurance voucher, a voucher that could be stereotypically sold for drugs if it were a Medicaid voucher given to inner-city poor.

Third: that said, non-cash payments can also worsen poverty. The government’s history of low-income housing has pretty much bounced from one fiasco to another.

Personally, I think going beyond AmeriCorps to a revival of the old Civilian Conservation Corps would be one step. Every summer, get hundreds of thousands of teens out of poverty environments, out of monocultural environments that feed poverty, misogyny and other problems, and working in places like national forests and national parks.

Fourth, resistance to scattering federal housing hasn’t helped. But, can you blame the middle class? Until we put federal housing inside gated communities, you can’t blame them at all, to be honest.

(As I’ve said about busing, the day the yellow vehicles roll up to Hyannisport is the day we’ll see the Kennedys really believing in it.)

This all goes to show that the solution for poverty isn’t easy, or simple.