My coworker, who has lived approximately 25 of his 50 years in the U.S., made the statement the other day that there are no poor people in the United States. I told him that wasn’t true, had he ever read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? He hadn’t. It was a silly retort, but I did mean I believe poor people exist in this country.
I forgot about this exchange until I was reading an article about the CHIP extension that Bush vetoed. In the article, they described an eligible child for the federal insurance program as belonging in a household whose combined income was up to 250% of the poverty level. For a 3-person household, this is $42,925. I used my calculator, and double-checked on the government website, to find that makes the poverty level for that 3-person household $17,170. The Census Bureau says 36.5 million were living in poverty in 2006, about 12% of the population.
Now, assuming that is net income, and assuming I had no debt to repay, and also assuming that I either had full medical coverage (doubtful on that salary) or else myself or my cat did not have any health problems, I found with my little calculator that I could easily live on $17,170 a year. But that’s just me and my cat. How comfortable would that be for three people? If I recall correctly, my lease states that no more than two people can live in my one-bedroom apartment, so we’d either have to lie or move house. If one or two of the three were children, hopefully they would grow slowly or finish growing quickly so we wouldn’t have to think about new clothes too much. But I think if we all stayed healthy, we could manage. So is that actually poverty? Would we actually be poor?
What is poor? My coworker seems to think there is a cut and dried definition of poor, and that according to that definition poor people don’t exist in the U.S. He says that having to crowd several people into a small house is the norm in other countries, and so that is not a hardship if you have to do the same here. My argument is, you can’t compare third world poverty to first world poverty. In a land of plenty, not being able to buy clothes for your growing child, having to share a house with 2 or more families because not one family can afford it alone, not being able pay for cancer medication – all those things are signs of poverty. In a third world country that may be just the State of Things, but in the richest country in the world?