What does poverty look like? Sometimes it’s a little hard to see, hiding behind the faces of the people you see walking an aisle at Walmart or the little kid who is standing beside your kid in the elementary school choir program.
People don’t wear signs that read, “I live in poverty,” but they are all around us. “How many?” you ask. Probably more than you think.
In Dent County the poverty rate was 19.8 percent in 2016, according to the 2018 Missouri Poverty Report, a biennial publication from Missourians to End Poverty. Many of the counties in this part of the Ozarks fare worse, with Texas (29.9 percent), Shannon (26.4), Wayne (26) and Oregon (24.9) all in the Top 10 Missouri counties with the highest poverty rates. Texas is No. 2, right behind Pemiscot in the Bootheel (30.9), where I grew up.
Just a few weeks ago I wrote a column about the booming economy in Phelps County, but according to the report, in 2016, the poverty rate there was 19.6. No doubt that has improved with lots of new jobs coming to Phelps County over the past two years, but still, the number is sobering.
There are skeptics. Some folks see someone in the grocery line with an EBT card and reason, sometimes aloud, “There’s another freeloader eating steak, while I eat hamburger.” Fair enough. There are abuses to the system, but the vast percentage of those in poverty really are in poverty, and some of them are in a cycle of poverty, generations deep.
The official poverty measure was developed in 1963 and is based on the cost of a minimum food diet for family size multiplied times three. It does not take into account federal benefits or housing and energy assistance. Aha, so we are saying that you add up the freeloading and poverty isn’t such a bad deal? Hardly.
Something called the supplemental poverty measure takes into account income, federal benefits and other assistance. However, there is not much of a statistical difference between the poverty measure and supplemental poverty measure. In other words, poor is poor, and the benefits you get just make you a little less poor.
That’s hard for some of us to imagine, especially when you factor in all of the work that not for profits, including churches, do to help poor people. How can there be so many people in poverty?
Poverty is a huge problem. Fourteen percent of Missourians live in poverty, 19.2 percent of children. If everyone below the poverty level in our state moved to the same place, it would be our largest city by almost double. Let me put it another way, about eight of the 40 kids standing up there with your kid at the elementary school choir program are in poverty.
I spent over an hour reading through the 20-page 2018 Missouri Poverty Report and was taken aback at the scope of the problem, a problem some people tend to dismiss as fiction or blame those in poverty for being there.
There are many more questions than answers. Poverty isn’t always laziness, it’s a cycle that is hard to break out of. Yes, they need to get a job – or simply a better job – but many of them don’t have the training to get that better job. It isn’t all about working. There are working poor, as evidenced by the fact we have an unemployment rate of under four percent and a poverty rate more than triple that.
Two adults working fulltime with two children would need to make a combined $15.09 each per hour to make a living wage in Missouri. A living wage means paying basic costs, for food, housing, insurance, transportation, clothing, etc. No iPhones or cable television included.
I know, I know, I know. . . There are people who can shoot all kinds of literal holes in these numbers, because numbers can be used on both sides of an argument. But the simple truth is there are more people trapped in the cycle of poverty than should be, with 43 percent of kids who grow up in poverty remaining in poverty as adults.
Another question. What can we do?
“When one aspect of a person’s life – economic and family security, education, food and nutrition, health, or housing and energy – is compromised, the whole person suffers,” according to the report. Those factors are called the five elements of poverty.
What we do, is address and improve those five elements of poverty, which is easier said than done. The report by Missourians to End Poverty lays out a distinct, easy-to-follow and easy-to-understand plan to take on poverty. You can read more about it in my column next week, or you can go to our website or moendpoverty.org to read the full report. I recommend it.
So many aspects of our lives are impacted from the poverty around us, and that should not be the case in this land of plenty.
