People today use the word "poverty" too casually.

This is poverty.

God’s Un-American View of the Poor and Why It Matters

America has an odd view of the poor. It is a view that reveals much about the underlying theological assumptions that create and support our culture. I will quickly quell any protests about the mixing of theology and politics by saying, everything, even politics is rooted in theology. More about that later on…

In general terms, when Americans encounter the poor, our first thoughts go to the individual and his/her story. What happened to them? What decisions did they make? Why are they stuck in this situation? Our stories of success do the same thing. We see the rich and focus on their individual accounts of luck, entrepreneurship, and brilliance. It is an analysis and a cultural reflex that is of a piece with Adam Smith’s musings about economics and commerce. Classically, it is called Capitalism.

We have a hard time in American culture managing a critique of Capitalism. The word acquired almost deified valuation during the Cold War. In the American mind, Communism was bad and Capitalism was good, and there was little nuance in the sentiment. Adam Smith did not write in a vacuum. He was a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment (1700’s), perhaps the most rigorous and thorough application of reason and individualism the world has ever known. One author has described it as the movement that gave birth to modernity.1

Reason and individualism, though rarely identified as such in contemporary parlance, are at the very heart of American consciousness. When we see the poor, our individualism draws our attention to each single instance. Our rationality asks questions regarding that individual’s choices, virtues and failings. Occasionally that same individualism and rationality turn their attention to God and wonder why He allows such problems to exist.

Adam Smith’s contribution to economic theory was rooted in “rational self-interest.” It was put forward that if markets are free, rational self-interest will be the engine of success and prosperity. It is an idea that is so current that it stalks the hallways of government to this day. It operates as a general assumption – something that need not be defended because it appears to be self-evident truth.

It is not God’s truth.

Read the rest here.
Also, please leave any comments there as well.

Lotteries, payday lending, and the swindling of America’s poor

...But there is one set of related policy ideas that would dramatically help the poor and should not be ideologically divisive. How about a renewed effort to help the poor by refusing to cheat them?

I am referring to a broad and growing collaboration between government and business to systematically defraud and exploit the poor through state lotteries, payday lending and payday gambling.

The lottery is a particularly awful example of political corruption. Here government is raising revenue by selling the Powerball dream of wealth without work. Studies in a number of states have shown that lottery ticket sales are concentrated in poor communities, that poor people spend a larger portion of their income on tickets and that the poor are more likely to view the lottery as an investment. “This could be your ticket out,” promised one typical billboard in a distressed Chicago neighborhood.

Think on this a moment. In a place where government has utterly failed to provide adequate education and public services, government is using advertising to exploit the desperation of poor people in order to raise revenue that funds other people’s public services. This is often called a “regressive” form of taxation. The word does not adequately capture the cruelty and crookedness of selling a lie to vulnerable people in order to bilk them. Offering the chance of one in a 100 million is the equivalent of a lie. Lotteries depend on the deceptive encouragement of mythical thinking and fantasies of escape.

Read the rest here.
HT: T-19

Wave of suicides have Greeks on edge

(Reuters) - On Monday, a 38-year-old geology lecturer hanged himself from a lamp post in Athens and on the same day a 35-year-old priest jumped to his death off his balcony in northern Greece. On Wednesday, a 23-year-old student shot himself in the head.

In a country that has had one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, a surge in the number of suicides in the wake of an economic crisis has shocked and gripped the Mediterranean nation - and its media - before a May 6 election.

The especially grisly death of pharmacist Dimitris Christoulas, who shot himself in the head on a central Athens square because of poverty brought on by the crisis that has put millions out of work, was by far the most dramatic.

Before shooting himself during morning rush hour on April 4 on Syntagma Square across from the Greek parliament building, the 77-year-old pensioner took a moment to jot down a note.

"I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life so I don't find myself fishing through garbage cans for sustenance," wrote Christoulas, who has since become a national symbol of the austerity-induced pain that is squeezing millions.

Read the rest here.
HT: T-19

This is why austerity will fail. It is not politically sustainable. No combination of higher taxes and austerity will save them (or us). In the end Greece will default. I am frankly surprised they haven't already done so.  The US is a different situation.  Our debt is denominated in our own currency so there is no question of overt default. We will continue to monetize the debt and print our way out of the hole.

Pakistan schoolboy's self-immolation raises alarm over poverty

ISLAMABAD — As the school term ended across Pakistan last week, proud families flocked to their children’s grade-promotion ceremonies much as they do in the United States. For a 13-year-old named Kamran Khan, the occasion promised special honors: He ranked first in his class in his rural village.

But instead of attending, Kamran set himself on fire with gasoline – ashamed, his family said, that he was too poor to afford a new school uniform as he entered the seventh grade.

Even in a country where 60 percent of the population lives in deep poverty, the boy’s self-immolation raised alarm. Kamran, who died Saturday from his burns, has become a symbol of the hopelessness of families crushed by high unemployment, rising prices for staples such as wheat and skyrocketing fuel costs.

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Begging for Your Pay

Romulo Saldana was looking for work.

It was 2001, and Saldana had moved to East Harlem from a small town in the Ecuadorian Andes three years before. Besides a sister, he knew few people in the city. A friend sent him to Manuel, an older Ecuadorian, who had papers and owned a successful construction company in Queens. The man hired Saldana as a day laborer and, over the course of five years, he built some 30 block houses, the kind of low-rise brick rental units that have sprung up lately in sections of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. Eventually, Saldana was promoted to foreman.

Every week, Saldana would gather his crew of six men in the “yarda” — a garage in a house the boss owned in Long Island — to hand out their pay. Only the money would always come up short — sometimes $3,000 for all of them together, sometimes just $1,000, even when they were owed a total of $4,000. At first, Saldana didn’t much mind his boss’s negligence: it was the height of the construction boom; he was able to do other jobs on the side. “I trusted him because he was from my country,’ Saldana told me, in Spanish. “I thought, ‘’If he isn’t going to pay me this week, he will pay me later.’”

In 2006, Saldana added up all those deferred promises in his notebook: $34,000. He is still seeking most of that money.

What does $34,000 mean to a New Yorker? For Saldana — who works in the kitchen of a restaurant in Long Island now that construction work has dried up — it meant the difference between being able to send money home to pay for his teenage daughter to go to middle school, and provide for a caretaker and medicine for his ailing 90-year-old father. It was the difference between paying his own rent and borrowing money from his sister. And this Christmas, he can’t afford to buy presents for his American-born 6-year-old. “I will tell my daughter, Santa Claus is very poor,” he said.

Read the rest here.

I have known a few people who were stiffed by employers, in one case for more than $15,000 in pay and overtime (that they never paid any of their workers for). This sort of thing really burns me.