NeighborScapes

10.  We don’t even have the vocabulary for it.  “Poverty alleviation” is a marble-mouthed mess.  The War on Poverty is an outdated concept, relating to a battle that many believe to have been lost rather than ongoing.  “Fighting poverty” itself  is a double-negative, poverty being the absence of income or wealth and fighting being the effort to bring something down.  Not one of these frameworks is inspiring or uplifting, and the inverse — creation of opportunity — is nebulous and applicable to the whole society.  The middle class kid looking to get admitted to college or get her first job afterward is just as interested in the creation of opportunity as poor people — or their advocates — are.  The issue is what our goals are for the 13.2% of Americans presently considered statistically poor.  Is the goal to eradicate poverty?  Linguistically, what would that mean?  The “poor” will always be considered the bottom tail on the bell curve of income and wealth distribution.  Is it just to reduce poverty?  If so, what is an acceptable level of poverty?  And how do we apologize to those folks who remain acceptably poor?

I think the answer has more to do with changing the *nature* of poverty — dispersing it and desegregating it, for one, and making it a temporary state by doing two things: creating enough opportunity ladders to enable people to climb out of poverty for real, and creating a better social safety net to make poverty less painful and hopeless for those who experience it while they’re there.  But how many advocates agree with this formulation, and why don’t we see clear statements of the goals in politics and policy.  Instead we get partial solutions within the realm of political feasibility, like “expand the earned income tax credit.”  Great, that helps but what then?