Politically Impoverished

The U.S. poverty rate climbed to its highest level in almost 50 years, with 50 million Americans now living in poverty.  That’s 18 million more impoverished Americans than in 2000, a trend Washington has greeted with a huge collective shrug.  Since the stimulus, Congress and the White House have done little to improve the lives of poor people beyond automatic increases in food stamps (a quarter of kids are now on food stamps!) and extensions of unemployment.  This shouldn’t be surprising.  National politicians lack incentives to aggressively help impoverished Americans because the poor don’t vote as often, don’t contribute to political campaigns and (most importantly) aren’t politically organized.

Source: US Census Bureau

Voter turnout is low amongst the poor

Poor people register and turn out to vote at far lower rates that wealthier Americans.  Experts have proposed a number of reasons for this.  Some say poor people have to work longer hours and don’t have time to vote.  Others argue that folks at the bottom of the income ladder are more worried about the day to day grind than complicated political issues.  Researchers have also found that more educated youth voters have voter turnout rates 26 points higher than their less educated peers.  However, the real reason that poor people don’t vote is that they don’t really give a shit about supporting millionaires named Barry or Mitt who Tarzan off the balls of billionaires named Jamie or Lloyd.

Americans living in poverty aren’t the ones contributing to political campaigns

According to news reports, “the vast majority of political donations coming from lobbies, corporations, and wealthy families.”  Contributions from the 0.11% of voting-age Americans who give more than $200 to political campaigns comprise 72% of all political donations.  These individual donors aren’t pushing mop buckets or scraping grease from Mickey-Ds griddles.  Wealthy people who managed to climb to the top of corporations have another avenue to dominate the political scene.  In 2012, business PACs spent $365M on national elections, compared to $66M from labor unions and $75M from ideological PACs.  Individual corporate employees and executives kicked in an additional $1.79B.  If you had rivers of bullion like that pouring down from Wall Street, would you take any time to listen to cats who can’t even flip you a nickel?

Impoverished Americans’ biggest challenge is organization

There’s an even more important reason politicians don’t listen to people in poverty though:  the poor aren’t organized.  This isn’t an accident.  Since time immemorial, elites have been working to crush any movement or institution that harnesses the democratic power of poor people.  The police and their business allies beat up, deported and killed socialist and labor organizers during the 20’s and 30’s.  In the 1960’s, U.S. intelligence agencies targeted the Black Panthers as much for their free breakfasts as their freedom fighting, and MLK was assassinated just as he began speaking for the poor.  Similarly, right-wing activists destroyed ACORN in 2009 because of its mobilization of poor voters.  Institutions that still mobilize and represent the poor are becoming weaker.  Labor’s dramatic decline since the 1970’s has been matched by an equally dramatic decrease in the union membership ranks of the poor.  Between 1971 and 2004, the proportion of union members in the poorest third of the income distribution decreased from 17.5% to 9.7%.

Pushing a pro-poor agenda will require the revival of popular organizations advocating for the poor

Given these obstacles to political participation by the poor, anti-poverty crusaders must focus on rebuilding popular movements and institutions that advocate for the impoverished.  Americans in poverty will never have money, but they’ll always have manpower.  There are more poor people in the U.S. than African-Americans, gay Americans, immigrants and gun owners.  There’s no reason why the 50 million Americans in poverty, or the additional 100 million low-income Americans, can’t exert as much or more clout as these groups.  If the Left can effectively organize the poor, then Obama, Reid and Pelosi will sing the praises of job creation and pro-meritocratic social policies from the rafters.  Until then, no one should be surprised when Washington ignores the poor.