The American Nightmare

Poverty in America is a crisis; we need to start talking about it like one

I was on a bus trip this past year, sitting with 30–40 other 20 somethings, having a conversation with someone about inequality, something I think about a lot, when dropped the following cliche on me regarding the mentalities of rich and poor that I had a hard time letting go, and it went something like“ A poor person stays poor because when they get money they’ll go spend it on a new pair of shoes, whereas a rich person saves that money.” This bothered me to no end, no only because its a ludicrous assumption based on nothing, and part of long history in American culture of shaming and blaming the poor for their state, the same philosophy that gave us Welfare queens and drug testing for welfare recipients, but an infuriating example of people who have no idea what being poor is like telling us what it means to be poor. There is still a stubborn refusal to ignore what is a truly existential crisis of poverty and inequality, a refusal to finally acknowledge that world order of globalization and capitalism as it currently exists has led a catastrophe of environmental, social, and financial degredation and in their desperation people are turning to right wing strongmen, racists, and thugs who fill them racist, anti immigrant rhetoric. The desperation and grinding fear of modern America is indicative of a global crisis, and its time to orient or minds and speech to reflect that.

If you look at strictly numbers the state of American poverty is bad enough, over 43 million in 2016 living in poverty according to the US govt, based on a formula that is close to 60 years old, but this is so drastically unhelpful in understanding the larger picture of the scope, and of the unique, vicious, and horrifying character that is American poverty. For the past two years we have been barraged endlessly with claims of how great the economy is doing, stock market reaching record highs, an unemployment rate reaching below 4 percent, we are winning, winning, winning, the story goes. This is a lie, and these numbers are meaningless for all but a handful of us.

First of all, over 80% of capital gains income, the kind of income derived from investment, goes to the top 1% of income earners, with each tax break going to these income earners resulting not in the laughable myth of “trickle down”, but in hoarding and stock buy backs, the latest Trump cut resulting in over 430 billion dollars in buybacks. A Federal reserve poll conducted in 2016 estimated that close to half of all Americans do not even have a thousand dollars saved. Is it because half of all Americans are lazy? Stupid? New sites and blogs are filled with no nonsense, simple, and(frequently) condescending advice to help us lackadaisical spendthrift Americans better manage our money, with advice like putting a small amount of money away every month, cooking and not eating out, getting your “side hustle” with a part time job or doing Lyft or Uber. Rarely do they address the elephant in the room, the elephant crushing the vast majority of Americans under its weight, namely, most of us will never get a head because we live in an economic system that is designed to keep us poor.

Adjusted for inflation, our hourly wage has about the same PP (purchasing power) as it did in 1980, almost 40 years ago, and that is issue enough before we get to the unthinkable rise in costs that have occured in the last 30 years, from education, to housing, to childcare, and of course, to health care. The average student loan borrower now carries close to 40 grand in debt, with the price of a unversity education on average costing over 200 percent more than it did 30 years ago. Our health care expenditure per capita is close to 10,000 dollars a year, double that of most European countries, and yet even those of paying hundreds of dollars monthly for health care must still pay the highest pharmecutical costs on earth, with a vial of insulin without insurance costing over 130 dollars, and hospital bills sending over 400,000 americans a year into bankruptcy. What does this mean for us? It means for most of us, we are trapped. It means that education is unaffordable, it means that we cannot afford to get sick, it means for those of us making hourly wage and don’t get paid sick leave that we cannot miss a day of work, it means we live one accident, one car repair, one hospital visit away from financial ruin. with half of American workers making less than 30,000 dollars a year, and the average price of an apartment now costing over a third of their income, it means that you cannot get ahead. The true means of accessing wealth in a capitalist economy, namely, education and property, are denied to all but an ever increasing few of us. Close to 15 percent of Americans students work full time and attend school, with close to seventy percent are employed in some capacity.

We have been raised in the historical legacy and social discourse of right wing social darwinism and racism, white supremacism, Ayn rand libertarian objectivism, and the ruthless American lore of self determination, spoon fed it generation by generation, its poision seeping insidiously into every facet of the American spirit. This is the viciousness of the modern American myth, even as inequality reaches unprecedented levels, our leaders, our politicans, our intellectuals, despite the pain, the hardship, the loss we endure,still tell us that this is Reagan’s City on a Hill, the greatest nation on earth, and our dreams waiting to be realized if only we reach out our hand to seize them. It is the greatest of lies, so carefully crafted, so cunning, so oft repeated, that for many of it is not is not only truth inherent, it is an integral part of the American Ethos, of our very souls, and in our failure to realize it, in our despair and anguish, we sink in the morass of existential defeat, convinced of our failure, looked at in abject contempt by those who ascend towards the shining city, their feet dreading upon the pitiable masses for whom the promise of its salvation is their balm and nepenthe, even as the gates shut before them.

The great globalist myth of the 20th and 21st century is a lie, in lieu of reshaping the world into a global village of prosperity, it has turned our oceans into garbage dumps, it has made deserts where once there were forests, it has relegated millions to the sweat shop for little pay and long hours, and in America it has shipped our jobs half way across the world and turned the majority of us into wage slaves, with huge swaths of our country drowning in addiction, poverty, and hopelessness. Make no mistake, this is the battle of our time, and it remains to be seen if any champion can be found to contest the forces that would keep us sick, keep us poor, and keep us in service to a system that serves no other master than wealth. We need to think about what a truly just society is, we need to feel empathy towards those of us united in the common despair of class struggle and poverty, and focus our anger against those who divide us.