The Poverty Paradox: Review

By Mark Robert Rank

The titular paradox is poverty in the USA, the largest and one of the richest countries in the world.  Compared to other rich countries the USA has much more and worse poverty than almost any other.  Professor Rank dissects the causes and has some suggestions, few if any of which would fly with the modern Republican Party.

Rank proposes what he calls the structural vulnerability hypothesis.  That means that political policies and economic circumstances punish the poor and make it harder to escape poverty.  Bad schools and bad neighborhoods promote poverty and make it hard to escape.  The US ranks high on the inequality scale and low on the social mobility scale.

Rank argues that a major driver of poverty in the US is blame the victim thinking, the idea that if persons are poor, it is their own fault.  Much poverty can be traced to lack of social capital: education, other saleable skills, disability, poor health, or access to employment opportunities.  Unlike other developed countries, the US does not have universal health insurance.  As a result, Americans are more likely to suffer from preventable disabilities and because the US locally funds education, expenditures per pupil are much lower in poorer districts than wealthier ones.

So what does he think should be done about it?  There are some obvious targets of opportunity. One of them is universal health insurance, assuring all citizens access to health care.  Another one would be junking our venerable but outmoded reliance of schools on local property taxes, which produce enormous disparities in educational dollars per student.  A critical unmet need in this country is affordable housing.  We have tax policies which subsidize housing for the upper middle class and the rich, but very little for the rest of America and especially the poor.  The final idea I will mention is expansion of the negative income tax.  It is too skimpy and too restricted.

Needless to say, all these are opposed by the Plutocratic classes and their political minions, mostly but hardly exclusively, Republicans.

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