How many times have we read or heard someone blathering on about “fixing poverty”, with the unspoken assumption that it can actually be done en masse (i.e., not for specific cases, where of course it can be)?
This morning I read one such piece that, in a tangential moment, referred to the notion of curing poverty. Because of the nature of the source, I gave the line a bit more thought than I usually did. This time, I asked myself the chipmunk question: What would “curing poverty” even look like?
On the notion that it could actually happen, I thought, well, first, we need to define what poverty means, so that we can recognize when it has been eliminated, whether for one family or for all.
At 72, I don’t have too many thoughts or insights that I haven’t had before, but this one that occurred to me at that moment, was a true newby:
“Poverty” isn’t a specific state; it is our societal characterization for the lowest X% of incomes — regardless of any exact value.
In other words, we continually redefine poverty based not on how the poor are doing, but how everyone else is doing. The poor may be doing just fine, thank you, but if the rest are doing better, then they are, a priori, in poverty.
The thing is, whether the poor can afford all the necessities of life or not, is always thought of in terms of what they have to spend, when it is just as relevant to look at the cost of those necessities.
When the people who tell Joe Biden what to do, got him to pump trillions of extra, newly-printed money into the economy, inflation soared. That is the natural consequence of inflating the money supply, but since they don’t teach history anymore, the Biden puppeteers either didn’t know, or didn’t care.
No one is hurt more than the poor when the things they struggle to afford become that much less affordable. But I digress.
My point is simple. We can never fix poverty, but that’s because it is a semantic argument. Here’s what I mean. This year, as I write this, in baseball’s American League West Division, the Oakland (soon to be Las Vegas) Athletics are in last place, far behind the rest.
Why is that remotely relevant? Because in sports, we define last place to have a specific meaning: “the worst record in the division.” If you magically make all the teams in the West equally better next week, so that the As are better than the putrid bunch they are now, will they still be last? Of course — because you’ve made all the teams equally better.
Do you follow? If, say, you freeze living costs but give everyone $50,000, the people we call “poor” now will still be referred to as being in poverty, simply because they’ll still have the lowest income. What will change? What changes is what we refer to as “poverty.” Poverty will now still refer to the lowest X% of the population, it’s just that their lives will be a bit better.
So why don’t we just print $50,000 and give it to everyone or, better yet, just the poor? Because where I referred to “freezing costs” in the prior paragraph, that’s the part that is counter-factual. If you say there are 20 million in poverty in the USA, and we give them $50K each, that is dumping $1 trillion into the economy.
What will happen, as it always does, is that the $1 trillion will be spent quickly, and the increase in demand for goods without an increase in supply — that monkey wrench to the demand curve — will drive up prices, leaving the poor exactly where they were before, except the regular income they were living on before now buys less than it did previously.
So like the Oakland (soon to be Las Vegas) Athletics, they’ll be better than they were, but still at the bottom of the “league.”
The left will always suck up to the poor no matter how well off they actually are, because with them it’s all about votes. If the poor vote for Democrats, as they perpetually do (even against their best interests), it is never going to make them better off, because while a rousing, Trumpian economy does make them better — the best treatment for poverty is a good job — they’ll still be at the bottom and fodder for Democrat advances. They’ll be at the bottom, but better off.
It’s all in the definition. Someone has to be at the bottom, and we call that “poverty.” As there will always be someone on the bottom of the AL East.
If you don’t get the analogy, check out the AL East, where all five teams have winning records. The last place team (happily, it’s the Yankees) is far, far better than Oakland, but they’re still in poverty … I mean “last place.”
And you can’t cure that. Someone needs to be last. It doesn’t make you bad, but it does mean you will never cure it.
Copyright 2014-2023 by Robert Sutton
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