Address root causes of poverty and inequality

• Structural barriers to equal opportunity
• Addressing the needs of the truly disadvantaged (e.g., Wilson's urban underclass, Gans and Shipler and predatory businesses, Seccombe and Hays and the welfare hoops their interview subjects had to jump through))
  • Socioeconomic structures--securing a living wage, health insurance (is universal insurance too expensive?), affordable housing
  • What sorts of factors work against (that is, need to be addressed) achieving these?
  • Big processes--
    • globalization (and outsourcing),
    • increasing inequality in the U.S. and world,
    • greater control over the US economy by fewer and fewer corporations,
    • the increasingly corrupting role of money in politics.
    • outsourcing of higher-paying manufacturing jobs with lower-paying service jobs
    • 'McDonaldization' of low-wage labor--little likelihood for advancement, development of human capital, in many cases even full-time employment
    • less union representation of American workers
    • Poverty as a state of emergency (according to Ehrenreich)
  • Can we explain differences in socioeconomic status in terms of individual personality traits?? What do you say, Paris?
  • Social versus private costs and benefits--even with health care, NOT providing it for some increases the costs to all of us. There is a cost to not taking care of the poor and needy, and its borne by the public quite often
  • Educational Equity
  • 'Skill and will' Shipler says that both are needed, human capital may not be sufficient.
• Addressing the relationship between social class and institutional trust
• Recognize reality in terms of family structures

De-stigmatize welfare (address cultural barriers)

• Raise awareness of the structural reasons for poverty and inequality
• Offer support to all types of families.
• Reframe the debate on welfare--what is 'deserving?'
• Democracy--Do we still have it?

Bottom-up design (political processes)

• Would incorporate the experiences of people who have to use welfare--rather than theory held dearly by politicians from upper middle class backgrounds
• re-framing the debate in political terms--away from 'deserving/undeserving' dichotomies
• If capitalism "requires" a certain level of unemployment, then should the unemployed be compensated fairly for their contribution to keeping the system going?
• Hays and 'family values'--does performing low-wage work and the juggling this entails for poor, often single-parent households, always provide more value to society than staying at home and raising children? Does the system allow choice?
• wealth redistribution--it's not about socialism--we're not talking about state-owned anything. It's about kleptocracy, oligarchy, rising rates of inequality--that is, the redistribution is towards the wealthy, not the poor (think corporate welfare, tax cuts), and the gap between the super rich and everyone else hasn't been this wide since the Great Depression.
• U.S. does less for its poor than any other industrialized nation--national healh insurance wasn't a conspiracy of the left--it was the product (and a flawed one at that) of rising health care costs and 50 million plus households without access to health care because they couldn't afford it and had no insurance. Every other developed country provides national health care for its citizens, and none has the rates of inequality or poverty that the US has.
• Voting--Shipler makes the simple point that if the lower income classes voted at the same rates as upper-income classes, another 7 million would be added to the rolls. This doesn't address whether they would vote their self-interests, but as Shipler says, no group needs government more than the poor.

Flexibility, diversity

• welfare is not just a public issue--there are non-profits, private groups, informal support networks, faith-based, non faith-based, etc.
• Bureaucratic approaches serve a function, but what is that function? Can they address causes (or at least, do they)?

Community, neighborhood-based-local in character (with moral and fiscal support of feds)

• Do we want a bureaucracy providing services, or a community more likely to care? Can we have some of both?
• Diversity by region, ethnic/racial make-up, local economy, etc. Does one welfare program fit all social situations?
• Social capital--building networks of assistance locally, involving local people in that process
• The common good--versus a competitive marketplace, inequality as a driving force--what are the social costs of a system where we 'need' undereducated people and 'unskilled' workers to perform the 'dirty work?'
• Fairness--isn't this what the American dream was all about?

Sources:

• Barbara Ehrenreich. 2002. Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting by in America. NY: Holt.
• Malcolm Gladwell. 2008. Outliers. NY: Little, Brown and Co.
• Sharon Hays. 2003. Flat Broke with Children. NY: Oxford.
• Annette Lareau. 2003. Unequal Childhoods. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
• Karen Seccombe. 1998. So You Think I Drive a Cadillac? Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
• David Shipler. 2005. The Working Poor. NY: Vintage.