Commentary––

Failing To Make A Living

By William A. Collins

We can take,

A statewide tour;

And somehow never,

See the poor.

Visiting Brazil in March, our family had a chance to observe close up this hemisphere’s nation with the widest disparity of wealth. Unfortunately it bore a painful similarity to Connecticut. (For example, one in four kids in Bridgeport lives in poverty.) Down there the chief causes are corrupt government and the International Monetary Fund. Up here they’re Congress and the General Assembly. Not to mention the president and governor.

Our leaders create this disparity in a number of premeditated ways. Most prominent just now are funding cuts to health care, welfare, transit, Head Start, child care, legal assistance, overtime pay, housing, labor-law enforcement, and other vital strands in the social safety net. At the same time we carefully impoverish other nations through “Free Trade,” driving their unemployed workers to risk all to sneak across our borders to labor here for peanuts. That keeps our local price of low-skilled labor at rock bottom.

Similarly we ship much of our manufacturing, service, and technical work abroad, or invite cheap technicians from abroad to work over here, again holding wages down.

Taxes, too, are structured so that by the time we tote up the sales tax, gas tax, Social Security tax, cigarette tax, excise tax, property tax, lottery tax, and income tax, the poor pay out at least as high a portion of their income as do the rich.

Thus it is no accident that “extreme poverty” in Connecticut grew 38 percent between 1989 and 1999. And many of those years were truly golden for the state’s economy, at least as measured by popular standards. But now with that economy in the tank, hardship is growing by leaps and bounds.

Republican legislators and newspaper reporters refer to the funding cuts that are causing much of this hardship as “fiscal discipline,” “belt-tightening,” and “trimming frills.” Democrats, who seek instead to raise taxes, are referred to as “protecting pet programs.” These “pets” largely encompass such items as health insurance, child care, mental health, education, bus service, and other bulwarks against destitution. By and large the cuts are proceeding.

To cope with this growing adversity, poor families have collapsed into various survival strategies. Multiple jobs are the most common, usually with no benefits paid at any of them. And what with even full-time security guards making only $21,000, you can see how imperative those extra jobs are.

Doubling up with other families is another popular, if unpleasant, fallback. In addition, growing numbers of folks are finding imprisonment as a way to get three squares a day. And without the impetus of economic hopelessness, we never would have had enough troops to go to war.

Luckily many workers were able to save up enough during the good times to live off savings for a while, and others have convinced Social Security to put them on permanent disability. SSDI now supports more folks than unemployment compensation.

Personally, having recently been thrown into the company of numerous struggling home health aides, I’ve heard first-hand their separate tales of quiet desperation. And being often immersed in the company of politicians, I’ve watched even worthy ones avoid dealing with basics like a living wage, worker protections, and housing assistance.

As a result of such inaction, greed has gained the upper hand in Connecticut’s economy and social structure. Glossy new magazines celebrate the wealthy, while shrinking newspaper staffs ignore the poor. In Brazil this desperation has led to widespread street crime. Here it’s led to drug sales. But with our talent for making poverty invisible, most of us never notice.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)