Keeping Up with the Symths

Poverty is a slippery concept. In a household fitting poverty guidelines today you may see color TV’s, microwaves, cell phones, washing machines, even air conditioning and Xboxes and numerous others things that people in other countries would see as signs of opulence or even our ancestors would find mind boggling. When I was a kid I thought if I could make $5,000 year, which was just over what I made my first year of teachings, I would have a good life and if I could make $10,000 I would be fabulously rich; and that was pretty much true. Following is today’s standards.

2011 HHS Poverty Guidelines
Persons in Family	48 Contiguous States and D.C.	Alaska	Hawaii
1	$10,890	$13,600	$12,540
2	14,710	18,380	16,930
3	18,530	23,160	21,320
4	22,350	27,940	25,710
5	26,170	32,720	30,100
6	29,990	37,500	34,490
7	33,810	42,280	38,880
8	37,630	47,060	43,270
For each additional person, add	3,820	4,780	4,390

SOURCE:  Federal Register, Vol. 76, No. 13, January 20, 2011, pp. 3637-3638

Thus my hopes would be at the poverty level today. Today we make much more than those in poverty but do not at all feel rich. In fact, we’d be less that the median income of the country and use savings to maintain the standard of living we want to live. And at times, such as the recessive times we even feel poor. Standards of living are slippery. Years ago I read a study that asked folk how much more money they would need in order to live comfortably. The answer was $2,000 or $3,000 no matter what your income level was. Slippery.

Poverty and how we view it is relative. It is where we stand in relation to others in our society. Thus, in our society, where the gap between the rich and poor is widening by remarkable degrees, more and more of us feel poor and more and more live in poverty. It has to do with inequality. In our materialistic country, we see value according to income levels. So, when we see  CEOs making huge salaries and other benefits it just does not seem fair. Are they that much more value to society than someone else who works just as hard? No! And that has been true throughout human history. Folk in biblical times did not compare their economic lives to folk who lived in caves before them, but to their contemporaries.

Ronald Sider puts forthe the idea in his book, Just Generosity: A New Vision of Overcoming Poverty in America. He quotes Leviticus 25.35-36 “If members of your community become poor in that the power slips with you, you shall make them strong…that they may live with you.” I find that consistent with Warren Buffet saying his secretary should not being paying a high income tax rate than he does. Several of the ultra wealthy 1% have expressed similar sentiments. John Calvin advocated debt forgiveness every 7 years as a way of decreasing these inequities.

All this has to do with liberty, the idea that the rich should not oppress the poor as they are prone to do. Adam Smith knew this when he envisioned a fair free enterprise system. As he put it, “A creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty.”

The Bible nor free enterprise believers think that everyone absolute economic equality, but the inequality should not demean anyone. This is the major problem that our country faces today. As William Bole, who lifts these concepts for us to consider in the December 27 Christian Century puts it, “Millions of Americans – the unemployed, the working poor, the uninsured and many others – have been falling for quite some time. That some of them may be doing so with a cordless phone in their hands is not much consolation.