America’s Flawed Safety Net
America is facing a mountainous debt, an anemic economy with a shrinking labor market, and an alarming increase in the poverty rate.
How America deals with these problems, how they prioritize them, will present a number of really big game changers that could affect the lifestyles of every American.
The average American today knows something is wrong with our economy, and they are worried that it will affect their own lifestyles, as well the their children’s future, but the problem is they don’t know what to do about it.
Every family understands the consequences when they get too deeply into debt. But what happens when our own nation gets too deeply into debt? A sluggish economy means less people are at work, and that means less tax revenue for the federal government. America could not have picked a worse time to become the world’s largest debtor nation.
Worse yet, our labor market is shrinking to levels not seen in decades—1.2 million people dropped out of the labor market last month alone, because they were unable to find a job. Our economy shows no signs of returning to the boom years of vibrant growth, and with the housing market still very weak, new construction jobs are non-existent in most poverty neighborhoods.
We also know that the social safety net is not working. People can and do become homeless in America. As a nation we rarely talk about the poor. All the political focus is on the middle class and how they will be affected by the national debt.
The national debt is in competition with the social safety net, and the national debt is winning.
We live in a country with unlimited resources to lift any American, who is willing and able to work, out of poverty. Yet we have squandered that opportunity, wasting trillions of dollars on wars and crony capitalism, while the children of the poor are denied the basic necessities that the middle class children take for granted.
Most people never think about what it must feel like to live in a culture where you are just one paycheck away from being homeless. Most people believe the government has a social safety net to protect every victim of poverty from starvation–it doesn’t.
Meanwhile our nation is burning through taxpayer’s money at a pace that no living American has seen in their lifetime. Our government is piling on massive debts that will have repercussions for generations to come.
The size of the national debt could cause a whole new struggle for the middle class as the job market continues to shrink—struggling to stay warm in the winter, struggling to find a way to feed themselves, and struggling to find the way to earn the money to do anything about it. There is a sense among many members of the middle class that the day of reckoning is near.
But poverty victims already know what it feels like to struggle for shelter, clothing and food. For them, the day of reckoning came months or years ago when they lost their jobs.
Many of the newly poor have lost their jobs to foreign countries. Their skills have become obsolete. They need to be trained in new skills in order to become employable. Their children are accustomed to a better way of life. They are in economic shock, their sense of self-worth threatened, their dignity denied for the first time.
Changes need to be made to the safety net to provide vocational training for adults, and child care support for parents, and mentoring for children to help them cope with the struggles that lie ahead. If we do not do these things, our nation will lose generations to an endless cycle of poverty.
America’s so-called “safety net” is actually a giant scam.
American politicians have made promises to the poor knowing full well that the promises will never be kept.
America is insolvent and our political leaders live like royalty. The poor are insolvent and they have to survive by any means necessary.
We can provide an adequate social safety net, but only when we acknowledge that the present social safety net is a scam. Our political leaders do not acknowledge that the safety net is a scam.
The failure to address America’s poverty problems means that right around the corner there is a very different trajectory than that presented by our politicians.
The real story for the future of poverty victims is going to be how the major complex systems of daily life will begin to destabilize and mutually reinforce each other’s instabilities and failures as the government begins to pull back on social spending because of our unsustainable national debt.
Nothing can be more destabilizing to a country than its people going hungry. Other cultures have gotten into trouble when they failed to adequately deal with poverty, and their national debts, and with their political response, and they paid the heavy price.
One in seven Americans today lives below the poverty line. People are hurting, and they are hurting as a result of the economic collapse, which is exasperated by record high unemployment, and underemployment. Medium wages have fallen and millions of people have given up hope.
Americans can ignore the problems of poverty and pretend that we have an adequate social safety net, but we do so at our own peril.
