The Geography of Poverty
Rethinking social policyThe American left is now waking up to the fact that it slumbered while a historic opportunity to aid the poor passed it by. When Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, he changed the moral debate over poverty. No longer could Ronald Reagan’s heirs wave help-wanted ads and ask sarcastically why those welfare queens couldn’t find a job when there were so many to be had. Now everyone was working, training for a job, or looking for one. It was the law, after all.
While many pundits would credit the “workfare” revolution to conservative think tanks and their proponents, the underlying force propelling Republican-led welfare reform lay at the intersection of demography and economics. When Aid to Families with Dependent Children was created by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935, it was meant to serve as insurance for (white) widows with children—specifically, to keep them home as caregivers. As non-marital childbearing rates rose, it quickly transformed into the quintessential welfare program as we envisioned welfare in the late 20th century: financial support for young, non-widowed single mothers.
Meanwhile, the labor force was drastically changing: female labor-force participation rates doubled between World War II and 1990. Looking back, it is no wonder why workfare replaced welfare. Social norms had shifted radically as most women began working and reasonable standards of living increasingly required two incomes. Under these changed conditions, politicians—and the public—were simply not going to pay poor women to stay home with their children when everyone else, male and female, was working longer and longer hours and seeing their children less and less. So with workfare, the system was turned on its head: mothers were paid to leave the home when once they were paid to stay there.
With benefits linked to work, Democrats could have argued for a much more generous safety net. But they missed the opportunity to rethink the social compact in this new moral universe. The last time the federal minimum wage was raised was 1993; that year also marked the last significant expansion of the Federal Earned Income Tax Credit. So we have failed to deliver on two work-linked policies with broad political support. Never mind rethinking the entire welfare state.
But while most left-leaning politicians have been nowhere on the issue for the last decade, significant advances have been made in researching the effect of income, wealth, and neighborhood on the opportunities of the poorest Americans. So before we move forward to revise the social safety net for the 21st century, we should consider what we have learned from poverty research since the time of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiative.
In particular, what answers does this research suggest to the most basic questions concerning the roots of poverty and its remedies? For example, how much does income itself matter? Would raising the incomes of the least well off be enough to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty? Put another way, is poverty cause (as the left would like to believe) or effect (as the conservatives tell us)?
Or is poverty perhaps neither cause nor effect but rather a reflection of an underlying social disease—namely, economic segregation and the time bind that low-wage parents face? Significant new research suggests the truth of this third possibility, which may augur a completely new form of social policy—addressed to time and place, not just money—and in turn, a way for the left to reconceptualize the safety net for the postindustrial economy. But in order to think freshly about issues of opportunity, we first have to look back and figure out how we got here.
In 1968—one year before the start of the rise in income inequality that continues unabated today—the anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote an article entitled “The Culture of Poverty.” This phrase, which Lewis used to describe a supposedly self-defeating set of practices of poor Mexican peasants, took root in the American public consciousness. The argument was that poor people adopt certain practices that differ from those of “mainstream” society in order to adapt and survive. In the U.S. context these might include illegal work, multigenerational living arrangements, multi-family households, serial relationships in place of marriage, and pooling of community resources as a form of informal social insurance (otherwise known as “swapping”). Each of these cultural practices is taken to be a rational response to a tenuous financial situation. But once these survival adaptations are in place, they take on a life of their own and end up in the long run holding poor people back.
The culture-of-poverty thesis resonated with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial 1965 report on the “Negro family” in which he argued that a tangle of family pathology held back African-Americans. The analogy is that the cultural arrangement of the black family—matrifocal and multigenerational—was the cause, not the effect, of African-American economic problems. The tangle-of-pathology and culture-of-poverty arguments engulfed much of sociology at the end the 1960s at the same time as fires spread across riotous urban America. This intellectual revolution, if it was that, peaked in 1970, when the Harvard political scientist Edward Banfield wrote a book applying it explicitly to the U.S. context, The Unheavenly City.
It seems that Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty had—in short time—engendered a sizable backlash. A considerable research effort over the next few years went into rebutting the claim—implicit in the culture-of-poverty thesis—that poverty is not the cause of the poor’s ills, but rather the effect. And the core of that effort was the largest social experiment in our nation’s history: the negative income tax.
At several sites around the country, scientists enrolled poor people into treatment and control groups. Members of the control groups got their welfare checks or their wages as before. Members of the treatment groups received a guaranteed check. The government “reclaimed” the money through taxation until a certain crossover point at which households would start paying “positive” taxes—hence the name. The research study took place across multiple sites in New Jersey, Seattle, and Denver. The results confirmed the left’s worst fears: women left marriages in droves and unemployment spells increased in duration. For example, the Stanford Research Institute found that in Seattle and Denver, the treatment groups had an average work reduction of nine percent for husbands and 18 percent for wives. This suggested, according to Jodie T. Allen, an analyst who wrote about it in Designing Income Maintenance Systems, that as much as 50 to 60 percent of the money paid to two-parent families under a negative income tax would serve to replace earnings. Liberals were burned by their own data.
Then, for the next decade or so there was radio silence. Rather than risk blaming the victims (or proving the right wing’s case for it), the generally left-leaning community of poverty researchers avoided the issue of cause and effect. But the right was not comparably quiet. Writing in The New Yorker, in 1981, the journalist Ken Auletta inaugurated the concept of the “underclass”—the culture of poverty super-sized. Not only were the poor different in their inability to take advantage of what mainstream society has to offer, the theory went, they were increasingly deviant and even dangerous to the rest of us.
As left-leaning academics were trying to debunk the underclass thesis, they were once again outflanked on the right. The conservative social critic Charles Murray made the left’s argument for it: the poor were no different from the rest of us; they respond rationally to economic incentives. According to Murray, poverty per se was not the culprit, nor even was the culture of poverty; the poor, he argued in his 1984 book Losing Ground, were the victims of an ever-expanding welfare state that provided the wrong long-term incentives. To make his case, Murray pointed to the expansion of welfare over the same period that showed a rise in crime, the proportion of unwed births, and unemployment duration. And then to bolster his claim, he rolled out the results of the old negative income tax experiment.
Progressives found themselves trapped. In order to argue against the underclass concept, they had to show that the poor were no different than the rest of us, but were merely responding to a lack of opportunity. But that played right into Murray’s thesis about the perverse incentives of welfare. In order to stake an alternative to both positions, prominent sociologists such as William Julius Wilson argued that welfare was really a minor consideration in shaping the labor and marriage markets in inner cities. The real action was lack of jobs and marriagable, employed men. Deindustrialization, globalization, suburbanization, discrimination, gentrification, and a host of other ills were the real culprits, according to Wilson and his intellectual coterie.
The new analysis came with a new strategy: to fight poverty, “make work pay.” Hence the abandonment of dreams of a Swedish-style welfare state in favor of targeted, work-friendly policies like the expansion of the earned-income tax credit. The left pushed to raise the income limits on Medicaid so that the poor would not lose their health insurance as they left welfare for the low-wage labor market. (In fact, that was one of the rationales behind pushing for universal health coverage in 1993—before welfare reform.) And, of course, there was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, otherwise known as the end of welfare as we know it.
Ultimately, poor adults were all but forsaken for the “deserving poor”—which meant children, through which the left could blunt the conservative critiques of perverse incentives and such. Instead of universal health insurance, progressives would push (successfully) for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Instead of more income support for families, third-way democrats would propose Children’s Savings Accounts, which parents couldn’t touch (a proposal that has recently been reborn as ASPIRE accounts, with bipartisan support in Congress). Even as late as the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore was arguing for universal day care. After all, should children suffer for their parents’ poor choices?
About the same time welfare reform went into effect, a third, almost fatal blow was dealt to the left’s arguments for an expanded safety net and a renewed focus on the well-being of poor children. It came from an unlikely source: Susan Mayer, a sociologist who wrote a book called What Money Can’t Buy: Family Income and Children’s Life Chances. In it, she argued that the effects of income poverty on children have been vastly overstated. Sure, study after study has shown that being poor as a child is associated with poor health, behavioral problems, bad grades, teenage pregnancy, dropping out of school and, ultimately, being poor as an adult. But documenting an association is quite different than proving cause and effect. Mayer used a series of clever devices to make a case that the real impact of income on children is somewhere between trivial and minor. For example, she examined the relationship between parental income and the investments that are supposed to matter for young children. She found a relatively weak relationship between income and the standard measures that psychologists have used to rate the educational environment of the home—such as the presence of books and educational toys. Meanwhile, the household conditions that are highly responsive to income—such as spending on food, size and value of home, and car ownership—were weakly related to children’s outcomes.
The immediate policy conclusion of Mayer’s research was defended with greater polemical energy and much less nuance by Charles Murray and his new coauthor, Richard Herrnstein, in their 1994 book The Bell Curve: the same traits that make adults economically successful make them good parents. While Mayer focused on the fact that it is likely that the same skills that lead to higher incomes make good parenting styles, Murray and Herrnstein went one step further, arguing that what really matters in good parenting is high IQ, which, of course, comes from genes. According to Herrnstein and Murray, successful parents had fortunate genes and they passed these genes on to their kids. Thus, the poor are increasingly beyond help since it is increasingly their genes’ fault that they are at the bottom of the ladder. So why waste any money trying to help them climb out of poverty?
It was classic Murray: rhetorically slick, elegantly straightforward and almost impossible to refute directly, since there was little in the way of testable hypotheses in his argument. Doubts aside, if either Murray and Herrnstein or Mayer were correct, it meant that the arguments of the zero-to-three crowd—that a dollar spent on prenatal care, child care, or reducing child poverty yielded several dollars of savings in the long run—were off the mark.
The poverty-research community once again found itself on the ropes. Just showing an association between growing up poor and any adverse outcome was no longer good enough. Now it had to be established whether poverty was just a side effect of social conditions, or whether it actually limited children’s opportunities. Finally, some sociologists and economists began to respond with a new set of experiments. The last time that researchers ventured into the world of socially engineered experiments, the result was disastrous for the cause. What would make this time any different?
In 1966, a Chicago public-housing resident took part in a class-action suit that alleged that public housing was serving as de facto government segregation. Her name was Dorothy Gautreaux, and as a result of her lawsuit a new social experiment of sorts was undertaken. The result of a settlement between the attorneys for the residents and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was a housing voucher plan to help 7,100 families in public housing to secure homes in the private rental market (in the more affluent Chicago suburbs). The goal was to disperse the families into neighborhoods with less than 30 percent minority residents. In addition to the vouchers, the participants received counseling and rental referral services to help them locate available units. A study by the Northwestern University sociologist James Rosenbaum undertaken years later found that those who had moved out of the ghetto and into low-poverty areas had better employment situations, and their kids had improved by a number of measures.
The problem was that Gautreaux wasn’t really an experiment: the “moving” group was self-selected, so there wasn’t a fair comparison to a real control group, and, furthermore, researchers were only able to track down 60 percent of the original movers for the second interview in 1989, so their better outcomes might be attributable to the fact that it would have been easier for the researchers to find the successes.
So in 1994 along came a new study, “Moving to Opportunity,” which attempted to pick up where Gautreaux left off. The sample of families was larger: 4,600. They were randomly assigned to move or stay; one third received no housing voucher at all, another third received vouchers with no restrictions on where they moved, and the final—“treatment”—group got the vouchers and assistance in locating units in areas with less than ten percent poverty rates plus tutorials in basic life skills including balancing a checkbook, yard work, and lease negotiation. It turned out that those in the treatment group reported feeling less stress from violence and other factors; they were happier and healthier. Among children the effects were the most significant: school truancy and delinquency dropped, victimization dropped, and health improved.
That’s the good news. The bad news was that there was little in the way of short-run changes in welfare usage between the two groups or in employment and earnings, and no effect on children’s test scores. The biggest return on investment seemed to come in the form of social or cultural improvements, while economic opportunity—such as parents’ success in the labor force—seemed less responsive. Read as a whole, the results so far seemed to suggest that when poor people all live together, there is a negative multiplier effect of risk. The results of the “Moving to Opportunity” study serve as an indictment of both the social problems rampant in poor neighborhoods and the larger society that has invested in gated communities, suburban sprawl, and other forms of economic (and racial) segregation. The study seems to imply that if income is not the main problem, social division is—that is, place and segregation.
We see a similar dynamic when it comes to where kids go to school (controlling for where they live). A study in Chicago—limited to public-school choice—found that those students who won lotteries did indeed attend better schools; but they themselves did no better academically. That said, they did show improvements in terms of disciplinary problems as measured by self-report and arrest records. This result—from Freakonomics co-author Steven D. Levitt and two other researchers—contains an eerie similarity to the “Moving to Opportunity” results: it is behavior that improves when at-risk kids are “scattered” among the rest of us. A similar New York City experiment—focusing on private-school vouchers—was based on the promise of a philanthropist to fund 1,300 kids to go to private (mostly parochial) schools (11,105 eligible students applied). The study appeared initially to show some achievement gains for black students, in particular. But more careful analysis by the economists Alan Krueger and Pei Zhu showed that this was largely a mirage.
So the bottom line on the geographical organization of poverty is that the effects are bigger for children than for adults (no surprise there) and that they hold for health and behavioral measures more than for academic ones. This suggests a possible rapprochement between the culture-of-poverty people and the Wilsonians: perhaps the culture of poverty is magnified when the poor are socially segregated—at home or in school—owing to peer effects. In other words, behavior matters, and context matters for behavior (even if the effects are rather modest). As for academic outcomes, is it any surprise that kids don’t catch up in a couple of years when put into a better social context? At least they are behaving better; over a longer time frame this may indeed lead to better “cognitive” outcomes too.
As for family income itself, there has been no social engineering since the days of the negative income tax. Ironically, for the left, the best evidence in their favor about the impact of income comes not from purposive social experimentation, but rather from accidental science—natural experiments that some researchers have exploited to examine the impact of income. Adding to the irony is the fact that the two recent studies, which together form the best evidence of the impact of income, come from gambling. The economists Guido Imbens, Donald Rubin, and Bruce Sacerdote surveyed people who played the lottery in the mid-1980s and found, among other results, that those who were not in the work force before winning increased their commitment to work after receiving their prize. I take this to mean that those at the very bottom face significant financial obstacles to fully participating in the economy. Perhaps they use their winnings to buy a car to get to work or to put a deposit down on an apartment or to simply stop wasting their time by jumping through welfare hoops. Meanwhile, those who were already working (at low-wage jobs) did reduce their hourly commitment to the labor force. It seems that folks on the low end want to work; they just don’t want to work all the time just to make ends meet.
A second study is of Cherokee children who experienced a windfall in income thanks to the bizarre arrangements of legalized gambling on American Indian reservations. The casino distributions in North Carolina lifted 14 percent of the Cherokee families out of poverty. Among those families, children’s behavioral problems improved, largely as a result of additional time that parents had to supervise their children. (Again, fewer behavioral problems may translate into better academic performance in the long run and thus better economic prospects in adulthood.) The issue of parents having time to spend with their kids should appeal across partisan lines; in fact, it should be the “family values” issue of the Democratic Party. It makes one wonder whether the negative income tax liberals were asking the wrong question 30 years ago: they should have been focusing on the kids rather than the parents who received the checks. Maybe there’s still time for a renunion for the negative income tax kids and a suitable control group. Evidently, we should have been thinking in units of “generations” rather than years.
We cannot think about how place affects poverty without reference to time. They are interwoven: historically high levels of income and wealth inequality mixed with economic segregation mean that those at the bottom—and perhaps even those in the middle—have to drive further and further through congested traffic to reach their low-wage jobs serving the needs of the wealthy. This intersection of inequality and real estate has reached absurd dimensions in Aspen, Colorado, where tourist industry workers often drive hours in their daily commutes (hence Robert Frank’s term “the Aspen effect”). Of course, if additional time spent supervising children is what helps break the cycle of poverty, then these daily marathons may do more harm than good (even setting aside the effects of auto emissions on air quality). We cannot think of place and time as isolated; they are the fabric of the social universe, and any viable policy has to address both.
The good news is that once we realize that to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty we need to address the issues of economic segregation and the family time crunch, we can begin to rethink social policy in a more creative fashion. One way to address the time crunch, of course, is to give parents money (or higher wages) so that they can work fewer hours. But if that is unpalatable, then we can skip the money part and give families time. Such an approach might involve, for example, mandated paid family leave, much like most other rich democracies offer their workers. But it also might involve urban planning to insure low-income housing situated in accessible neighborhoods so service workers don’t suffer such long commutes and poor children who attend decent schools don’t have to sit on school buses for hours a day. Or it could mean better rapid transit.
On the other hand, it is tricky business to relocate families and thereby constrain housing choices—especially when racial politics is involved. And more recent ethnographic work shows that mixed-income communities may not be the Shangri-Las they are advertised to be. The sociologist Mary Patillo, for example, has found that poor families in Chicago feel misunderstood and “surveilled” by their higher-income neighbors in these mixed-income developments, leading to social tension and divisions that may defeat the whole purpose of economic integration. So maybe we should be worrying about how easy it is for low-income workers to reach jobs and not what the exact mix of incomes is where they sleep. If place were thought of in terms of time (commutes to work and good schools), then a new urban policy might come into focus.
Fixing the geography of inequality and making more time in the day are tall tasks, of course. Even middle-class and upper-class parents are working more hours per week than ever before (and than in any other nation). What makes the situation particularly toxic for poor kids is the fact that when their parents are working, they are spending the time in unstructured activity. While the middle class has signed their kids up for ever more soccer leagues, music lessons, and myriad other after-school activities, the poor do not have that luxury. Their kids, disproportionately, spend time “hanging out”; this has been observed by Jason DeParle in his chronicle of three welfare families struggling through the era of reform in Milwaukee, American Dream. A recent study by Annette Lareau, Eliot Weingarter, and myself shows this statistically: outside of school, the time spent by well-off and poor kids could not be more different. Poor children spend 40 percent more time in unstructured activities than middle-class kids. So, if we can’t get the parents home to spend more time with kids, we can at least stitch together a 24-hour social safety net in the form of mandatory full-day kindergarten; universal pre-kindergarten; funding for after-school programs; and, yes, midnight basketball leagues (a much-ridiculed part of the crime-reduction bill President Clinton signed in 1993).
“The days are endless and the years fly by,” goes the parenting adage. Social policy can learn something from this. We need to think in terms of hours in the day when it comes to bettering the lives of poor children; and we must be patient in terms of outcomes, waiting years, perhaps, to realize the payoff. Why not? We’ve waited long enough already since LBJ first declared war on this scourge of American society; and we’ve learned something in the meantime. Now let’s put that knowledge to use. <
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About the Author
Dalton Conley is a University Professor and the chir of the sociology department at New York University.
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Why? Because the so-called disadvantaged have all the jobs. If you are white and over 40 in NYC, you can drop dead unless you are a lawyer, doctor or other "professional." I am sick to death of people "crying' for the poor.
I am poor because I have been shoved out of the way so affirmative action candidates can have all the adm. ass't, secretary, receptionist, teller, retail, banking jobs.
In my building the "poor" hang out in the parking lot all day, do drugs, deal drugs, play their music so loud our apartment shakes, threaten me if I tell them to please turn it down, shoot people, stab delivery boys, beat old ladies to a pulp.
I am just as poor and I don't do that. In addition, for every scholarship for a white person, there are 100 for black people and 30 for Hispanic. So, what are they doing this for? I am the one who falls through the cracks. Even with my education that I now owe $62,000 for, and am ruined for life by the student loans, I still look for work. As far as "workforce" goes, why is it only geared to minorities? I was told I would have to "relearn" PowerPoint so they could send me on a job. Red tape stupidity? If I am passed over NOW for those jobs, why would taking a course in something I already know get me a job?
As far as welfare goes, the new laws make it that if I want that lousy $137 a month, I would have to sit for 6 weeks with ex-cons, druggies and other nefarious creatures to learn, and get this: TO LEARN HOW TO NOT SPEAK GHETTO.
I am sick to death of people feeling sorry for the people who have all these scholarships and affirmative action opportunities and choose to be thugs and bums. And to relocate them is not the answer either.
One block away a beautiful apartment building is being ruined by relocating the welfare people. Loud music, trash, hanging out in hallways, drugs, just like the projects.
It's about time someone woke up and realized that is some white people who have done nothing wrong, just tried to get work and were affirmative actioned out of the job market. Who feels for us?
Is it equality that I have to live in the projects after all my accomplishments that no one will translate into actual work? Is it equality that I have to be threatened by my neighbors, live through gun shootings and beatings? Live with drug addicts? NO. I want equality. I want a chance to work.
And no one talks about the disgusting, draconian SSI laws that PUNISH the care-taker spouse of the disabled. We are not allowed to have more than $3,000 in the bank, YET we are also not allowed to have more than $1500 in life insurance on our spouses. Then we are supposed to also pay our student loans under these conditions, and if we earn over a LOUSY $240 a month, Social Security TAKES money out of the SSI recipient's check. SO, of course, people do under the table things. Our lawmakers are pigs and they have taken my CIVIL RIGHTS away, my right to earn my own money, save my own money and save for my future. I have ZERO respect for Congress or any of our Presidents.
No wonder most mentally ill and disabled are not able to live with relatives. Why would they sacrifice their OWN well being for the disabled's well being?
But I don't see you addressing any of these issues, which are KEY to some of the poverty. These laws even make the SPOUSE,who is not on the government's tit, worse off than the one who is.
I go back to the room to clean up the carpet, to find out where the cat lives, my head pounding like an African drum.
So hungry. No money. Shoulda ordered a big hamburger and ran out – they wouldn’t give me a job.
Woulda served them right.
Later my belly hurts so much I pray for death, never ever to be restored to the living." Gosh greedy-gut, you have always been a loser and always will be. I hope your pathetic remaining years are filled with punishment for the last six or seven decades you have spent living it up at the taxpayers expense.
By the way, I'm not seventy - and I worked for many years. Why aren't you stalking drug dealers and people who set out to go on welfare as a lifestyle if you really care about your taxes?
One of these days the law is going to get you and get you good. What you don't get is I don't care what you do or say, but I will continue to point out that you are posting as me. Identity theft much, you self-righteous teeny-weeny weeny.
You're such a chump that you take it all out of context. I never once said I was too good to work: I said I wanted to work and was denied work, but f you, Mr. HOOM cult man - raised by cultists - Carol and what's his name-your reverend dad. SHould i post your phone number?
JACOB WALSH has written these posts and is a cyber stalker and cult member of HOOM. He lives in Indiana and is a Sallie Mae worker or apologist.
Keep spending money on more hacking equipment, that's the ticket.
You are Jacob Walsh of Indianapolis, Indiana. You hate Nanette because she can't pay her student loans. She paid her first ones, probably when you were still picking your fat nose.
Some of her real jobs that you say she never had:
Joint Center for Radiation Therapy - Deaconness Hospital
Associated Press
United Hospital Fund
Anyone reading all your posts must know that only a real insecure, gutless person with a grudge for someone they don't even know would write this crap.
You are an envious, creepy, ugly stalker with no balls.
I first went to university in the 1980's and had to leave for financial reasons. I paid back my student loan and did it so well, that I was evicted for non-payment of rent, so well that they discounted the last few payments and said the loan was paid in full. This, I believe was because lots of people weren't paying. Fast forward: Unable to get any kind of work in New York City, drowning in more eviction notices, and soon to be homeless, I went back to school. My university, The New School University, is so determined to be multicultural and politically correct, gave great scholarships and work study jobs to minorities, but even though I was on the Dean's List for all but one semester, my scholarship was not that great. I took out $35,000 in regular Sallie Mae loans and $10,000 in a private Chase Bank loan, convinced that with a college education, finally, I would get a job. Even though the government gave me work-study, every time I applied for a work-study job at The New School I was turned down by some snotty, younger student. I went to the Financial Aid office and complained and I complained that most of the work-study jobs were taken by foreigners and I was told I was a racist.
I graduated in 2002, one month before I became homeless and had to endure the depravity and danger of the homeless system, even as some of my poetry was being published, even though I made the Dean's List consistently. Now it is 2006, I live in Public Housing with my husband whom I met in the homeless shelter. He receives a check from the government, $626 a month for both of us, Supplementary Security Assistance (SSI). Sallie Mae is not the only money-hungry jerk killing the citizens of this country. Congress again is the culprit. If I earn over $240 a month, they take money out of his check. And I still CANNOT get a job. I have ideas as to why, but I would be called a racist again. In New York City, restaurant jobs go to illegal aliens or very young girls or guys (for waiters), as for secretarial etc. jobs, Affirmative Action is rampant. Even if I get a temp job, and that is rare, the whole office is Black or Spanish. I am also 53 years old, so that is a factor too. My social security, if I live that long, will only be about $400 dollars a month, because of my horrific luck at getting a job. And I can't pay my student loans, so they will attach 15% of that. I have not done this on purpose.
I paid my first student loans when others were not. I am harassed about 10 times a day by snotty, inarticulate, insipid, brainless SALLIE MAE employees. I tell them, will Sallie Mae give me a job? Then maybe I can pay. They start yelling at me. I hang up. Someone from on high, an executive called, and I explained my situation and still, these amoebas continue to harass me. I think our country is a piece of crap to treat people like this, to have Congress bought by a company. Between the laws Congress passed about spouses of SSI recipients and the laws about student loans, my life is really over. Even if I get a job, which is unlikely, I will never be free. This country should stop telling people they need a college education to get a job, then implement Affirmative Action, hire illegals and let age discrimination go unchecked. Last week, I took a grueling proofreading test, passed with flying colors, had a great interview, and still was told, "It was pleasure meeting you. It was a hard decision, but we had to go with someone else." Code for: You are too old, too pretty, too white, too legal. This country should do what Germany does. Let everyone learn a skill, they pay for it and you're on your way.
I have finished with bankruptcy and it now is all for naught. My student loans have exceeded deferment and forbearance. My $10,000 loan is now $18,000. My $35,000 loan is now about $42,000. The least they could do is not add penalties and interest. The LEAST they could do is listen to the hopelessness of my situation, and everyone’s situation, and realize they are killing us, causing tortuous stress and migraines. What good is getting an education if the rest of your life is poverty-stricken to pay back the loans? And what good is an education if then, in New York City, they tell you that you are overqualified, too old, too this, too that.
What happened to the days where if you couldn’t find a job you wanted, you could at least get a crummy job? Now the crummy jobs go to the very young, the Affirmative – Action crowd, the immigrants and the illegal immigrants. Before this country keeps paying for MEDICAID and schooling for ILLEGALS, why don’t they straighten out the horrific conditions of the student-loan borrowers? Why are we being shoved aside to let illegals gain access to the phony American dream?
Maybe if they hired people who can't pay their loans, instead of uneducated, foreign and stupid people there wouldn't be a problem either. And I don’t want to hear the whole thing about illegals ONLY doing jobs Americans don’t want. Illegals are now earning 30-40K in places like Swift. And what about all the construction jobs they take away from Americans. This whole country is falling down. Our jobs are also being outsourced at a record level. I bought into the whole thing that the reason I couldn't get a job was because I didn't have an education completed. My IQ was always high, it's still high, my education didn't make it high, and I still don't have a job. And I have been published in over 50 literary journals, but I can't be hired for a lousy job? I can't get a proofreading job even though I did great on the test and interviewed very well? I am sick of my own country. Congress should all drop dead as far as I'm concerned. I don't care about my country anymore.
In 2003 I became homeless because I couldn’t find enough work, or sometimes ANY work to pay my rent. I went to a private university. I now have over 60 publishing credits in good and great literary journals. I was just nominated TWICE for a literary Pushcart Prize. I still cannot get a job, except maybe a couple times a year, a low-paying temp job where they treat you like you’re garbage. Shouldn’t the interest and penalties at least be stopped if you are homeless?
I also take care now of a mentally disabled husband and we are living on a little over $600 a month. And technically the SSI is HIS money. The government cannot take it. And my husband is willing to pay out of this paltry sum $45 a month. To keep me out of default and I am having a hard time convincing Sallie Mae to take this sum. On their insipid website they say you could pay your loans if you didn’t have cable. So, my husband is supposed to not watch television because of this? He didn’t do anything wrong. Oh, and speaking of being disabled, this government is so screwed up. My husband has his college paid for by a government agency BECAUSE he’s disabled. Too disabled to work, so he collects money, and then they pay his college. If you’re too disabled to work, how come you’re not too disabled to go to university?
And because I am married to someone on SSI, if I earn over $240 a month (I’m lucky if I ever do), they subtract money from his SSI check. Do you believe this. I am being punished by this sick, sick, government. So how would I pay my loans anyway? I hate this government. They do everything for non-citizens. They are screwing me on both ends. On three ends:
Affirmative Action
SSI related
Student Loans
And I can’t even apply for Grad School to maybe eventually get a job, because I can’t afford the applications and GRE costs. So, I sit here, graduate from a private university, published in over 60 literary journals, a two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, a caretaker for a disabled person, and I HAVE NO OPTIONS for any kind of a life. This is America – land of the free – NOT, America, land of opportunity – NOT, America – land of the brave – NOT our Congress. WE are brave, brave to suffer through this raping of our lives.