"The pleasures of the rich are bought with the tears of the poor." --Thomas Fuller

he price that the United States of America pays for its economic inequality is its persisting poverty. It would be no exaggeration to say that poverty in America today is growing by leaps and bounds. Especially among women and children. The rulers and profiteers of this country can neither hide nor justify today's new burst of poverty. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and it's not necessary to be a Marxist to see and recognize this obvious truth. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer are not two processes taking place separately or side by side. In large measure, the fantastic accumulation of wealth on the top is a direct byproduct of the impoverishment of ever-wider layers of Americans.

Today, basically, there are two Americas in America. One America which is very small, lives in swanky mansions in wealthy neighborhoods, drives fancy cars, eats at the finest gourmet restaurants, enjoys media notoriety, sends their children to the best schools. The other America -- which is very big -- lives from paycheck to paycheck (if they are getting one), lives in fear of losing jobs, sends their children to dangerous public schools, is increasingly hungry and homeless.

The real extent of poverty in America can be understood only within the context of wealth in America. It is often said that a poor person in a rich country is less poor than a poor person in a poor country. So, the poor in the United States, supposedly, have it better than the poor in Rwanda or Bangladesh. This sort of relativistic approach is, in itself, wrong. The approach of "relative deprivation" would be more realistic, under which the poor in a rich country are compared with the more affluent.

Poverty is recognized as an evil in any society. Being hopelessly poor is hard enough anywhere, but it is made many times more difficult in America where the poor are bombarded daily with images of enormous wealth. The perception of wealth in America can generate excruciating resentment among those who are not wealthy. What does it mean to be poor in America? As the psychologist James Garbarino described it:

Being poor is about being left out of what your society tells people they could expect if they were included... Being poor means being different, not meeting the basic standards set by your society, not being 'regular.' It is not so much a matter of what you have, as what you do not have. And, it is the messages that difference sends.

It's important to clearly understand what I mean here, in this book, by the word "poverty." To begin with, the U.S. government has confused this straightforward issue by establishing an official definition of poverty in America that is now grossly inaccurate. The official poverty figures understate the number of Americans living at a subsistence level. In order to determine how many Americans are poor each year, the federal government compares an individual's or family's income with what is commonly known as the "poverty line" or "poverty threshold." People whose income falls below the poverty threshold, depending on the size of the family, are officially considered to be poor.

Many experts claim that the federal poverty line is set far too low and that if it were set at an appropriate level, millions of additional people would be included in American poverty data. For example, a new poverty measure that more accurately reflects who is poor in America has been recommended by a panel of the National Research Council's Committee on National Statistics. The panel's proposed measure paints a very different picture of the nation's poor. It shows many more working families as living in poverty. "The current poverty measure has not kept pace with far-reaching changes in society and the economy," said the panel's chair, Robert T. Michael, professor at the University of Chicago. "Our new measure, for example, will show for the first time the effects of work-related expenses -- such as transportation costs and child care costs -- on families' available income. This new approach will provide us all with a more accurate and consistent picture of who is living in poverty today."

The official poverty line was established in early 1960s! It simply does not reflect today's actual cost of living here. It is calculated on what a family or single individual would need to spend on "minimally adequate" food and then multiplied by three, assuming that the average family is spending one-third of its budget on food. While the dollar amount of the poverty level is adjusted yearly for inflation, the government has never adjusted its increasingly inadequate poverty formula to reflect the current cost of housing, health care, transportation and all the other basic necessities such as child care for working parents. Today the official poverty line is still the same across America despite the wide variation in housing and other costs between, for example, rural Mississippi or Alabama and those in New York City.

In accordance with the official poverty line standard, more than thirty-five million Americans lived in poverty in 1997. In reality, poverty in the United States is without doubt much worse than the official figures show. The official poverty line is set so low that many Americans who are living in poverty are not even included in the statistics. The reality is that this official poverty line in America is set far below actual sufficiency for basic necessities.

When the U.S. government first adopted the poverty line measure in the 1960s, it defined poverty as the smallest amount of income required to afford basic necessities at the lowest level of living for an average family, purchased at the lowest realistic cost. As John E. Schwartz, political science professor at the University of Arizona, and Thomas J. Volgy, a former mayor of Tucson, Arizona, show in their book about the working poor, The Forgotten Americans, the official poverty line in today's America is way too low to cover even most basic human needs, such as food and housing. It is ludicrously inaccurate and simply does not reflect today's actual cost of living.

A family of three needs an income of about 155 percent of the official poverty line (which is now $13,650 for family of three) just to buy minimally sufficient food, housing, health care, transportation, education, clothing, and other absolutely necessary things, as well as to pay taxes. As Schwarz and Volgy point out in their book, divorced from any real definition of poverty, the official measure has fallen far below economic reality, masking particularly the number of working poor. The number of year-round, full-time American workers who live in poverty is actually three times what official census figures would have us believe. ...

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