Poverty, Homelessness, and Hunger

I remember learning back in school about the basic necessities for human life: food, water, shelter, and clothing. While the latter may at times be a matter of prerogative, the former three are indisputable necessities. When these are not available to us, we become incapable of functioning within societal parameters. When whole areas are afflicted with a shortage of these necessities, society breaks down completely. Man reverts to his more primal nature, securing these necessities for himself and his family without regard to others, fighting for these things if need be. It is with this understanding of the fundamental importance of securing these necessities of life that modern societies have created for themselves a social safety net for those who are having trouble meeting these basic needs. It is an imperfect safety net, to be sure, but the fact that it exists is a testament to the rational empathy of humanity.

In the 2006 Federal Budget, the U.S. has allocated the following amounts to aid in the fight against hunger, poverty, and homelessness: Health & Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Social Security Administration have a combined total of $105 billion dollars, or 11% of all discretionary spending. (This does not include Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payouts, which are mandatory spending requirements in the budget.) By comparison, Defense receives $419 billion, or 44% of all discretionary spending. (This is not a complaint regarding defense spending. It is both necessary and important, but badly managed. But that is another discussion.) Energy and Justice each take about 2%, or $20 billion, and Education gets nearly 6% with $56 billion. The point of all these numbers is to show how much we are spending, financially, to help people in trouble obtain the basic needs of life. To me, $105 billion dollars is a lot of money. With that much money at hand, surely we could end hunger and homelessness, and maybe even poverty too. So why haven’t we?

It isn’t for a lack of effort, that’s for sure. There are thousands of private and governmental agencies whose stated mission is to assist those in need. However, despite them all, we have yet to conquer these problems. The poverty rate in this country is around 12%. The hunger rate, defined as “frequently skipping meals or eating too little, sometimes going without food for a whole day, due to a lack of food” affects nearly 10 million people. Each year, some 2 million people experience some degree of homelessness; increasingly these people are displaced families with children. And while poverty may be a tougher problem to handle, certainly hunger and homelessness could be eradicated.

As I see it, the problem is twofold: inefficient or ineffective management of funding, and attitude. With $105 billion dollars to work with, and remember, this is just federal tax dollars and doesn’t include the additional billions pouring in from state and private sources, we should certainly have enough money to address the problem. But when you come down to things, this isn’t about having enough money, and it isn’t about having enough compassion and desire. It’s about our societal ethic that values contribution and productivity and it’s about our attitude towards those who fail to meet these expectations of society. It’s about a bureaucracy that prefers to maintain the status quo for all the wrong reasons, and in the process, robs us of our taxes and deprives the needy of their dignity.

Truth be told, in today’s uncertain economic world, even the richer among us is just a heartbeat away from needing the help of our social services. Another stock market crash, a debilitating injury or illness, an outsourced job…any of these could befall us and send us packing into the street if we are not prepared. And let’s face it; most Americans do not have the cash reserves to weather a lengthy period of strife. Most barely have enough to make it through a few weeks without a steady flow of income. Yet, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, most of us who have never needed to rely on the social safety net view those that do need help as either inferior or just plain useless. In truth, it’s often just a matter of luck. This is not to say that there haven’t been and won’t continue to be people who are just “gaming the system,” but to paint all in need with this same brush is slander of the worst kind.

As I said earlier, part of the problem lies in our attitude towards those who need our help. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a government aid agency has probably experienced a great level of discomfort. If you think the Department of Motor Vehicles is a nightmare, try navigating through food assistance or housing programs or trying to collect unemployment. You can almost feel an underlying attitude of scorn or contempt. This bias displays itself in the attitudes of government workers as they shuffle through file after file, navigating the red tape of micromanagement, or in the wayward glance of the motorist who ignores the panhandler at the intersection. And the mountains of regulation created by politicians, which only serve as a barrier to those who truly need help, further expand this type of contempt. Obscenely enough, many of the programs that would provide assistance are created with this bias already in place, turning the safety net into a spider’s web that lures you in with a little assistance, and then wraps you up in regulations so tight that you suffocate and die. All the while, watching over you with an unfeeling eye, preventing you from escape, or in the real world, keeping you dependant.

When it comes to the efficiency of these programs, we must also ask ourselves if government is really the best administrator. In my humble opinion, it is not. Government’s propensity to over spend, over evaluate, and under perform makes it the least likely candidate for the job. Government excels at collecting funds and assuring an even playing field through legislation. It is a capable collector of goods, but a lousy dispenser of service.

An alternative structure could be something like this: the federal government would be tasked with collecting a tax specifically earmarked for social programs that assist those in need. The feds could not take any money out; they could only put money in. They would also be responsible for crafting general guidelines for allocating these funds. Private organizations would bear the responsibility of developing local or regional assistance programs. These organizations would submit plans and funding requests to a rotating, national citizens committee who would be responsible for ensuring that the funds were being properly disbursed and equitable distributed. This citizen panel would also conduct audits on both the organizations that provide assistance and the people who were receiving the aid.

We must remember that assistance is just that- it is meant to be temporary help while an individual gets back on their feet. Towards those ends, programs must be developed that not only meet the urgent requirements of shelter and food, but also must be geared towards returning a person back to productive society. Provided that recipients are not disabled, there should be ways for them to contribute while they are getting back on their feet and there should be training programs to help them avoid returning to the same status as before. In other words, we offer help to those who demonstrate their willingness to help themselves, so long as they are able to.

I haven’t addressed all of the root causes of poverty or hunger or homelessness, focusing here mainly on the structure of the aid itself. And it would be ridiculous to imagine that simply reforming our safety net could solve all these problems. Larger issues like costs and wages, improved education, employment practices, and healthcare are all contributing factors to these issues. But until we make the necessary adjustments to those aspects of our society, we will continue to deal with hungry children, homeless grandfathers, and poor families. And there is no reason that those in need should be subjected to the cruelty of government red tape. The least we can do is expect our safety net to be solid, efficient, effective, and to treat our citizens with dignity.

School Funding and Local Control

When we pay for something tangible, we own that thing and may use it, for the most part, as we see fit. This rule applies to our cars, our houses, our clothes, and on and on. If we want to paint all the windows in the house black, we can because we own it. Likewise, if we pay for a service, we expect to get our money’s worth. If we pay someone to paint the windows black for us, we don’t want to see any bits of light shining through at the end of the job. We have ownership of that service at that time and want things done our way. After all, we’re paying the bill. And when we get a product that we can’t adapt to our needs, or when we receive service that is less than we expected, we make our displeasure known through switching services or brands. But how do these ideas apply to public services like education? After all, we are the ones paying for education through our tax dollars, yet we seem to have little ability to control the use of those dollars to ensure that we are indeed getting what we are paying for. Further, if we are able to discern that our money is being ill-spent, we are hard pressed to fix the problem because of the disconnect between an entrenched educational bureaucracy and the common tax paying adult.

Our current system of funding and control seem to have the appearance of rationality and accountability on the surface, but if you crack open the lid on this jar of worms, you’ll find nothing but mismanagement, wasteful resource allocation, and an overall lack of common sense. The state and federal governments allocate a portion of their general or property tax revenues for general education funds, disbursed to pay for all the facility, instructional, administrative, and operational costs and apportioned by various formulas and guidelines. In the 2001-2002 school year, the national expenditures were $434,438,650,000 (yes, that is BILLIONS) or about $6500 per pupil per year. As of the last population census, legal residents of school age (5-18 years old) numbered about 55 million. (I know that the math for these numbers doesn’t exactly add up- 6500 x 55m does not equal 434b- but what can I say…government tables!) So what are we getting for our money?

Students are provided with textbooks, at an average cost of $50, maybe 5 per student. (Many of which are outdated or shared by multiple students at one time, preventing these books from being taken home for study.) Students are provided with teachers, whose average salary of $42,900 and average class size of 16 costs $2931 per student. (Many of who are becoming disillusioned with both students and administrators.) Students are provided with a facility in which to learn, that also requires administration and maintenance staff, supplies, and utilities. How much of the remaining $3569 is spent here? (The state of these facilities varies greatly though, due to their primary source of construction funding, local bond measures.) Students are sometimes provided with extra-curricular activities. (Often at an additional cost.) Apparently, more than half of the “cost per pupil” is being spent not on education, but on education infrastructure. Is this the return on our investment that we were expecting?

But really, $434 billion is a lot of money, and when we spend that much money, we expect to have some control of how it is being spent. If you thought the financial end was a bit jumbled, this gets really strange. To begin with, government falsely assumes that the money it collects in taxes belongs to it instead of the people. Taxes are not the property of government; rather government is entrusted with those funds to pay for the needs of society. This false assumption of ownership allows government to feel that it should have some control of the education process, rather than just being a conduit of shared resources. At the same time, we have demanded that government legislate laws ensuring a level playing field in society, so we have invited the government to the table insofar as school regulation is concerned. The people, however, recognize the fact that the tax money that pays for education is really theirs, and as such develop school districts and elect local citizen school boards to maintain their bit of control on the process. Yet those elections are not widely attended and the parents often remain unattached to these elected boards and their policies. What often results is an adversarial coupling when government makes mandates for education that the people don’t agree with. It would seem that we need to redefine the roles each should play in the educational process.

Where funding is concerned, we must come to recognize that simply throwing more money at school administrators and teacher’s unions is not going to change the state of our children’s education. The things that matter are the books and the tools and the instruction they receive. The formulas should be reworked so that teachers are at the top of the pay scale instead of the administrators and consultants. In fact, why couldn’t we turn over the administration aspects of schools to volunteer citizens who could manage these affairs on a part-time basis? The savings could be funneled back into classroom materials. Facilities would come next in line to assure that they are safe and clean, and consistent across the nation, offering all children the same opportunities according to their abilities. Streamlining our building efforts could save untold millions in construction and maintenance costs as well as alleviate uneven property taxes and unnecessary building bonds. Again, these savings could be used to support extra-curricular activities that are being cut all over the country. Absorption of school utility costs through minimal across the board ratepayer increases could further free up operating funds that could improve student-learning programs.

When it comes to providing an adequate learning environment, we must adopt those attitudes I discussed in the previous two essays: the necessity of parents to instill the traits of responsibility and respect in their children and for parents and teachers to work together to demand those qualities of their students, and the necessity of society to restructure its agenda to allow parents and children more time together so these traits can be taught through example. In order to further these goals, we should return more disciplinary control to our teachers and severely restrict the ability to sue schools or teachers for anything but the most egregious behavior. Our schools are inundated by lawsuit happy parents for slighting students or hampering their spirit or whatever other nonsense they can think of. The costs of defending or settling these kinds of lawsuits, and the insurance schools now need to pay for just strips away more of the dollars for real education. Students need to be clear on the fact that their job is to learn and their rights are dependant on their level of responsibility. Once we take away the “get rich quick” option, schools can go back to teaching and stop looking over their shoulders as they make a lesson plan.

Control of academic curriculum is usually what most parents are concerned about. We want to make sure that our kids are learning the basics of reading and writing and mathematics. We want to make sure that our teachers aren’t filling our kids heads full of false information, though at times, even this is subjective. But the government wants to impress an environment that is as equitable to all as possible, while expecting a minimum standard of achievement on certain general areas of knowledge. A solution could be as simple as delineating who gets to be responsible for what. Government, by nature, is best at providing a level playing field. Moving much beyond this simple task, at least in the area of education, is only asking for trouble. So governments role in schools should be limited to a few things: assuring the equitable redistribution of collected tax dollars for education; assuring equitable facilities for all students through oversight committees; providing basic standard criteria for teacher certification; and developing minimum required mastery levels for reading, writing, mathematics, civic responsibility, personal finance, history, and science. Local school boards would then be responsible for implementing academic courses of study that would serve their student populations and teach at least the minimum requirements according to that communities specific needs or methods; hiring and firing of all school personnel; procuring and distributing educational materials; and managing the day to day occurrences that arise. Each would abide the decisions of the other, but disputes would err towards to people in cases of curriculum and style or towards the government in cases of fairness or assessment.

Business could and should be encouraged to step up to the plate too, since they are big beneficiaries of an educated citizenry as well. They could be instrumental in developing instructional courses for areas that fall outside of the required minimum mastery levels. Specialized instruction in career specific areas could engender the right numbers of future workers for industries. An example would be similar businesses pooling their resources to form teaching guilds. The sports and entertainment industries could return some of their mega profits to society by funding community sports programs and arts education.

As with every new change, you can choose to phase the new ideas in gradually or adopt them all at once. In the case of education, it becomes even trickier to decide, since if the changes are really beneficial, you want to reach all the kids as early as possible. In this case though, I think we just need to formulate the plan, and pick a date of adoption and begin to implement starting with the kids first entering school that year. As the system evolves, preexisting kids could be brought into the fold, under the “better late than never” concept. Finally, adults should be offered some re-education opportunities as they need them to fill any gaps in their education due to growing up in troubled educational times.

The bottom line is that there is already a good amount of money being spent but no real control beyond who can make headlines with the latest lawsuit. An educated society is a shared responsibility and a shared asset. It’s time that government and citizens quit fighting over education and turn towards our respective strengths to provide a more efficient, and therefore, more effective school system for our children.