Six or eight million people have fallen into poverty since the coronavirus stimulus ended, depending on how you measure it. Either way, it’s a damn lot of people who are suddenly poor because a pandemic has slammed through the nation’s economy and Senate Republicans don't want to fix it. The Cares Act lifted four million people out of poverty, but once it expired—once the one-time payments had been used up and the expanded unemployment insurance evaporated—the result has been a disaster.
The Cares Act “wasn’t perfect, but hands down it’s the most successful thing we’ve ever done in negating hardship,” University of Michigan poverty researcher H. Luke Shaefer told The New York Times. Republicans take a different view.
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“I’m not as alarmed about poverty as I am about unemployment,” the head of one conservative policy organization said. “Poverty is an arbitrary income threshold, and people who dip below it, they make adjustments. If you’re not working at all, that’s a huge deal. Physical and mental health declines, substance abuse goes up.”
An arbitrary income threshold.
Poverty is an income threshold, to be sure, and it could use some updating, but the point at which a family cannot pay the bills and keep the electricity on is not an arbitrary measure. The point at which a parent is skipping meals to feed his or her child is not an arbitrary measure. And poverty has very clear physical and mental health effects, including on children—children being a group that hopefully even Republicans can agree shouldn’t be employed.
“Socioeconomic status is the most powerful predictor of disease, disorder, injury and mortality we have,” according to the head of the University of California San Francisco’s Division of Developmental Medicine within the Department of Pediatrics. “Poverty gets under our skin and leads to biological changes that can last into adulthood, even when circumstances change, and, in some cases, affect the next generation through maternal health,” Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, head of UCSF’s Center for Vulnerable Populations, said.
Poverty is linked to a host of negative health outcomes, from low birth weight to lowered life expectancy, worse educational outcomes, higher blood pressure and risk of cardiac disease or diabetes. Six to eight million people added to the United States’ already high rate of poverty is a disaster. It’s a healthcare disaster, an educational disaster, and—because Republicans supposedly care about this—a fiscal disaster, leading to increased costs going forward because of the damage it causes. Most of all, though, it’s a moral disaster.
And it’s one about which that jackwagon quoted above is comfortable saying it’s not alarming. People can just make adjustments. Yeah, adjustments to how many meals they eat each day and whether they have hot water to shower and clean with. After a while, adjustments to whether there’s any roof at all over their heads.
Like the preexisting poverty, the new poverty is hitting already vulnerable groups the hardest. Black people and Latinos are most likely to have been hit by pandemic-related job loss, are disproportionately likely to have been denied aid or gotten inadequate aid—some because they are undocumented and, for many Black people, because they live in Southern states with intentionally inadequate benefits—and they’re most likely to be poor now. Child poverty is also skyrocketing, in part because parents whose kids are home all the time are less likely to be able to go out and get the few jobs that are available in the pandemic.
This is one more way the coronavirus pandemic—and Donald Trump’s failed response to it, and Senate Republicans’ refusal to extend economic aid—is going to scar a generation.
