The high price of being poor

Make it Make Sense Vol 10

If there is one thing I learned from my close to four decades on this earth, it's that being poor is expensive. This is a truth that runs counter to narratives centered in meritocracy. That whole pulling yourself up from your bootstraps bit. Fun fact: like a lot of turns of phrases we use today, the bootstrap one has morphed and changed from its etymological routes. It used to be a comment on how absurd the action was. You just got to defy the laws of physics and pull yourself up, you see.

The sentiment, like most anything else, reminds me of a scene from The Simpsons. Chief Wiggum is trying to dig himself out of a hole. "No no, dig UP stupid!" But I digress, the point I'm trying to make here is that it's easy for people who have never existed in poverty to diminish just how mind boggingly difficult it is to get out of it. Which is one thing on its own, but a completely different beast when those people are in positions of power and are making executive decisions for the rest of us based on that ignorance.

Courtesy of Iowa Starting Line

Enter the 9th, secret, horcrux: Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. Who, among other things, cites healthy eating concerns to deny federal aid for children to receive school lunch assistance. Per Iowa Starting Line, “In December, Gov. Kim Reynolds announced that the state would decline to participate in a federal Summer Electronic Benefits (EBT) program through the US Department of Agriculture that would have given Iowa $29 million in federal funds to feed about 240,000 children.”

Putting the burden back on these already strapped families. Well let's get into this in today's post. Because, for better or worse, I'm fairly intimate with the topics at hand. I've got by with less than enough in stretches of my life. I used to be on the free and reduced lunch program. I know what its like to try to eat healthy while on a minuscule budget. It is a close to impossible feat, and one that brings shame and guilt from the judgment of others in our community. I'll never forget how it felt to be poor, and the feeling that it was somehow MY fault, that I deserved it, that I wasn't trying hard enough. That I just wasn't digging up enough.

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Now I was going to go into the weeds of The Iowa Departments of Education and Health and Human Services press release on the matter. But really if you want a comprehensive look at Reynold’s (thread-bare) reasoning and plenty of refutations on that reasoning, this piece by the Iowa Capitol Dispatch does a great job of it.

Instead I want to focus on one key point of the statement. In it Reynolds states,

“No child should go hungry, least of all in Iowa, but the Summer EBT Program fails to address the barriers that exist to healthy and nutritional foods,” Garcia said in a statement. “Iowa’s kids need consistent access to nutritionally dense food, and their families need to feel supported to make healthy choices around food and nutrition. Another benefit card addressed to children is not the way to take on this issue.”

This is a particularly insidious sentiment. It's this whole thing of "if we let the poors choose their food they will waste it on xyx. They will squander it on food void of nutrition." Now there is a lot to unpack here. The first thing, and this is what most others have offered as a counterpoint, is the utter disdain with which Reynolds regards poor individuals. We are slack jawed yokels, or worse yet, immigrants, and welfare queens. In her eyes, we are poor because of the poor decisions we make...so how can we be trusted to make healthy choices for our own betterment. But here is another point I want to focus in on, when you are food insecure, and I mean like really fucking strapped for cash. It is a zero sum game. You just need calories. You need food. Full stop. We can't even get to discussions of healthy vs unhealthy...we need to talk about consuming enough kcals so that we don't continue to burn off calories and not be able to function in the day to day. Being poor and hungry is a race against time. It is a race against your own body consuming the energy you have before some more sustenance comes along.

I remember when I was in college and food insecure. I was going to school at Kirkwood full time while working as much as I could to pay for my classes. It gave me just enough for maybe 15 or 20 bucks a week for food. Wendy's was my savior back then. Specifically the Wendy's dollar menu. Now I'm not talking about the pathetic excuse for value menus that fast food joints have nowadays. Wendy's was a pioneer in a real deal bonafide dollar menu ie everything on said menu was a dollar. I would get a baked potato and chili with a cup for water please. That would be enough to fill me up for two bones and some change AND if I was lucky I could load up on crackers to boot. Some might argue that getting my meals at a fast food joint was unhealthy...although I know some pretty knowledgeable health and science professionals that talk about how the actual food is less important than calories consumed vs energy expenditure. Of course it's important to get some variety in there but on a base level even eating a friggin cheeseburger is better for you than not eating for a day. I double dog dare you to ask anyone that is hangry that, “you know, actually, we shouldn't eat this meal because overall its unhealthy for us. Instead let's just spend some time figuring out a healthier, more sustainable option.” You're liable to get a beat-down for that behavior in my neck of the woods. (And by neck of the woods I mean if Ive gone a few hours past a meal time and I'm in full snickers commercial hangry mode.)

This whole conversation brings me back to the bootstrap discussion. And another metaphor that speaks to the situation and just so happens to be about boots as well.
Terry Pratchett wrote the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness” in the Discworld series book Men at Arms. It goes:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

Courtesy of Wikipedia

This is such a succinct and real way to look at poverty that its now known as the boots theory, it even has its own wiki. Even more, a price index that looks at creeping food costs, called the Vimes Price Index, was named in its honor. This whole boot metaphor is Reynolds and co telling us that we should hold out for something better. It’s us saying we desperately need strong footwear because the terrain is starting to tear up our bare feet. And instead of addressing the immediate and real need, this administration is telling folks that we need to think about better quality boots. They say all we are going to do is buy flashy sneakers that wont help us in the long run. And the entire time they wax poetic about the programs that will maybe, eventually, help us help ourselves. While they talk our feet are tired and bloody from walking on this increasingly hostile terrain. They'll have us walk until we can walk no more than say its our fault for needing the boots in the first place. We can't even begin to pursue their perverted ideals of pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps if we don't even have boots to begin with.

That's all for today. There is one other angle that I, unfortunately, have a "good" real life example to help me explore. It has to do with how getting caught in this bootstrap paradox also costs us so much in social cache. The example has to do with a time that a "concerned citizen" berated me because I had the audacity to run out of gas on a neighborhood street by his house. Who then proceeded to shove his cell phone in my face and say I should count myself lucky that he couldn't weaponize the police upon me...Like a lot of these posts it will be fun, if you're idea of fun is exploring the worst that our community has to offer in the name of righteous indignation. (And hey what do you know? I just so happen to DO think that is fun- heh.) Until next time. -C