| Poverty exists because our society is
an unequal one ,and there are extremely strong and powerful political
pressures to keep it that way. Any attempt to redistribute wealth and
income in the United States will inevitably be opposed by powerful middle and
upper class interests. People can be relatively rich only if others are
relatively poor, and since power is concentrated in the hands of the rich,
public policies will continue to reflect their interests rather than those of
the poor. As Herbert Gans (1973) has pointed out, poverty is actually functional from the point of view of the non-poor. Poverty ensures that" dirty" work gets done. If there were, no poor people to scrub floors and empty waste, these jobs would have to be rewarded with high incomes before anyone would touch them. Poverty creates jobs for many of the non-poor, such as police officers, welfare workers, pawnbrokers, and government bureaucrats. Poverty makes life easier for the rich by providing them with cooks, gardeners, and other workers to perform basic chores while their employers enjoy more, pleasurable activities. Poverty provides a market for inferior goods and services, such as day-old bread, run-down automobiles, or the advice of incompetent physicians and lawyers. Poverty makes middle-class values seem acceptable. To the middle class, the fate of the poor — who are supposed to lack the virtues of thrift, honesty, and a taste for hard work — only confirms the desirability of qualities the poor are thought to lack. Poverty also provides a group that can be made to absorb the costs of change. For example, the poor suffer the main part or force of unemployment caused by automaton, and it is their homes, not those of the wealthy, that are demolished when a route has to be found for a new highway. There is no intentional, conscious "secret plan" of the wealthy to keep the poor in poverty. It is just that poverty is an inevitable outcome of the American economic system; which the poor are politically powerless to influence change. |