Poverty is a Shortage of Money. Period.

As Congressional repugs compete to come up with the most mendacious and degrading excuse for snatching the last crumbs of sustenance from America's non-rich, Barbara Ehrenreich reminds us that lying about the real source of poverty has a long history.

Harrington did such a good job of making the poor seem “other” that when I read his book in 1963, I did not recognize my own forebears and extended family in it. All right, some of them did lead disorderly lives, by middle-class standards, involving drinking, brawling and out-of-wedlock babies. But they were also hard-working and in some cases fiercely ambitious—qualities that Harrington seemed to reserve for the economically privileged.

According to him, what distinguished the poor was their unique “culture of poverty,” a concept he borrowed from anthropologist Oscar Lewis, who had derived it from his study of Mexican slum-dwellers. That concept gave The Other America a trendy academic twist, but it also gave the book a conflicted double message: “We”—always the presumptively affluent readers—needed to find some way to help the poor, but we also needed to understand that there was something wrong with them, something that could not be cured by a straightforward redistribution of wealth. Think of the earnest liberal who encounters a panhandler, is moved to pity by the man’s obvious destitution, but refrains from offering a quarter—since the hobo might, after all, spend the money on booze.

SNIP

By the Reagan era, the “culture of poverty” had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused not by low wages or a lack of jobs but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to “defer gratification” or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money. In fact, Charles Murray argued in his 1984 book, Losing Ground, that any attempt to help the poor with their material circumstances would only have the unexpected consequence of deepening their depravity.

So it was in a spirit of righteousness and even compassion that Democrats and Republicans joined to reconfigure social programs to cure not poverty but the “culture of poverty.”

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Even today, more than fifteen years later and four years into a severe economic downturn, as people continue to slide into poverty from the middle classes, the theory maintains its grip. If you’re needy, you must be in need of correction, the assumption goes, so TANF recipients are routinely instructed in how to improve their attitudes. Applicants for a growing number of safety-net programs are subjected to drug testing. Lawmakers in twenty-three states are considering testing people who apply for such programs as job training, food stamps, public housing, welfare and home heating assistance. And on the theory that the poor are likely to harbor criminal tendencies, applicants for safety-net programs are increasingly subjected to fingerprinting and computerized warrant searches.

Unemployment, with its ample opportunities for slacking off, is another obviously suspect condition, and last years twelve states considered requiring urine tests as a condition for receiving unemployment benefits. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich have suggested drug testing as a condition for all government benefits, presumably including Social Security. If Granny insists on handling her arthritis with marijuana, she may have to starve.

SNIP

Fifty years later, a new discovery of poverty is long overdue. This time, we’ll have to take account not only of stereotypical Skid Row residents and Appalachians but of foreclosed-upon suburbanites, laid-off tech workers and America’s ever growing army of the “working poor.” And if we look closely enough, we’ll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.

Read the whole thing.

Later, Ehrenreich responded to defenses of the "culture of poverty."

I am somewhat dismayed, though, by Harrington’s and Burton’s apparent assumption that the poor or a subset of them do in fact exhibit some forms of “unfortunate behavior” that can be attributed to a “culture of poverty.” If there is a “culture of poverty” among the long-term or multigenerational poor, it has always been, in my experience, characterized by a great deal of generosity. As my father used to say: “If you ever need money, go to a poor man, because they’re the only ones who will help you.” The “culture of wealth,” if we could call it that, provides an instructive contrast.