A little while ago, Matt Bruenig and I wrote a response to Gavin McInnes pro-stay-at-home-mom rant on HuffPo Live. You can read our response here, at Salon. In our essay, we provide some census data showing that over half of couples in which the wife works would fall into or near poverty if the wife were to stop working. We suggest this is a bigger obstacle to women staying at home with their kids than some poisonous masculinizing of women due to feminism, and provide the Netherlands as an example of the options available to moms in countries with robust social programs.
McInnes responded with an article in Taki’s Magazine, which I guess is some kind of bizarro world counterpart to HelloGiggles.com, with an article claiming that there really isn’t any American poverty. You can read McInnes’ response here, though I will be quoting from it so that you don’t have to give the website traffic. If you can resist, I’d advise you not visit for that reason.
It’s difficult to discern a structure from McInnes’ response. We get a stream of consciousness that visits his boyhood in poverty, some things that might happen in the Dominican Republic relating to American welfare fraud, and a movie he recently shot. Point is, I can’t really respond sequentially. So I’m going to respond thematically.
Theme 1: Children don’t really add many expenses, so mothers don’t have to work.
One of the only sane responses to my insistence that women would rather stay home was, “Yes we would, but we can’t afford it.” We’re told families need two incomes to stay above the poverty line. Why? You’re already paying rent for your place. Add another person in there and all you need are more groceries. And if you don’t eat shitty food, groceries are still pretty cheap.
I’m going to try to be very clear here because it’s obvious McInnes did not understand the sort of analysis Bruenig and I offer of the census data. 54% of couples feature families that, if the women had not worked, would have been in or near poverty. So, they were already in poverty prior to the wife’s earnings. McInnes seems to imagine they are not in poverty to start with and then add more members to the household (which is a trivial cost for some reason). No, the husband’s income alone would already put them in or near poverty. That’s why the wife works.So either McInnes is talking about a family surviving above poverty wherein the wife continues to work (in which case: not relevant to his overall argument against us) or he’s refusing to engage with the portion of people who would be in poverty without the wife’s income.
Theme 2: Poverty in America is not really poverty.
When we think of true poverty, the famous picture of the migrant mother in the Dust Bowl comes to mind, but today’s poor look more like Honey Boo Boo’s mom. They live in big houses or subsidized apartments. They play video games. They watch TV on a massive screen and they stuff their faces.
To quote Bruenig: “This is an old saw of the right wing, typically peddled by the laughingstock “think tank” known as the Heritage Foundation. The argument, as best as it can be made out, is that there is no more poverty because consumer electronics are very inexpensive these days. Were consumer electronics the only things needed to live, this would be a great point. It turns out however that people also need housing, transportation, health care, child care, clothing, and food, among other things. Pointing out that there has been a severe price decline in one class of goods tells you nothing about the overall cost of living.
Well said. Digging a little deeper here, we can imagine McInnes’ point like this: if ‘poverty’ is only nominal, we shouldn’t be able to see it as a label track with any significant indicators, such as health, mental health, life expectancy, early pregnancy, etc. If the label ‘poverty’ does track with indicators like those, we know those living in poverty are materially distinct from the rest of the population, meaning that McInnes’ argument that the poor are basically as well off as anyone else is nonsense.
Living at or up to twice the poverty line is correlated with a loss of 8.2 years of perfect health. The rate of unintended pregnancy among women at or near the federal poverty line is five times that of women at the highest income bracket. Poverty contributes significantly to mortality. Asthma is more common in people living below the federal poverty level than those living above it by a significant margin.
This is to say that living at or near the poverty line has real material outcomes; it tracks with measurable differences between the group labeled ‘impoverished’ and those not labeled so. Thus, no matter how much TV they’re watching or if their kids have cool shoes or if they’re eating enough to live, poverty is a real condition with measurable outcomes. If the poverty line were nominal and there were no serious difference between the people living under, at, or near it and everyone else, we wouldn’t see the data that we do.
Theme 3: People commit all kinds of elaborate welfare fraud.
She told me it’s a myth that women get lots of money for having kids, as the state only adds $125/month per kid. She said scamming among other single moms was rare but admits she’s seen a few who get up to $800 a month in food stamps. This sounds like a dumb way to scam the state until you realize many will exchange the food for cash. Many Dominican moms use their stamps to send barrels of food back to their homeland.
Food stamp fraud occurs at about 1.3%, or 1.3 cents on the dollar. The elaborate scheme involving the Dominican Republic is from a NY Post article, wherein a handful of people are apparently interviewed and freely offer up that they’re committing food stamp fraud. No investigation of any kind is mentioned or implied. Hm.
I recently shot a movie on one of the poorest streets in Brooklyn and the single mom’s house we shot in was gigantic. She had four kids and each had their own room. One room appeared to be some kind of shrine to the matriarch and the walls were festooned with pictures of her from throughout her life. The fridge was packed, the porch went on forever, and the TV was one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. We shot all night at that location and I was startled to see her teenage son playing Batman on his Xbox at five in the morning. I hadn’t noticed him because he didn’t get up until five PM. When I was his age I worked at a gas station and if I wanted to play a video game, I’d bring a dollar to the arcade. Only spoiled brats had an Atari at home.