Extreme poverty in America: read the UN special monitor's report | Hacker News Reader

Extreme poverty in America: read the UN special monitor's report

theguardian.com

75 pointsrbanffy36 comments

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15939995

Part of a series, actually.

Direct link to full report: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?Ne...

> I have spent the past two weeks visiting the United States, at the invitation of the federal government, to look at whether the persistence of extreme poverty in America

I'm confused. This statement makes it sound like Philip Alston is a third party investigating the US on behalf of the UN, however the top results on Google indicate he's an employee and beneficiary of US-based federally-funded institutions.

Well, yes - but where is the confusion ?

I guess its my fault for being ignorant of how the UN chooses who does these reports, but I didn't expect someone with such close ties to the US to be writing reports about the US. For instance if this was "extreme poverty in Russia" I would be surprised to find Moscow State University faculty as the author. Although now that I know better I probably won't be as surprised in the future.

No big surprise here. The US is a member of the UN, of course, and the US and the UK were the driving forces behind the inception of the UN, which was first conceived by the US State Department and later worked out in more detail by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Harry Hopkins.

Having read the full report, this is an extremely damning and bleak view on how USA treats its poor on every level: employment, disability, law enforcement, healthcare, race, gender, and media depiction. I believe if there is one thing to take away from this is the following: This is not purely about what we can see (housing, dilapidation, "single mom" stereotypes) but also what we cannot see (poverty on full-time employment, incarceration rates, healthcare).

Whether you agree or disagree with it on a moral level, eventually the tides are going to turn where the government is going to tax the rich and give to the poor just because the poor are going to so vastly outnumber "the rich" that they are going to vote a true populist into power.

Red state representatives will only be able to appease the masses by blaming people who don't look like them and quoting scripture for so long.

Once they toughen illegal immigration and can't use the boogeyman of "Mexicans taking their jobs" or the evil Muslim non American former President trying to implement Sharia law" something is going to give.

Let's hope so. There has to be a reckoning... Income inequality HAS to be a bubble... the rich getting richer at everyone else's expense has to end someday right?

Let's hope it's amicably via someone like Bernie Sanders as President rather than through a war that the poorest have no chance of winning. Numbers don't matter when it's pitchforks verses tanks.

Don't get too excited. It only takes around $140,000 household income to be in the top 15%. When "they" start voting to redistribute wealth they will come after software engineers, doctors, lawyers and a lot of two income earners who don't think of themselves as "the rich".

In ever increasing ways the US is more comparable to Developing countries than to Developed countries.

I wonder when it will officially be downgraded and recognized as such.

Remember, the first step to fixing a problem is admitting there is one.

  About 55.7% of the U.S. voting-age population cast ballots
  in the 2016 presidential election. In the OECD, the U.S.
  placed 28th in voter turnout, compared with an OECD
  average of 75%.  Registered voters represent a much
  smaller share of potential voters in the U.S. than just
  about any other OECD country. Only about 64% of the U.S.
  voting-age population (and 70% of voting-age citizens) was
  registered in 2016, compared with 91% in Canada (2015) and
  the UK (2016), 96% in Sweden (2014), and nearly 99% in
  Japan (2014).

This is a comment from the report itself. This comment was probably the one that stood out to me the most. It wouldn't surprise me if it was the case that disenfranchisement of the poor would always or almost always lead to a society that doesn't properly care for its less well off.

The poor and minorities have been systematically disenfranchised recently in many states, since they tend to vote against the party currently in power (especially minorities in red states).

The reason why there are homeless in SF and other US cities is because of rent-seeking: a market failure which creates artificial scarcity in housing through zoning density restrictions, overuse of historic landmark status, and overregulation.

It is emotionally convenient (esp. for main-stream media) to blame President Trump for everything, but it is typically local city councils, usually Democratic and not Republican, that is responsible for the rent-seeking. The results are housing scarcity, the high costs of housing, renters paying much more they would in an efficient market, and landlords getting far more money than they would get in an efficient market.

Japan fixed this problem by having federal laws that overrode local laws that supported rent-seeking to disallow zoning density restrictions. The results: in 2014, 140,000 housing units built in Tokyo vs 20,000 in NYC and less than 90,000 in all of California.

The lesson: don't blame President Trump. Seek out and destroy rent-seeking market inefficiencies. Let the market do its thing and you'll see far more affordable housing. Japan has already demonstrated this fact.

I'm curious why you've framed your comment so. The link barely mentions Trump (just in the context of the Republican tax plan impacting government antipoverty spending) and is not written by a journalist, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Alston .

What would a president who is barely in office for a year have to do with decades of poverty development and increases in income inequality ?

The article explicitly thanks Trump administration for cooperation. The rest of article has no mention of Trump. Problems described in article sound to be long term and unlikely to be related to Trump.

Edit: there is second mention of Trump - in relation to plan of tax cuts that make it worst. Still, it hardly counts and blaming the Trump for current situation since it is just a plan.

"The dramatic cuts in welfare, foreshadowed by Donald Trump and speaker Ryan, and already beginning to be implemented by the administration, will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes. It is against this background that my report is presented."

That would be "the plan". Not a cause of current state. They claim that Trumps plan will make it worst. Not that Trump caused current situation.

The reason there are homeless is far more complex than high rent. Anyone working a reasonable job can afford to rent a room relatively cheaply, although there are working homeless.

Unfortunately, the orgs that help the homeless are focused on self-survival by strictly focusing on the impossible cases. Having a job, being sober, and no mental illness gets no support. A lot of this is via earmarking, but there are so many elements that it's impossible to pinpoint a single reason that encompasses all things.

> The reason there are homeless is far more complex than high rent. Anyone working a reasonable job can afford to rent a room relatively cheaply,

Yeah, this is not true.

I don’t think OP meant literally rent, it’s a term “rent seeking”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

Another problem is the fact that all new housing tends to be semi-luxurious. No developer wants to develop affordable housing.

Which you’d think would have a downward pressure on non luxury housing

It's not that simple.

It is literally that simple.

It's not a "free" market.

You would think that there is a market for small houses on small lots that people can actually afford.

Profit margins are lower.

It's also riskier, due to how insecure low incomes are to maintain. It's a death spiral.

Seems to be the perfect place for a government to step in.

With all the free, empty land inside of major cities?

This is an explanation of homelessness in particular in the midst of plenty. The report was not simply a report on homelessness but on poverty. Poverty in the US has increased massively in the last twenty or thirty years. With less mass homelessness, that poverty would be harder to see but certainly be present - for examples, you could actually read the OP.

I think solving the poverty crisis in the U.S. requires a few insights to become broadly accepted:

- There are many causes of this systemic poverty and no specific regulation or deregulation can fix it. Only broad systemic change can lead to genuine improvement.

- The causes and fixes of the poverty crisis are not partisan. Placing either blame or solution with one political party is uninformed and counterproductive.

- America must fix its income inequality to fix its poverty. Tax hikes for the rich are unavoidable. There are no free lunches or quick fixes. Everything has been tried before somewhere in the world and the only proven anti-poverty strategy is wealth redistribution.

- Things can always get worse, passively waiting until they do is actively contributing to the problem.

I'm curious how you can reconcile your second and third bullet points. If tax hikes on the rich are an unavoidable part of the solution, one party just rammed through a huge tax cut for the rich and the other party did everything they could to stop it. It can be argued that the Democrats don't really care about fixing income inequality and that they like to use it as a talking point more so than they like to actually make progress, but to pretend that the Republicans are anything less than a roadblock to fixing this issue seems disingenuous if you believe what you said in the third bullet point.

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