RE-THINKING POVERTY

"If you think the cost of education is high, think about the cost of ignorance." ~ Anon.

A recent report says that poverty in British Columbia costs the government $8.1 to $9.2 billion a year. It also says reducing poverty significantly would cost the government about a half to a third of that: $3 - $4 billion a year.

The report comes from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA). It's title: The Cost of Poverty in B.C.

B.C. is the part of Canada which rubs up against the Pacific Ocean. (It's sometimes called British California.) By comparison, it is larger than every U.S. state except Alaska. The population is about 4.5 million, roughly the same as Louisiana.

The cost of poverty, as reported by the CCPA, works out to about $2,100 for every man, woman and child in BC, or $8,400 for a family of four, every year. That's a significant amount of cash.

Where are those costs? Health care is huge. Poor people are usually hungry and malnourished. I've seen numerous health agency reports (including one by the Health Region based in River City). Malnourished people are sicker than the average, because poor eating lowers a body's defences to fight off illness. Poor people don't pay as close attention to their physical or mental health — they seek help from doctors and dentist less often than others. And so it goes.

Then there is the cost of ignorance — unemployability. There is lower or lost worker productivity. There is increased crime. There is homelessness or terrible housing, which often makes people sick.

I'm sure none of this comes as a surprise to any of you.

The report ends with a strong conclusion:
Purely on economic grounds, it makes more sense to tackle poverty directly than to continue to pay out year after year for its long-term consequences. The real question is not “Can we afford to reduce poverty?” but “Can we afford not to?”

But solving the problem is not as simple as it sounds. There is a lot of bias, strong bias, against the poor.

The poor are blamed for their poverty. That's like blaming a fish for being born in water. The continuing cycle of poverty means many or most poor people have no idea of how to be non-poor; poverty is the only thing they know — it's a learned response to life. And when you add the people de-employed by the 2008-09 financial disaster, the number of unemployed people is pretty high. Unemployment is about one worker out of ten in the U.S, almost as high in Canada. Many hard-working people are out of jobs through no fault of their own. Many have fallen into real poverty. But somehow they are made to feel the job loss is their fault.

Fortunately, there are programs for helping people. Unfortunately, those programs are so limited in terms of the number of people they can help, they make little significant difference.

So I keep coming back to that quote about the cost of education. It's a lot less than the overall effect of ignorance. The same holds true for the cost of keeping people in poverty, instead of helping them find ways to get out of it.