An Idea for Republicans, Ctd

Last Friday I talked about the importance of the poverty problem to a limited-government party in a modern society.

It comes down to this: poor people are expensive. The money they don't earn in wages they still cost society in terms of prison cells and emergency room visits.

In the 1990s, the US made progress against poverty for the first time since the 1960s, thanks to tight labor markets. That progress stopped in the 2000s, as 10 million new migrants (half of them illegal) put slack in labor markets. The progress has gone into reverse since 2008 as a protracted economic crisis has pushed millions of former workers into unemployment.

We can hope that labor market recovery will pull many of those workers back out of poverty.

But even if and when such a labor market recovery occurs - even if we could get people working as if it were 1999 - it would still be true that more than 1 in 10 Americans would be poor.

Now in one sense, the poor will always be with us: the laws of statistics dictate that there must always be a bottom 10%.

It's also true that the poor in America, even in 2011, are not absolutely destitute. They don't starve, they don't freeze to death, they possess refrigerators and other appliances (even if they obtain them through rent-to-own or credit programs that ensure they pay much more for these machines than non-poor Americans do).

That said, in absolute terms, the American poor know more want and insecurity than poor people in other advanced democracies. The American poor also impose more social cost than the poor in other advanced democracies.

The 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections in the last year before the economic crisis - up from less than $11 billion in 1988, according to the Pew Center on the States. More than 1 American in 100 is held behind bars, a rate of incarceration more than seven times higher than Germany's.

Likewise, the lack of basic healthcare sends poor people to emergency rooms at an amazing rate. In 2009, the state of Mississippi reported more than 583 visits to an emergency room for every 1000 people in the state. Maine reported 601. West Virginia reported 671.

Investments that reduced those social demands would be money well spent.

But how?

- MORE TO COME -