I'll keep it brief this time (as brief as clarity will allow for).
I've fixed thousands of broken things in my life, many of them simple messes. When you're faced with a mess, the best approach, I've found, is to first separate what faces you into piles of items that share some salient common characteristic. After that, each pile can be treated in its own special way. Immediately, things that can be useful to you become apparent. Things that can be recycled can be arranged for ease of handling. Stuff that others can use can be set aside and so on. In the end, if you're smart about it, the minimum turns out to be absolutely unusable.
It's not too much of a stretch to call the American wealth dichotomy a mess - a giant social mess that continues to get bigger and a glaring failure of our current approach to democracy.
You will never comprehend the nature of relative poverty if you fail to recognize that there are two distinct classes of causality behind such poverty. The first comes out of left field in a person's life, laying them low, as the result of entirely unique personal factors. The other relates to systemic factors that act, without surcease, to imprison whole classes of people in permanently disadvantaged circumstances.
Individual misfortune can be very difficult for government to redress in any meaningful way, and since this essay is directed at what I believe government should be doing, I'd like to put the class of individual misfortune off to the side with the casual observation that love connections - as opposed to institutional structure - can be most helpful in bringing relief to any given situation of personal misfortune.
The class of people this writing is dedicated to helping, however, involves those who find themselves trapped in communities where, no matter how hard they work, they just never seem to be able to get ahead of the endlessly rotating monthly cost of being where they are. This second type of burdened Americans, includes various sub-classes, most of which could experience some degree of government-engineered relief, if we could only muster the intellectual force and the political will needed to design and enact appropriate fixes. As it now stands, obstacles standing in the way of implementing of such relief are simply permitted to persist, interminably.
I can hear it now - the murmur of collective objection rolling in from that territory of political thought where any government expense on behalf of the disadvantaged and the struggling is verboten - unless, of course, it's for the purpose of continuing to expand our already enormous military/industrial complex. Simmer down guys, these ideas aren't directed at expanding welfare rolls. Quite the contrary, in fact. They're directed at helping working people to keep more of what they earn so they can make more of the lives they have.
In America, outside of academia and a smattering of books and periodicals, we have tended towards a highly politicized view of poverty, muddied by the existing Democratic/Republican duopoly, the realities of which compel lawmakers to battle for political office in a way which tends to make them abandon sensible nuances for brazenly lopsided political polemic. The white-hot realm of electing most lawmakers, swamped by blandishing tides of biased advertising that go for the gut effect, don't allow much room for finely tuned reasoning. The observing public is coaxed into lusting after silver-bullet mental nuggets, most of which would do more harm than good if they were ever implemented. Many politicians succumb to the temptation to oblige this lust, embracing the inevitable attention of the press with both arms. Thus the opportunity to winnow out useful understanding from destructive disinformation, in the laying down of some base of useful common ground, is lost to a flood of angry emotion, election after election.
Arguably, frustration with that situation is what led many voters to opt for a presidential candidate whose personal means appeared to put him beyond having to pander to entrenched political process. It remains to be seen whether that run around the flank of the system will prove to have been a good bet by American voters or a foolish abandonment of cautious protocol. Personally, I don't care what party Mr. Trump actually belongs to; as far as relieving relative poverty is concerned, both the main parties have been miserable failures. If his administration succeeds in allowing the United States middle-earnings class to both garner - and hold onto - a greater share of overall wealth, I will be jubilant.
As I have indicated in my essay toting the usefulness of lateral, class-neutral, person-to-person financial assistance in the mitigation of wealth disparity, there is nothing inconsequential about people falling from security into the spiritual pit of hard times. It should be understood, however, that there is not much that government can do about insulating people from the effects of either bad luck, or bad choices, without becoming an oppressive force on their natural freedoms.
Many would argue that we have already strayed into the territory of government interference in people's lives, with no net social gain to show for it. For the most part, I do not subscribe to that view. One concern I do share, however, is what certain over-cautious regulatory controls might be doing to dissuade people from trying their luck in the niche business sector.
The one role of government that it would please me to see more vigorously applied is in the dismantling of entrenched systems of commercial, or financial, privilege that entrap whole classes of people in a financially disadvantageous situation, particularly in America's large cities.
When people migrate, en masse, to urban areas, looking for social gratification and work opportunity, the demand for housing becomes so intense that landlords jack the price up as high as the market will bear. People end up being barely able to hang on to whatever housing they have secured. They're left with very little to spend on the local, street-level economy. Any hope of getting beyond renting and into a house of their own evaporates; and the situation remains that way, year after year, until they age out of the work roles they hold and are suddenly faced with being unable to make the rent they've been paying.
The grand solution to this pressing nationwide problem is so simple that it pains me to contemplate the institutional foot-dragging that surrounds the issue. It all revolves around the simple principle of increasing supply and reducing demand in urban areas where people are closely packed together.
I believe the whole situation would do a huge U-turn for the better if only people saw living in one of America's smaller communities as being more attractive than they do now, and one way to help that happen is for government to invest in improving public services and amenities in those smaller communities, in a word, by making them better.
Another way to sweeten the bait is for government to do a better job of helping smaller, rural-based businesses survive (if not thrive). The codes that apply to having a business in a rural community need to be simpler and reflect rural realities. For instance, requiring some chuck wagon on some corner out in the middle of nowhere, patronized by ranchers and cowboys (like the one in our 150-strong town) to have a wheelchair-accessible bathroom, like some eating establishment in a city, is totally counterproductive, to put it kindly. That business will simply disappear (leaving a lot of die-hard burger-chowing Republican gripers in its wake).
I'm advocating this approach from the standpoint of personal experience. We moved out of Seattle to occupy and restore an old building in a one-horse town in the middle of nowhere. It was a bit of a bumpy ride, at first. People out here tend to be a bit rough around the edges, compared with their city brethren. The trick was to not care too much about how much we stuck out. It took time to find paying employment. That period of difficulty forced us to invent our way toward living well on very little money. The up side of being out here is that there is a lot of flexibility available, once you cop to the pace of things, and a huge bounty in natural providence. All told, we now get to keep more of each dollar made than when we lived in Seattle, with very little to waste it away on.
Not a day goes by without me marveling at how financially lucky we've become, even though we may rail against the social and torpor of the surrounding county and its lackluster business activity.
This is a huge, mainly empty, country with thousands of languishing small towns waiting for earnest people with drive to come and breathe new life into them. It's also veers hugely toward voting Republican, which is boring as all get out. Why leave all of this bounty of ease and beauty to the Republican Party to monopolize. I hardly think the nation's founders would delight in the idea of vast swaths of rural America sinking into the ideological swamp of entrenched, one-sided political discourse.
Now that's something to contemplate, isn't it?
Yes, we CAN make America great again; but not before we free the renters from urban servitude and help them get happily settled in slower-paced, more rural communities.
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