Want to Attack True Poverty? Look Overseas

For too long, a kind of America-first mindset has dominated our giving and prevented a fair share of the U.S. charitable dollar from going to the poor of the rest of the world.

It is not hard to understand why. Helping those “at home” is a natural instinct reinforced by seeing the homeless and other needy Americans firsthand.

But by international standards, not only would most low-income Americans not be considered poor, they would qualify as rich. And our assistance to them, in a very real sense, would be considered charity for the rich.

In dealing with the issue of poverty, U.S. government leaders face a complex maze of constituents’ emotions and political sensitivities. For them to examine the subject critically is to risk being labeled heartless.

But private donors face no such obstacles. They are free to direct their giving where it will do the most good.

By failing to recognize that poverty — in its classic, accepted sense of material want — has been eliminated in America, donors continue to misappropriate their resources. Those grant makers and individuals who want to attack poverty in its basest form should look anew at the needs of people who live outside America’s borders.

True charity begins with an assessment of true needs.

The American tradition of helping the poor owes much to the images presented by the journalist Jacob Riis and the photographer Walker Evans decades ago. To this day, when we think of poverty we usually associate it with emaciated faces, tattered clothing, and squalid surroundings — the sad scene that was real when President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke of “one-third of a nation ill housed, ill clad, and ill nourished.”

To the United States’ immense credit, however, the basic needs of most of its citizens have been met. The important — but often neglected — truth is that the rising tide of prosperity since World War II has created a nationwide standard of living that, combined with government programs, has eliminated material want for the overwhelming majority of our people. In fact, among Americans of all incomes, poor and rich, overeating poses a greater health problem than not enough to eat.

The reverse is true in developing nations, where undernourishment remains common. There are no food stamps, welfare payments, public housing, medical clinics, and the many other services that government agencies and charities provide for America’s needy.

For the truly unfortunate people of the world, every day is a struggle to survive — to put food on the table and to ward off such elemental threats as disease and hostile weather. Their homes usually have no electricity or indoor plumbing. There are no televisions, no telephones, no refrigerators, no microwave ovens, no cars — none of the things that have become commonplace in virtually every segment of American society. Experts estimate that one-fourth of the people of the world — some 1.5 billion people — live in such a state of poverty.

To be sure, America still has its share of impoverished people, the most visible of which are the homeless. But to equate that relatively small population — composed in the main of people who are severely handicapped in one way or another — with the much larger group that is generally labeled “poor” is a distortion that stands in the way of finding solutions to the real problems of poverty.

The federal government is the main source of the confusion over who is really poor, partly because it defines poverty exclusively by income. For example, it considers a family of four to be poor if its income is below a level of about $16,000 a year.

By that measure, the government maintains, some 38 million Americans fall below the poverty line — and poverty has hovered relatively unchanged around 14 per cent since 1980. Yet can anyone really believe that poverty is that pervasive, or that it has remained so stubbornly unchanged for so long?

Some may argue that comparing the poor in America with the poor abroad neglects the fact that poverty is relative — that, set against the broader background of American wealth, those with less suffer deprivations that are real. Yet the sword of relativity cuts both ways.

For example, millions of Hispanics come to the United States each year, legally and illegally, to seek work. Some 30 per cent of those immigrants are said by the government to be living in poverty.

Yet they keep coming, and the reason is clear: True poverty is what they left behind, and they are willing to endure all the hardships that being a stranger in a foreign land entails. What’s more, despite wages that are meager by U.S. standards, most Hispanic and other immigrants find a way to maintain their improved standard of living and still send money back home to help relatives who have stayed behind.

Annual per-person consumption is perhaps the most telling indicator of a people’s well-being. By that measure, the United States ranks third in the world, behind only Japan and Switzerland, at $16,500 for every man, woman, and child. In contrast, 121 countries out of 177 have annual per-capita consumption under $2,000, with 88 of those countries under $1,000. But only when one looks at individual totals — such as Madagascar’s annual per-capita consumption of $200, India’s $170, Nepal’s $135, Ethiopia’s $95, and Somalia’s $17 — does one fully appreciate the desperate state in which many of our fellow human beings find themselves.

Americans can help alleviate that extreme misery, just as their generosity — provided through tax dollars and private donations — has helped eliminate poverty at home. But a strong bias against such giving persists.

Politicians who rail against foreigners and foreign aid have contributed to that bias. The Korean War-era Congressman who said that the life of one American boy was more important than “all of Asia” may have been extreme in his views, but his sentiments have been echoed, albeit with more polish, many times since.

Indeed, criticism of foreign aid has tainted the very idea of helping non-Americans. It has also created the false impression that our government is taking care of the problem by channeling an abundance of riches overseas. As a result, polls repeatedly show that Americans think that U.S. foreign aid, which accounts for less than 1 per cent of the federal budget, is 10 to 20 times its actual amount.

Recent revelations in the Chicago Tribune about serious flaws in the management of international charities should not blind us to our ability to alleviate genuine poverty. The American economy is like a great ship, riding high above the waves and through all storms. We who have the good fortune to be aboard that ship must recognize that it is fundamentally wrong to use fixed resources to make more comfortable those already on the ship, when all around us people are drowning in real poverty.

The continuing failure to differentiate between the situations of the world’s poor guarantees that those most in need will go wanting. That may be the real heartlessness.

Philip D. Harvey is president of DKT International, an organization in Washington that provides family-planning services in developing countries.