Silvio Laccetti: Beyond the Poverty Threshold

Silvio Laccetti is a retired professor of history and social sciences at Stevens Institute of Technology. He can be reached at slaccett@stevens.edu.

Big headlines greeted the recent release of new federal poverty statistics, fueling a vitriolic debate about wealth and poverty in America. The same ancient rhetoric is resurrected every election cycle, confusing the issue and further dividing the populace. To have a more meaningful discussion, we must keep in mind that poverty is relative.

We can and do quantify poverty. Federal poverty lines are drawn based on yearly income: $10,890 for one person, $22,350 for a household of four. According to the latest figures, 15.7 percent of all Americans - some 46 million people - are poor. In Pennsylvania, the latest poverty rate stands at 13.4 percent, or some 1.6 million souls, with much higher rates in cities such as Philadelphia (26.7 percent), Allentown (27 percent), and Reading (41.3 percent, the highest among cities of more than 65,000 nationwide). All the numbers are up, but after three terrible years of economic recession, who is surprised?...

As the Bible says, the poor shall always be with us; poverty is a by-product of civilization. But there is hope. In a famous speech, the Athenian statesman Pericles declared that poverty was no disgrace so long as one works to get out of it.

I can personally point to an example, a friend with substance-abuse and mental-health problems who was living in a cemetery. I intervened, giving him a place to live rent-free, provided he went into rehab and found work.

He did. After some months, I charged him a fair rent. A year later, after lots of hard work and overtime, he had managed to save $20,000; according to one study, more than a quarter of Americans don't even have ready access to $1,000. My friend wasn't wealthy, but he was poor no more....