Poverty

6 Pages 1380 Words

The existence of poverty ensures that society’s “dirty work” will be done. Every society has such work: physically dirty or dangerous, temporary, dead-end and underpaid, undignified, and menial jobs. Society can fill these jobs by paying higher wages than for “clean” work, or it can force people who have no other choice to do the dirty work and at blow wages. In America, poverty functions to provide a low-wage labor pool that is willing or, rather, unable to be unwilling to perform dirty work at low cost.
Indeed, this function of the poor is so important that in some Southern states, welfare payments have been cut off during the summer months when the poor are needed to work in the field. Moreover, much of the debate about the Negative Income Tax and family Assistance Plan has concerned their impact on the work incentive, by which is actually meant the incentive of the poor to do the needed dirty work if the wages there from are no larger than the income grant. Many economic activities that involve dirty work depend on the poor for their existence: restaurants, hospitals, parts of the garment industry, and “truck farming” among others, could not persist in their present form without the poor.
In history during the great depression one key reason for the great crash of 1929 was that, the Harding-Coolidge-Hoover administrations followed laissez faire policies. They refused to “tamper” with income taxes, interest rates, or use economic regulation powers. This example supports the first functions of poverty.
Because the poor are required to work at low wages, they subsidize a variety of economic activities that benefit the affluent. For example, domestics subsidize the upper-middle and upper classes, making life easier for their employers and freeing affluent women for a variety of professional, cultural, civic, and partying activities. Similarly, because the poor pay a higher proportion of their income in property and...