Poverty Returns with Misguided Policy

Kurztext / Annotation
Poverty is not a natural phenomenon but the resxult of misguided politcial decision.

Professor Franz Segbers understands capitalism as a religion with money and competition as fetishes. Capitalism is not monolithic but has varieties and responds to social pressure.


Textauszug
1. Poverty Returns WITH MISGUIDED POLICY

By Franz Segbers

[This article published on May 12, 2011, is translated abridged from the German on the Internet. Up to 2014, Dr. Segbers was a professor at the University of Marburg.]

When you hear the word poverty, what picture do you have? Is it the beggar, the unemployed Hartz IV recipient or the woman, the single parent taking care of her children? Who comes to your mind?

Poverty in Germany strikes the long-term unemployed engineer, the academically trained single parent, the factory- and service person slaving away, the deregulated subcontracted worker, the creative and precarious small- or Internet entrepreneur and parts of the core personnel in businesses. Very normal pensioners stand in line at the soup kitchens. Poverty extends to the middle classes and our communities that for a long while were not stricken by poverty.

"I was not really described as poor." Elisabeth is a single parent. She lives with her two children in a small apartment on the outskirts of Frankfurt. She has a part-time job that she supplements with Hartz IV (radical German welfare reform that combined unemployment assistance and income support, drastically reduced the duration of benefits and was ruled in violation of civil rights by the German Constitutional Court). She has slightly more than 900 euros. Is she poor? No, she says. "We have a tight budget but we aren't starving. When the children need new things, I get money from my parents..." She has no prospect of a full-time job...

There are many Elisabeths in Germany. Every eighth person has to manage with an income below the subsistence level. European statistics set the mark at 60% of the median income of the country. Whoever has less is defined as poor. Three groups are particularly afflicted by poverty: unemployed at 54%, single parents at 40% and migrants at 27%. Those are nationwide numbers; the Berlin numbers are always higher. But poverty is different than income poverty or lack of money. There is no objective definition of poverty. Poverty means fellow persons have to live in miserable housing, have low-paying work, can hardly feed themselves and suffer with poorer access to education. This undersupply is largely a consequence of income poverty. The more or the less a rich society is ready to hand over part of its wealth to combat the plight of fellow citizens, the more or the less poverty exists in a society. Poverty is the exclusion of people from the possibilities and resources of a society. Why are they excluded? Who excludes them?

Poverty is returning. That must be our first discovery when we speak about poverty in Germany. Once it was fought and became a marginal problem. Why is it returning? For a long while, there was the firm belief that life goes forward and we live in an elevator society. Our children will be better off. That was the motto when I was growing up. This picture of the elevator society where everyone would be prosperous is not reality any more. Everyone is not on an upward course any more. The picture has turned upside down. While some are going upward, others are going downward. A Lord's Prayer society has replaced the elevator society. The formerly secure middle class at its outskirts has long been eroding. Children with good education can not find good jobs and work their way from one traineeship to the next and one temporary job to the next.

In the 1980s, unemployment was the main reason for poverty. In the 1990s, child poverty moved into the center of attention. Since the turn of the millennium, work is the main reason for poverty. Now poverty gnaws in the situations of many families who are counted in the middle class. Why is that? Why is poverty returning and why is the number of the poor increasing - and also the number of the rich? Why is the middle cl

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