Poverty problem affects everyone, not just the poor

Poverty is a complex issue. On the surface it seems like someone else's problem, but a deeper look can show its impact on others. You don't have to be poor to see the effects of poverty.

As a teenager, I thought poverty was something that in itself couldn't actually affect anything. I felt poverty was an outcome of someone else's poor decisions and lifestyle choices. The poor were merely unable to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps - as the saying goes.

In hindsight, I didn't really think about it at all. I imagine most people don't. As with many other aspects of the world around us, our exposure to poverty is mainly through the lens of television cameras. The poverty we see on the news is real, but it's not just on TV - poverty is problem all over the United States, and especially here in Louisiana.

In its most base definition, poverty is deprivation. People living in poverty are often deprived of access to healthy food, clean water, proper shelter and education.

People are classified as impoverished when their income is lower than the poverty line or they meet federal poverty guidelines.

The poverty line itself is calculated by the U.S. government and considers inflation and the cost of living, and is used primarily for statistical classification. The federal poverty guidelines are a little more flexible and are used to grant access to government programs such as Women's Infants and Children's Nutrition Fund.

They are both highly influential in the classification of people in poverty and the public perception of what constitutes poverty.

The 2008 poverty line for a single person is $10,400 dollars of yearly income, according to the Federal Register. That means a single person who earns less than $10,400 is technically living in poverty. The line changes for the number of dependents the head of the household has, adding $3,600 for each dependent, so a family of two must be less than $14,000.

They're not the most holistic methods of measuring poverty, but they're the easiest way to see poverty from the outside.

On the national level, 13 percent of the U.S. population lives below the poverty line according to the 2006 U.S. census. That seems like a fairly low number, but in terms of poverty prevention and intervention, the U.S. is one of the lowest-ranked developed nations according to the United Nation's development program. On the human poverty index the U.S. ranks 18th - below most of western Europe and Japan.

That's pretty awful, but poverty in our state is even worse.

Around 14.4 percent of all families in Louisiana are impoverished, as are 19 percent of individuals according the U.S. Census 2006 American Community Survey.

Locally things don't look so good either. 2006 figures show 20 percent of Baton Rouge families and 27 percent of individuals living in poverty.

There are certainly some post-Katrina factors in those statistics, but arguments about the definition of the numbers won't change anything - we're still in pretty bad shape.

The big deal here is that many of the same factors that keep Louisiana on the lowest tier of nearly every U.S. ranking are the result of or a determinant of poverty. The issue really isn't as individual as people tend to believe - poverty affects entire regions.

Two of the major determinants of poverty, education and healthcare, are major problems in Louisiana and have far-reaching effects.

Our poorly funded and staffed schools keep our children uneducated and unskilled in a world that is rapidly requiring advanced training for even the simplest of jobs. Our future workforce will be tainted by poor living conditions and unskilled for the future.

Our inadequate medical facilities can barely handle the sick they have now, but children born into poverty have a lesser chance of survival than those born out of it. High infant mortality is inexcusable in the modern world, but it is also something that damages the future of our state by cutting our population.

Both of these measures seem distant and abstract. But new young people and their education are of utmost importance to the betterment of this state and to the public policy that will be drafted by the state. These are just two examples, but there are many more.

Whether an individual is poor or not is almost irrelevant. Poverty itself is influential and will affect our future.

Originally published in The Daily Reveille...