Spare Change?
John Edwards and the Problem of Homelessness in America
David Hodges
March 2005
It is a scene that most of us here in Chapel Hill are familiar with. Friday night, you’re walking down Franklin St with a group of friends, when all of a sudden a voice masked by shadows calls out, “Hey man, got any spare change?”
To some, it’s just a minor distraction—an inconvenience if you will—to an otherwise uninterrupted stroll along our campus’s main thoroughfare. But to most of us, it’s a somewhat humbling experience. A reminder of how fortunate we are to be attending a four-year university and to have our greatest concerns be wrapped up in tuition hikes or travel planning for spring break as opposed to where our next meal is going to come from or how we’re going to stay warm when the thermometer starts to dip below freezing.
According to a study by the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, on any given night there are upwards of two-hundred thirty homeless people walking the streets of Orange County (a low estimate according to most homeless aid workers). More than 30% of these have been labeled “chronically homeless,” meaning that they have a disability and have been homeless for more than a year. It is also estimated that in the Triangle area there are a total of 1,800 homeless people, and perhaps more shockingly, that 600 of them are children.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill recently launched a Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity (CPWO for short) to be housed in the law school. According to a UNC press release, the goal of this new think tank will be to “bring together faculty and other national public policy experts to examine innovative and practical ideas for moving more Americans out of poverty and into the middle class.”
It all seems innocuous enough on the surface, but this is where things get tricky.
The school is bringing in former North Carolina Senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards to head up the whole thing. He was tapped because he is a “distinguished alumnus” who “[as a U.S. Senator] championed policy initiatives such as raising the minimum wage and providing incentives for teachers to teach in low-income schools” among other things. To top it off, they’re giving him a guest professorship.
This move is ignorant of the fact that increasing minimum wage reduces the demand for labor and therefore lowers economic output and creates more joblessness. Joblessness to poverty and poverty to homelessness seem like pretty easy connections to make. So John, remind us again why we want to raise minimum wage? Oh, because it plays on the heart strings of the “burdened America” you claim to represent? Is that the very same “burdened America” that you also claim does all the work while the “privileged America” gets to “reap the reward”?
Let’s take a closer look at Edwards’ dualistic view of America, because he’s got it half right. There are two Americas, they just don’t look anything like John’s Americas.
According to a 2004 Heritage Foundation study, the top fifth of households (income of $84,000 and above) perform “a third of all labor in the economy” and are among the “best educated and most productive workers.” Those families pay 82.5 percent of federal income taxes and two-thirds of all federal taxes. Compare this to the bottom quintile that pays only 1.1 percent of total federal taxes.
This minor little discrepancy in how America can be split underscores Edwards’ gross misperception of American poverty, its roots, and how it should be prevented.
All of this just goes to show that he was selected to serve not because of any expertise or special ability he has to bring to the table, but because he will be a figurehead that will bring notoriety to UNC due to his name recognition. But at the same time, Edwards also benefits by remaining in the public’s consciousness as he continues to keep his attention focused on the presidential elections in 2008 (in hopes that the Democratic Party will consider it a good idea to choose their next candidate from their spectacularly flawed 2004 ticket).
So even though this institution may have been conceived with the good intentions of finding reasonable solutions to poverty and homelessness, it has already been sucked into partisan politics before it even had the chance to get its wheels spinning. John Edwards’ opportunism and dedication to his populist image make it hard to believe that CPWO will ever be able to tackle poverty and homelessness in any meaningful way. It’s a safe bet that the CPWO will be centered on an ideology that finds poverty and homelessness to be conditions that are not to be overcome by any efforts on behalf of the individual, but rather as problems to be solved by ingenious manifestations of the government.
And so the question becomes, who stands the most to lose in this situation? The panhandler on Franklin St. who won’t see the situation improve any time soon, or the taxpayers of North Carolina for the monumental waste of money that is the CPWO?
And so as we continue to walk down the streets of Chapel Hill, we will continue to be met by total strangers with scruffy beards and hand-me-down jackets asking for whatever’s in our pockets that we can part with. Walk a little further to the outskirts of Chapel Hill, and you’ll find a newly acquired $1.1 million dollar estate. Only the man who answers this door will be in a fresh-pressed suit and tie and he’ll ask you for your vote. So what do he and the homeless have in common? They both want your money; only one of them actually needs it, but both are likely candidates to misuse it.