When addressing the complex and controversial issue of abortion, there are three central questions to consider: Will criminalizing abortion put an end to abortions?, How immoral is abortion?, and Are there effective ways of reducing the number of abortions that don’t relate to criminalization?

Answering such questions through a serious study of history and sociological research is key, because only through those methods can abortion be made a thing of the past. Despite the fact some conservatives are deeply offended by pro-choice people, and slander them as “baby killers,” it is of great importance, to this liberal and I’m sure to many others, to reduce the number of abortions — to save infant lives.

The answer to the first question is without question no. The choice between abortions and no abortions, at least predicated on the law, is a false choice. After all, there was a time in the U.S. when abortion was illegal. Many conservatives wish to return to this era of righteousness, a time free of the holocaust of the unborn.

Unfortunately, abortions occurred throughout the country despite their illegality. In 1967, for example, it was estimated 829,000 illegal abortions took place. In the decade before Roe v. Wade, the U.S. saw as many as 1 million illegal abortions a year. Over 330,000 women were hospitalized annually due to the unsafe nature of “back-alley abortions” (Zinn, A People’s History of the United States). Thousands died, particularly before certain medical advancements.

As Rachel Gold writes,

In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women—nearly one-fifth (18%) of maternal deaths recorded in that year. The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just the number that were officially reported; the actual number was likely much higher.

Poor women and their families were disproportionately impacted. A study of low-income women in New York City in the 1960s found that almost one in 10 (8%) had ever attempted to terminate a pregnancy by illegal abortion; almost four in 10 (38%) said that a friend, relative or acquaintance had attempted to obtain an abortion. Of the low-income women in that study who said they had had an abortion, eight in 10 (77%) said that they had attempted a self-induced procedure, with only 2% saying that a physician had been involved in any way.

The fact that modern medicine would mean fewer deaths if abortion was outlawed today does not necessarily justify its illegality, as abortions would still occur, some women would likely still be hospitalized and die, and State power over our personal decisions would still be increased, as discussed below. It may be tempting to think that sacrificing a few mothers a year would be worth it to save a far greater number of infants, but this may not be the reality — the holocaust of abortions would continue despite fewer maternal complications and deaths.

In Texas, which has slashed funds to abortion providers, ensuring that today fewer than 20 abortion clinics serve the entire state, women are buying a drug (misoprostol) smuggled in from Mexico to self-terminate their pregnancies, as documented in an important piece from The Atlantic. Dealers sell it illegally at flea markets in small Texas towns, and it is popular because it works. Misoprostol (combined with mifepristone) is prescribed by doctors for early pregnancy abortions. “In 2011, it accounted for 36 percent of all abortions before nine weeks of gestation” in the U.S.

The article also takes a look at the past conditions of women in Brazil who wanted an abortion but were barred due to the power of the conservative Catholic church over government policy: “They listened to old wives tails, ramming sharp objects into their uteruses and guzzling drug cocktails, and visiting clandestine, unsafe abortion clinics.” That is, until misoprostol came along; today half of Brazil’s 1 million annual abortions are due to the drug, which is sold on the black market, making drug dealers wild profits.

This is the story of many women in nations that restrict abortion rights. “More than 21 million women annually have unsafe abortions worldwide, which account for nearly 13 percent of all maternal deaths.”

This is not to say that some women won’t give birth because having an abortion is illegal. Criminalizing things, making things harder, can “work” to a degree, reducing abortions. But you have to think about the consequences of its failures, and weigh that in your moral calculus.

Pro-life individuals have very little to say in response to these facts. Take for example a Life News article entitled “Legalizing Abortion Did Not Stop Women From Dying in Abortions” (as if that somehow makes it acceptable to again criminalize it, which would increase maternal deaths). The author writes:

Pro-choice advocates would have you believe [the death toll from illegal abortions was] a monumental figure; some claim that prior to Roe, a whopping 17 percent of maternal deaths were related to unsafe abortions. Surely we would want to avoid this tragic loss of life, wouldn’t we? But those figures are inaccurate and misleading. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, in 1972, the last year before Roe, 39 women died in illegal abortions.

That is literally the only attempt in the article to refute the historical information presented by pro-choice advocates. Simply call it wrong, then offer additional knowledge (39 deceased women) and pretend it somehow contradicts the fact thousands more died before those 39.

Not only will outlawing abortion not stop abortion, only endangering women, neither will it stop natural abortions. 70% of conceptions are lost prior to live birth, in a natural way. Most of the failures, which include both early failures to implant and later miscarriages, occur before a woman misses her period and even knows she is pregnant. Even after she is aware she is with child, she has a 10-20% chance of losing her pregnancy before week 20. True, this is not the same as the willful destruction of a fetus by conscious adults, nor is it meant to say nothing should be done to reduce the number of abortions, but it does provide perspective. Nature, evolution, and our imperfect reproductive systems are responsible (or is it God who is responsible?) for a holocaust far greater than our own.

How immoral is abortion? That is a far more complex question than it seems. You have to ask a lot of questions. Mull over various factors and wrestle with many of them; I certainly do. It’s not enough to say “It’s the same as if I murdered you right now.” Obviously, those are not identical things. They’re not literally the same. All ethics are situational. If a situation changes, even slightly, the ethics of an action may change too. A lie is unethical, unless a killer is asking where your family is hiding. Perhaps you think killing is wrong, unless it’s for your country or in self-defense. And so forth. Right and wrong are not black and white; they exist on a spectrum, where the same action can be less moral or more moral dependent upon the situation. Abortion, no matter where you fall on it, is an exceptionally unique issue with unique, complex moral questions.

For example, is it less immoral to commit abortion if the pregnancy was the product of rape? Is it right to force someone to give birth to a child that was forced upon her through sexual violence? Even many conservatives find it more morally acceptable to terminate a pregnancy in this case. Likewise, what if giving birth puts the mother at serious risk of death (still an issue even in more advanced nations like ours)? Is it then less immoral to commit abortion than it might be otherwise? Shouldn’t the person who already exists have the preeminent right to life in that case? Personally, I think abortion is in fact less immoral in these contexts, among others. Should 11-year-olds be forced to give birth by the State?

If abortion is more morally acceptable in some circumstances, what about others? Is it more unethical to abort as time goes on and birth draws closer? Does age, developmental stage, matter at all in the moral equation? Many people think it does, and only consider abortion in the first or second trimester to be morally permissible. Fortunately for them, in 2014, “91.5% of abortions were performed at ≤13 weeks’ gestation; a smaller number of abortions [7.2%] were performed at 14–20 weeks’ gestation, and even fewer [1.3%] were performed at ≥21 weeks’ gestation,” to quote the CDC. Personally, I tend to agree that it’s less ethical to commit abortion later on. Note that one can believe this while holding that all abortions, regardless of developmental stage, are either morally acceptable (somewhere on the right side of the spectrum) or morally unacceptable (somewhere on the wrong of the spectrum). I fall more in the latter category; I don’t view abortion as a moral thing to do, as it is taking a human life, and likely wouldn’t have one if men could give birth. But while I do not judge it to be as moral (or ethically neutral) as the Left often does, I do not believe it to be quite as immoral as the Right suggests — and ethics and law are at times divorced for good reason. There are various factors you have to take into account when 1) deciding if it should be criminalized and 2) deciding just how immoral it really is.

Regarding the first point, we’ve already seen how criminalization is ineffective. Terminating a pregnancy may be unethical, but surely the termination of a pregnancy with lower risk to a woman’s life and health is less unethical than the termination of a pregnancy with a higher risk to a woman’s life and health. Yes, I think it would be most ethical to give birth to the child. But that is simply not a choice I, you, or the government can make. It is the woman’s choice; it always has been and always will be, regardless of the law. That’s just the reality in which we live, so you have to go from that starting point. While it is compelling to argue that anything unethical must be made illegal, there are some unethical actions we do not outlaw (lying to hurt someone, cheating on a spouse, even suicide, and so on), for various reasons. Not all unethical things are or should be illegal; you have to weigh a lot of unique factors for each case, which may result in different conclusions. It isn’t necessarily hypocritical to believe an unethical act should be legal — you may feel that way about a host of issues (being rude is wrong, but should you be hauled off to prison?). Conversely, it’s sometimes said, “Well, if abortion should be legal because a ban doesn’t work, why not make murder legal? The ban on that doesn’t work either.” This is a good point, but again the situations aren’t precisely the same — there may be important reasons to keep abortion legal that don’t apply to making murder legal. If you’re a conservative who makes that point, consider that you already believe avoiding bans on war, firearms, torture, the death penalty, or other things that end up killing innocent people may not justify lifting a ban on murder. (See more here.)

As for the second point, while abortion in my view is immoral, I do not consider it as immoral as infanticide or the killing of an innocent person who’s been born. That’s not meant to celebrate abortion or advocate for having one! It’s simply to say that ethics are on a spectrum and not all scenarios sit on top of each other. A thought scenario that is sometimes raised has merit: if a fetus in a tube and a baby in a nursery were both about to die but you could only save one, which should you choose? Surely the moral choice would be to save the baby. Which would you choose? Letting a fetus in a tube die does not have the same moral weight as letting a baby die, in my view. Ethics are situational, so, likewise, abortion and murder (or infanticide) are not identical situations and do not carry the same moral weight. They each have unique moral questions and answers. Circling back to whether the age of the baby in the womb has any sway over the moral equation, the idea that infanticide is less moral than abortion fits with the idea that later abortions are less moral than earlier ones. You could even revise the thought experiment: if you had to choose between saving a fetus the size of a finger and a fetus at eight months, which would you choose? If you choose the latter, you’re accepting the idea that some innocent deaths are simply worse, simply less ethically tolerable, than others. And that others are more tolerable.

We’ve mostly covered this, but another moral decision to make: should the government force you to give birth against your will? For many conservatives, if the alternative is killing a baby in the womb then yes. Not exactly “small government” and keeping Big Brother out of our lives, but it’s understandable. The State outlaws theft, murder, rape, and so on, to curb or punish behavior. Liberals and conservatives tend to agree on these things. But personally, while I view abortion as wrong, I don’t believe giving the State the power to force women to give birth is desirable. It’s certainly not something I would wish upon myself. (And, again, it simply fails as a policy: women have dangerous black market abortions.) And to reject such a disturbing State compulsion, such tyranny, is to invite punishment! Some women who’ve illegally had abortions will be arrested and — what? How should we punish women who break the law and commit abortion? A fine and community service? Prison time? A life sentence? Execution?    

As for the final question posed in the beginning, we already know the most effective means of reducing abortions: preventing accidental pregnancies.

Research overwhelmingly shows safe-sex education prevents accidental pregnancies and abortions. Abstinence-only education simply does not work: students in such programs begin exploring their sexuality just as early (often earlier) and with as much enthusiasm as control groups. But, unsurprisingly, they are one-third less likely to use contraceptives. Thus, one recent study showed teens who received safe-sex education were 50% less likely to become pregnant than teens who received abstinence-only education.

Studies show sex education accomplishes what conservatives, and many liberals, most desire: a longer delay in becoming sexually active, fewer partners, less unprotected sex, lower pregnancy and STD rates, and fewer abortions. This is why those who hate abortion the most should also be the most vocal supporters of safe-sex education. To make abortion history, the Right must put aside its hysteria over sex and join the Left on this issue, broadening sex education in the home, at school, in healthcare clinics, etc.

Even while the U.S. has over 3 million unintended pregnancies a year (teen girls are double the rate of women, due to lack of sex education and access to contraception), the rate of abortions has declined dramatically since Roe v. Wade. Today it’s under 700,000 a year. Planned Parenthood, and groups like it, are central to this reduction effort, because they provide safe-sex information and contraceptives (in 2009, 35% of patient care at Planned Parenthood had to do with contraceptives; compare this to its abortion services: in 2011, only about one in every 10 clients received an abortion).

In 2009, the Guttmacher Institute estimated federal funds given to places like Planned Parenthood in 2006 prevented 1.9 million unintended pregnancies, thus preventing some 810,000 abortions. 2013 research told a similar story, 345,000 abortions prevented. Planned Parenthood estimates it helps prevent a half-million unintended pregnancies, and thus 216,000 abortions, a year. As a writer for the New Yorker said with a heavy dose of sarcasm:

If only we could find an organization that educates young girls, and boys, about the dangers of early and unwanted pregnancies; a group that distributes contraceptives but also stresses the fact that sexual abstinence is safe, free, and, when used continuously, always prevents pregnancies. That group could really lower the abortion and teen-age pregnancy rates in this country. Oh. Wait. We have that organization.

Yet because Planned Parenthood and other healthcare organizations also perform abortions, they are rightwing targets that must be protested, defunded, shut down, slandered with deceptively edited videos, or terrorized with violence like destruction of property and the murder of doctors.

Planned Parenthood receives $500 million a year from the Federal government, yet since it is illegal (due to conservative activism) to use those funds for abortions except in cases of rape or to protect the mother’s life, that money is used for other health care services, like STD testing, cancer screening, contraception, safe-sex education. Things that prevent the spread of diseases, death by cancer, and abortion itself.

Americans serious about ending abortions should be the most enthusiastic supporters of such groups, maybe even cutting a check themselves.

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When Bernie Sanders proposed using American tax wealth to cover all citizen medical and college tuition expenses, debates exploded over how much this would cost and how it could theoretically be paid for.      

Covering all state university tuition fees would cost the government an estimated $63 billion a year, which is actually far less than the State currently spends on Pell Grants, loans, and other financial assistance for higher education. Universal healthcare would cost $1-2 trillion a year, not too different from what the government currently spends ($1.3 trillion annually) to cover Medicare and Medicaid.

Sanders plans to enact a tax on Wall Street speculation, increase income taxes on the wealthy by 5-7%, on everyday citizens by 2%, increase capital gains, dividend, and estate taxes, and close tax loopholes for the wealthy (the wealthiest Americans are supposed to pay a tax rate of nearly 40%, but in reality some only pay 18%, sometimes 15%).

Sanders would also close corporate tax loopholes. Many large corporations don’t pay federal taxes.

Corporations employ armies of lobbyists to bribe politicians with campaign funds or promises of future executive positions to deregulate industries and place tax exemptions in the U.S. tax code, while armies of lawyers and accountants make sure companies are using the loopholes most effectively to whittle down their taxes (see Nader, The Seventeen Solutions for a detailed look at this topic).

This has been underway for decades, and now the largest companies pay no federal taxes — and sometimes even get tax refunds.

For instance, “From 2008 to 2010, GE made $7.72 billion in profit in the United States, paid no federal income tax, and got $4.73 billion back from the U.S. treasury” (Nader). In 2011, the nonprofit research group Citizens for Tax Justice released a report showing 30 major U.S. companies (like GE, Verizon, and Wells Fargo) paid no net federal income taxes from 2008 to 2010. 26 of them enjoyed negative tax rates. Instead of paying 35% of their income (that’s supposed to be the corporate rate), they got a refund. These companies alone left the government short $78 billion in revenue over the course of 3 years.

In 2014, 13 major Fortune 500 companies, including Time Warner, Ryder, Priceline, Prudential, Mattel, and CBS, paid $0 in federal taxes, instead receiving rebates. Two others, GE and JetBlue Airways, paid less than 1% in taxes. These companies made $23 billion in profits in 2014, but tax loopholes left these fortunes untouched.

In the second quarter of 2014, 20 large companies, such as GM, Merck, and News Corp., paid $0 in federal taxes or got a government check, despite all making huge profits. Merck’s income soared 52% during the quarter.  

Of 258 top U.S. companies, 18 paid no federal taxes from 2008-2015, with 100 companies enjoying at least one tax-free year. Averaged, the actual rate was closer to 21%, and the loopholes and subsidies amounted to over half a trillion dollars in lost revenue for the country. Amazon made nearly $6 billion in 2017 but paid no federal income taxes.

Amazon made nearly $6 billion in 2017 but paid no federal income taxes.

Over the years, corporate tax revenue has not kept up with economic output, a huge favor to wealthy corporate owners and their firms. According to the Tax Policy Center, 60 years ago, revenue from corporations was 5 to 6% of the GDP, but by 2010 it was a mere 1.3%. 

The tax burden rests heaviest on individuals. The Federal government collected $2.2 trillion in revenue in 2010. 82% came from individual income taxes and payroll taxes, while only 9% came from corporate taxes. In 2015, the government collected nearly $4 trillion in revenues and borrowed funds, taking $1.5 trillion in individual income taxes and $1 trillion from Social Security and Medicare taxes, but only $342 billion from corporate taxes.

(Naturally, the burden of taxes on wealthy individuals has also lightened. In the 2013 tax bracket, any income you made over $400,000 was taxed at 39.6%, down from 70% in the 1960s and 94% during World War II, averaging 81% from 1932-1980, according to Thomas Piketty in Capital. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. In 2008, the IRS reported the 400 richest Americans only paid 18%. A third of these 400 paid less than 15%, the same rate as someone making $36,000 a year. At the same time tax rates fell, the richest 1% saw its share of the national income double since 1979; the share of the richest 0.1% almost tripled.)

The government hands out $1.3 trillion a year in tax breaks and subsidies, the majority of which benefit the top 20% of Americans and their businesses. $250 billion a year goes to the richest 1%. The Socialist Appeal reports, “It has been estimated that between subsidies, corporate tax underpayments and deductions, offshore tax havens, and various corporate tax loopholes, the wealthiest Americans avoid as much as $3 trillion in taxes every year. This is 3 times the U.S. annual budget deficit.” Oxfam found in April 2016 that the top 50 U.S. companies alone had $1.4 trillion hidden in tax havens.

Clearly, while free college tuition and healthcare are expensive endeavors, the possibility of cracking down on tax dodgers, rewriting tax laws to benefit ordinary working people instead of corporations, and ending the corporate welfare comprised of subsidies, deductions, and refunds, very much exists.

Doing so would go a long way toward funding programs that serve human needs.

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The state of American workers today is jarring.

50% of all jobs pay $34,000 a year or less (about $24,000 after taxes), thus 48% of Americans live in poverty or earn low income and 56% have under $1,000 in the bank (see this article). Inequality is worsening; the bottom 50% of Americans own just 2.5% of the nation’s wealth, the bottom 80% just 7%. The cost of rent, food, utilities, healthcare, and college exploded over the past three decades, while worker wages remained stagnant — a recipe for growing poverty.

Also remaining unchanged are the thoughtless diatribes against low income persons, most common among conservatives but not exclusive to them. Stories of neighbors who escaped poverty and built for themselves a life in the comfort of the middle or upper class are waved in the faces of those who have not. The slandered are said to have serious flaws: laziness and lack of ambition, being unwise, irresponsible with money. So despite the fact millions of Americans who work full-time (some with multiple jobs, others begging for a job or more hours) are still poor, working harder and “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” can get you anywhere.

These ideas betray a frightening ignorance of both empirical research and how social conditions are perpetuated — passed down from generation to generation. To a large extent, one’s economic opportunities are affected by factors beyond one’s control.

For example, a 2014 study from Harvard and the University of California – Berkeley found where you grow up greatly affects your opportunities, your economic mobility:

The probability that a child reaches the top quintile of the national income distribution starting from a family in the bottom quintile is 4.4% in Charlotte but 12.9% in San Jose… High mobility areas have (1) less residential segregation, (2) less income inequality, (3) better primary schools, (4) greater social capital, and (5) greater family stability.

More importantly, this study and many others found your income can usually be predicted by your parents’ income. Parents at every rung on the economic ladder are not all that likely to see their children climb higher. In fact, the relationship between parent and child in terms of income is even closer than in terms of physical attributes like height.

As one would imagine, rising from a lower or middle class family into the upper class is extraordinarily rare. 2006 studies indicate a child of a low-income family has a 1% chance of making it into the wealthiest 5%, and a child from a family of middle-quintile income has a 1.8% chance (and is actually slightly more likely to fall to a lower quintile than rise to a higher one). Data from 2007 showed people born in the lowest, second, and middle income quintiles have below a 5% chance of making it to the top 10% of income earners — in the fourth quintile, it’s about 8%. Only those in the highest income bracket have the opportunities that grant them a better chance, at over 40%.

This does not mean there is no social mobility. A 2007 study found that a minority, 34% of Americans, manage to reach a higher quintile (for example, moving from the lowest to the second quintile). Yet “children of middle-income parents have a near-equal likelihood of ending up in any other quintile, presenting equal promise and peril for those born to middle-class parents.” 42% of people born into the lowest quintile die there, and the vast majority of those who escape the lowest quintile die in the second lowest. The very poorest and the very richest are those least likely to leave the social class in which they were born.

This is not a temporary problem. In 2014, economists found children have about the same chances of economic advancement that children had 50 years ago.

Social class is much more rigid than many would suppose. Blaming the poor for their position in society — talk of laziness and irresponsible spending — is a stereotype that evades sociological contexts, even the most obvious, like if your wages are low enough everything you earn must be spent immediately on rent, utilities, and groceries, or the simple availability of high-paying jobs (in 2014, 46% of employed college graduates under 27 were working in a job that did not require a college degree, and about 15% had part-time work but wanted full-time work).   

Factors that have some basis in reality deserve consideration: low wages, worthless inheritances, jobs available, the cost of higher education, the cost of living, anti-poor and racial prejudice, wealth disparities between suburban and urban areas, and so on.

Obviously, individuals making low wages must spend everything or almost everything they make on groceries, electricity, water, rent, and gas or bus fare right away. If anything can be saved, it is often wiped out by the typical hurdles of life that better-off people consider mere annoyances, such as broken down cars or doctor’s visits. There is no money for college courses. Even with some grant and scholarship opportunities available, low test scores or a family that cannot go without income right now will rule out these possibilities. Most poor people will remain stuck. While hard work may lead to a job promotion or a new job that pays a bit better, there are no guarantees: for every person who “gets in,” there will be many hard-working competitors, many with families to feed, whom there simply isn’t room for. The management jobs are few, the non-management jobs are many. We should not pretend that if all workers at the bottom of society simply worked harder then they could all be managers — whom would they manage? Even college graduates, after all, don’t always get a spot. In 2014, 46% of employed college graduates under 27 were working in a job that did not require a college degree. Half a million college graduates make minimum wage. Sometimes there are simply not enough high-paying jobs for all who need them. The jobs that do exist pay very little.

Class entrenchment begins at birth.

Historian James W. Loewen (Lies My Teacher Told Me) outlines how the cycle of poverty functions so well I cannot help but quote him at length:

Affluent expectant mothers are more likely to get prenatal care, receive current medical advice, and enjoy general health, fitness, and nutrition. Many poor and working-class mothers-to-be first contact the medical profession in the last month, sometimes the last hours, of their pregnancies. Rich babies come out healthier and weighing more than poor babies. The infants go home to very different situations. Poor babies are more likely to have high levels of poisonous lead in their environments and their bodies.

We know that for a fetus, infant, or young child, malnutrition impacts brain development, hurting attention span, memory, and other learning systems. Lead poisoning, most prevalent in inner cities, harms I.Q. and learning abilities as well.

Rich babies get more time and verbal interaction with their parents and higher quality day care when not with their parents. When they enter kindergarten, and through the twelve years that follow, rich children benefit from suburban schools that spend two to three time as much money per student as schools in inner cities or impoverished rural areas. Poor children are taught in classes that are often 50 percent larger than the classes of affluent children. Differences such as these help account for the higher high school dropout rate among poor children.

Even teacher attitudes toward poor children perpetuate social class. Some years ago, education researcher Jane Anyon (“Social Class and School Knowledge”) found that

…students of different social class backgrounds are still likely to be exposed to qualitatively different types of educational knowledge. Students from higher social class backgrounds may be exposed to legal, medical, or managerial knowledge, for example, while those of the working classes may be offered a more “practical” curriculum (e.g., clerical knowledge, vocational training).

In the working-class schools Anyon studied, teachers and administrators were less interested in student success.

A principal told a new teacher, “If they learn to add and subtract, that’s a bonus. If not, don’t worry about it.” Many teachers believed students were lazy. “You can’t teach these kids anything,” one teacher said. The teachers concentrated on presenting basic skills to the students and keeping them busy with copy work and rote memorization. They avoided textbook pages that called “for mathematical reasoning, inference, pattern identification, or ratio setup.” The students therefore felt the teachers were lazy, saying a good teacher would “teach us some more” and “help us learn.” A majority of fifth graders said their grades would not be high enough to go to college. Anyon wrote that “many of these children already ‘know’ that what it takes to get ahead is being smart, and that they themselves are not smart.”

Jonathan Kozol (Ordinary Resurrections) wrote later on that poor (usually minority) children were looked upon as different from other kids, part of a culture of poverty that made them “quasi-children” or “morally disabled children.” Children of the slums were seen as criminals-to-be or “premature adults.” This prompted teachers to use “a peculiar arsenal of reconstructive strategies and stick-and-carrot ideologies that would wouldn’t be accepted for one hour by the parents or teachers of the upper middle class.” Loewen writes:

Even when poor children are fortunate enough to attend the same school as rich children, they encounter teachers who expect only children of affluent families to know the right answers. Social science research shows that teachers are often surprised and even distressed when poor children excel. Teachers and counselors believe they can predict who is “college material.” Since many working-class children give off the wrong signals, even in first grade, they end up in the “general education” track in high school. “If you are the child of low-income parents, the chances are good that you will receive limited and often careless attention from adults in your high school,” in the words of Theodore Sizer’s bestselling study of American schools, Horace’s Compromise. “If you are the child of upper-middle class-income parents, the chances are good that you will receive substantial and careful attention.” Researcher Reba Page has provided vivid accounts of how high school American history courses use rote learning to turn off lower-class students…

He also notes:

As if this unequal home and school life were not enough, rich teenagers then enroll in the Princeton Review or other coaching sessions for the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Even without coaching, affluent children are advantaged because their background is similar to that of the test makers, so they are comfortable with the vocabulary and subtle subcultural assumptions of the test. To no one’s surprise, social class correlates strongly with SAT scores.

Indeed, the poorest students score on average 400 points below the wealthiest students on the SAT; many score so low they will not be admitted to 4-year colleges.

American schools with the highest test scores and graduation rates tend to be very fine buildings serving middle class and wealthier populations, usually white. The poorly performing schools are crumbling facilities serving the very poor, usually black and Hispanic, who disproportionately suffer with low-quality teachers, overcrowded classes, and a lack of books, supplies, and physical and mental health care. “I want to be able to go to school and not have to worry about being bitten by mice, being knocked out by the gases, being cold in the rooms,” a Detroit student, Wisdom Morales, said in 2016. Some states now have classrooms with 40-50 students (Maass, The Case for Socialism).

School funding is based on property taxes, which ensures poor neighborhoods have poorly-funded schools. It’s also often based on test scores, which ensures low-performing schools stay poorly funded.

A harsh environment can harm physical and psychological well-being, birthing social, emotional, and behavioral instabilities. Children who grow up in poverty are more likely to experience high-stress homes, absent parents, abandonment, displacement, homelessness, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, exposure to alcoholism, drug use, and crime, poor health, depression, developmental delays, decreased concentration and memory capabilities, and a host of other problems. Poor housing alone damages one’s mental health, leading to depression. A 2015 study showed that parts of the brain tied to academic performance are 8-10% smaller in children from very poor households. (Being poor creates a mental strain on adults that is equivalent to sleep deprivation or losing 13 I.Q. points). This will happen to private school children or public school children, white children or black children.

Loewen continues:

All these are among the reasons why social class predicts the rate of college attendance and the type of college chosen more effectively than does any other factor.  After college, most affluent children get white-collar jobs, most working-class children get blue-collar jobs, and the class differences continue.

Indeed, a Brookings Institution study of 18,000 people in 5,000 families from 1968 to 2015 found that while a college education does increase income for poor Americans, an earning gap persists afterward. The poor with degrees will earn 91% more money during their career than the poor without degrees, while middle- and upper-class persons with degrees will earn 162% more than their socioeconomic peers without degrees. By middle age, a poor college grad is earning half what a rich college grad makes (even worse than when they both graduated, when on average poor grads make two-thirds what rich grads do). Factors that contribute to this include differences in academic performance between poor and rich students, and the colleges the poor can afford — public versus private, for instance.

Loewen writes, “As adults, rich people are more likely to have hired an attorney and to be a member of formal organizations that increase their civic power.” In a similar vein, this raises a major challenge for the poor. Consider the idiom “It’s all about who you know.” Well, people who grow up poor mostly know other poor people, meaning fewer opportunities stemming from social connections.

He concludes:

Because affluent families can save some money while poor families must spend what they make, wealth differences are ten times larger than income differences. Therefore most poor and working-class families cannot accumulate the down payment required to buy a house, which in turn shuts them out from our most important tax shelter, the write-off of home mortgage interest. Working-class parents cannot afford to live in elite subdivisions or hire high-quality day care, so the process of education inequality replicates itself in the next generation. Finally, affluent Americans also have longer life expectancies than lower- and working-class people, the largest single cause of which is better access to health care. Echoing the results of Helen Keller’s study of blindness, research has determined that poor health is not distributed randomly about the social structure, but is concentrated in the lower class.

Ultimately, social class determines how people think about social class. When asked if poverty in America is the fault of the poor or the fault of the system, 57 percent of business leaders blamed the poor; just 9 percent blamed the system. Labor leaders showed sharply reversed choices: only 15 percent said the poor were at fault while 56 percent blamed the system. (Some people replied “don’t know” or chose a middle position.) The largest single difference between our two main political parties lies in how their members think about social class: 55 percent of Republicans blamed the poor for their poverty, while only 13 percent blamed the system for it; 68 percent of Democrats, on the other hand, blamed the system, while only 5 percent blamed the poor.

Most Americans die in the same social class in which they were born, sociologists have shown, and those who are mobile usually rise or fall just a single social class.

All these obstacles have lasting effects. One researcher found that “the residual effects of wealth remain for 10 to 15 generations.”

This is not to say some poor people won’t spend money on non-essentials, fall into a routine that doesn’t devote much time to searching for a higher-paying job, or give up on a job search in despair. These things happen and are predictable. Yet these issues must be understood within the context of the cycle of poverty; to focus on them alone is to deny socio-economic realities. It’s been found that even geniuses, with I.Q.s approaching 200, who come from poor homes are less successful than geniuses who come from wealthier homes (see Outliers, Gladwell). Middle-class persons who struggle to understand how the poor could have fewer opportunities and advantages should compare themselves to the wealthy. Growing up, did you have the same opportunities as the child of a billionaire? Did your parents’ massive donation to Harvard or Princeton help you get in? Did your parents give you a million dollars to help start your first business? Did they have CEO friends in the Fortune 500 or on Wall Street, and could put in a good word for you? Of course not.

The factors that make poverty so hard to escape are numerous, but not difficult to understand. We should recall what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said of poor blacks, who are to this day disproportionately impoverished due to past and present racial discrimination, which makes them special targets for those wishing to attack the poor as lazy or foolish. King condemned our propensity to view poverty as due to personal flaws, like an unwillingness to work hard, ignoring different opportunities within different social conditions. To paraphrase King (Why We Can’t Wait), the poor man

…is deprived of normal education and normal social and economic opportunities. When he seeks opportunities, he is told, in effect, to lift himself up by his own bootstraps, advice which does not take into account the fact that he is barefoot.

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