In the present economic environment, “lifting 5 million out of poverty” will bloat what Newman and Chen call the “missing class,” those who are “decidedly not middle-class Americans” and yet “beyond the reach of most policies that speak to the conditions of life among the poor.”

The Huffington Post today reported on a study from University of Massachusetts-Amherst economist Arindrajit Dube.

Together they claim that a proposed Federal minimum wage increase from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 “could help lift nearly 5 million people out of poverty.”

If Congress were to go through with a plan backed by President Barack Obama to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour, it would reduce the poverty rate among Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 by as much as 1.7 percentage points… That would bring about 4.6 million people out of poverty directly and reduce the ranks of the nation’s poor by 6.8 million, accounting for longer-term effects.

A $10.10 minimum wage would help to reverse some of the damage done by the Great Recession. The economic downturn, which technically ended in 2009, and recovery have been marked by high unemployment and stagnant or falling wages. After the recession, many jobs that did return were low-paying — with many offering just minimum wage or close to it.

Three-fifths of the new jobs created during the economic recovery paid low-wages, according to an August 2012 analysis from the National Employment Law Project, a left-leaning advocacy group focused on low-wage workers.

The combination of many Americans not working at all or working for not that much money contributed to a 3.4 percent increase in the poverty rate during the recession that has not abated. A $10.10 minimum wage could go a long way in reversing some of that economic damage, according to Dube.

I was ‘lifted out of poverty’ recently with a $500 annual raise. My $18,000 annual stipend was increased to $18,500. That raise put our household income just barely over the threshold for food stamps and other benefits, and we consequently lost thousands in benefits. The raise was a significant net loss. If we monetized our benefits, my family lost well over 10% of our annual income with that raise of less than 3%.

Minimum wage increases are necessary but as a guaranteed income, and part of an assurance of a standard quality of life for all. A guaranteed income would replace both minimum wages and unemployment insurance to ensure that no person or family fall below a certain threshold. In some European countries, the loss of a job automatically triggers government benefits without a need to apply for unemployment pay. The instantiation of minimum quality of life standards can be partly met through a guaranteed income, but minimum wages fall significantly short of this.

In the present economic environment, “lifting 5 million out of poverty” will bloat what Newman and Chen call the “missing class,” those who are “decidedly not middle-class Americans” and yet “beyond the reach of most policies that speak to the conditions of life among the poor.” Newman defines the nearly poor as “people with household incomes between $20,000 and $40,000 a year for a family of four, or 100 to 200 percent of the poverty line.” Writing in 2007, there were about twice as many of near poor as there were people under the poverty line — at that time, about 57 million in the US. This has increased sharply since the Great Recession.

As an aside, the “disappearing middle class” that we have incessantly heard about since then refers to two different groups, depending on who’s speaking. Some centrist-liberals are referencing the slide of working class people into the “near poor.” Those are a result of a loss in union jobs, often in manufacturing, that have been off-shored and replaced with ‘knowledge workers’ domestically, those who possess levels and kinds of education most working class people lacked. Technological changes and globalization increased the size of the missing class considerably. But this is old news, and an established discourse. Most recent references to the “disappearing middle class” are paradoxical, because they are in fact referencing the wealthy, six-figure earners with investment portfolios losing most of their capital and joining the middle class. These are the people who watch the news, often for hours a day, paying close attention to this discourse of the “disappearing middle class”, but they also paying very close attention to those stock reports that the rest of us poor slobs could care less about. These are the petty bourgeois, the managerial class, and small-business owning people who were in the top 20% income bracket (but not the top 1%) who have seen their real income decline sharply since 2007. This is the so-called “disappearing middle class” we hear about.

But, I digress… Newman explains the new poor represent “the promise of upward mobility.” However, their lives are precarious. “They truly are one paycheck, one lost job, one divorce or one sick child away from falling below the poverty line.”

For the majority of the past decade, I have vacillated between “missing class” and poor, and this position of precarity was often frightening even without a family. Like most “near poor” people, I managed to piece together state and federal benefits, occasional work well below my past income, and odd jobs. I learned to significantly reduce my “quality of life” –or, in other words, I learned to be less healthy and happy by neglecting health care, eating lower-quality food, and doing without “leisure” activities. Instead of going out to bars with friends, I worked in them. I rented a house in a neighborhood where I heard gunshots daily (and found shell casings in my yard) so I could sublet an apartment above the garage. I was far from destitution, but just as far from stability and comfort.

With a family, the anxieties of being “missing class” can be crippling. Over the last few years, my income changes three times a year, requiring multiple trips to state benefits offices to update paperwork, go to interviews with caseworkers, and wait for weeks worrying about whether we’ll be able to eat healthy food or toxic plastic for the next months. Some months, we received hundreds in food stamps and a healthy cash benefit, others we received nothing because our paychecks put us over thresholds by as little as a few dollars. When my daughter was born, she was fortunately on the Arizona state health care plan, because she required weeks of intensive care to survive. The bill would have at least cost hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions. We don’t know, because we never got that bill. That’s what medical care should be like for everyone, and especially in a country where we are surrounded by opulence. When my daughter was just months old, however, my partner made about a hundred dollars more that quarter, which pushed us $27 over the threshold for state benefits. Our family immediately went from having full health coverage to having no coverage, without notice, and without any back-up plan offered. We spent the next six months without any insurance, a frightening situation while poor and with a newborn.

Lifting “5 million out of poverty” in the present environment means casting a large chunk of the poor into a shadowy area where needed benefits may not shine. Many of these families will see wage incomes increase slightly, but benefits reduced sharply. This is partly because the Federal government and many states are slashing benefits as part of austerity measures. But it’s also because the “missing class” is neglected by social welfare policies. In the United State, the safety net is set very low, and has many rips and tears in it.

This is the case in part because most policy makers, the wealthy conservatives who vote them in, and the corporations who own them hate poor people. There’s a reason why minimum wage reform is becoming more popular: it still places the emphasis on the individual to make life work in a community that has forsaken them, in a policy environment that detests them. It maintains the valorization of work, instead of, for instance, the assurance of a respectable minimum standard for all members of a community. It emphasizes individual responsibility rather than the collective responsibility to each person.

Even the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke, expressed a view contrary to the actions of even centrist-liberal legislators, when he wrote in 1748:

The riches of a nation are not to be estimated by the splendid appearance or luxurious lives of its gentry; it is the uniform plenty diffused through a people, of which the meanest as well as greatest partake, that makes them happy, and the nation powerful. When this is wanting, the splendor of the great is rather a reproach than honour to them…

The idea of robust minimum standards is common to all modern political ideology with the exceptions of fascism and the contemporary American brand of neoconservatism. These are far from radical ideas, and this is one reason why it’s important to be very specific about the methods of assuring they are met. They should not valorize work and toil, nor should they place the burden on the individual. Burke’s concern for the poor is rooted in crass nationalism and maintaining the stability in a highly stratified society. But his conservatism seems radical compared against the American neocons of today.

There are other reasons beyond ideology to focus on methods of ensuring minimum standards, and ones that should unite most policy analysts beyond their ideological differences. If the plan truly is to eliminate poverty and produce a community where everyone can thrive, attention to evidence-based policy would suggest that minimum wage is a secondary or tertiary measure that must accompany other significant alterations in entitlements. Raising base wages is necessary but far from sufficient, and all evidence points to this. Neglecting any piece of the puzzle in favor of moralistic demands for individual responsibility is to willingly disregard the overwhelming evidence in favor of thin, unfounded ideas about the relationship between policy and personal development. There is no evidence that eliminating entitlements and reducing assured wages will encourage individuals “to better themselves”, and there is much to the contrary. Just as there is no evidence to support the empty moralizing of “trickle-down economics,” there is no basis for the idea that forcing people to fend for themselves is better for anyone (except the rapidly privatizing prison industry).

Minimum wage reform in a time of austerity is frightening, not a step forward. Without a strong defense of existing safety nets and a strong push for radically expanding entitlements, these measures will present little real benefit for most who experience them.

This is not original commentary. Even the article I began discussing recognizes this acknowledgement from the report author:

Still, even Dube himself noted that increasing the minimum wage isn’t the most direct way of reducing the poverty rate. Instead, policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps and those aimed at reducing the unemployment rate of at-risk groups are more effective, he said.

Simply demanding economic reforms be grounded in evidence — and forsaking the tired moralizing about bootstraps and hard work — would alone improve the situation. Software could write better legislation. We know what will improve the quality of life for the poorest Americans and the near poor.

The problem is that the plan is not to eliminate poverty and create an exuberant community where everyone thrives. The problem is that the people making the decisions are serving the rich, seducing those who have even marginal influence with blind moralism, and turning millions of Americans who are better off into mean, spiteful hoarders of imaginary wealth who hate the poor. This is where the earlier digression about the “disappearing middle class” becomes relevant. This is code to focus attention away from the missing class and those slipping into it, and to keep the attention on the interests of the top 20%. Their interests fully occupy the shaping of all mainstream political discourse. Problems are defined in terms that cater to their interests. Raising the minimum wage, particularly how it has been discussed in the popular press in the past months, is very much part of this discourse.

We need more than just attention to evidence-based policy. Policy and discussions thereof should be predicated on it. Those policies that have increased poverty and precarity should be entirely off the table. The talk of individual responsibility needs to be regarded as the silly moralizing as it is, as the spitefully classist discourse that it is, and those advancing it should be no part of determining economic and other entitlements.

Oh, and smash capitalism and stuff, too.