Occupy the Safety Net

Betsy Reed

December 14, 2011

This fall, as eye-popping statistics depicting the obscene wealth of the top 1 percent were liberated from obscurity by Occupy Wall Street, some equally revealing figures emerged showing how those on the lowest rungs of our economy are faring. The vicious bite of the Great Recession has left one in three Americans—100 million people—either poor or perilously close to it, one busted car or broken leg away from falling into the vortex of dire need whose gravitational pull is a constant feature of their lives. These figures—drawn from the government’s new Supplemental Poverty Measure, or SPM—provided proof of something these Americans already knew: that the social safety net—the anti-poverty programs that form the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society—remains, even in its stretched and frayed condition, their last, best defense against what FDR called “the hazards and vicissitudes of life.”
 
The official definition of poverty—developed as a temporary measure by a research analyst at the Social Security Administration named Mollie Orshansky, and formally adopted in 1969—has little relevance to how deprivation is experienced today.