Poverty in Plano

Our mayor likes to say that Plano has the highest median income of any US city with a population over 200,000. I wish he would stop. The factoid reinforces a false but persistent notion that we don’t have poverty here. The truth is a lost job can move a Plano family from lavish lifestyle to the poorhouse in a thrice, just like anyplace else.

I count at least 27 food pantries in our city, mostly run or supported by churches, synagogues, and mosques. There is no shortage of need. Minnie’s Food Pantry, the one my parish supports, makes the news occasionally when their shelves go empty. It isn’t unusual to see someone drive up to Minnie’s in a Cadillac Escalade to pick up the family’s food for the week. The salary that was to have paid for the car is gone and they may be on the verge of losing their home. We lost a lot of those salaries in the Y2K telecom bust and in the heavy rounds of layoffs that have continued ever since. More than a few homes have been lost too. Samaritan Inn, the one shelter in the county that can accommodate families, turns away fifty or so people every week, about a third of them children, many from Plano.

The Plano school district sends a bus to McKinney every morning to collect children enrolled in our schools, but living at Samaritan Inn. Just because they are in a homeless shelter doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be in school, or necessarily have to change schools right away. Over 20% of school children in the district qualify for the free or discounted breakfast, lunch, and snack programs. That means their families have incomes no more than 185% of the federal poverty level. They tell me Mondays and Fridays are the days with highest attendance because the schools also have a back pack program so the kids don’t go hungry over the weekend. If they don’t bring in the empty back pack on Monday they can’t expect the school to fill it on Friday.

Then there are the free clinics. The one I’m most familiar with is the Collin County Adult Clinic which operates three facilities, one in Frisco and two in Plano. Like the official county program, which pays for emergency room visits at Primacare for eligible, enrolled patients, and for a new program that allows them access to volunteer physicians in the doctors’ regular offices, the Adult Clinic accepts county residents who have incomes no more than 200% of the poverty level and no insurance. Unlike the official county programs they don’t check immigration status. They see about 1100 patients 5000 times per year at the two Plano facilities, most of them apparently legal, all of them residents of the most affluent major city in the country. I don’t see any statistics on the web site for the county health department which operates the taxpayer funded programs.

The point of all this is there is more poverty here than most of us realize. Some of it is chronic, some is associated with undocumented immigrants, but a lot of it is among people who have hit a rough spot in life and just need a little time and assistance getting back on their feet. The false perception they aren’t here gets in the way.

We know there is a need for a second homeless shelter for families. We also need more and better workforce development programs for people who don’t have skills needed for jobs offering living wages and career paths that will allow them to support families. We know we have food insecurity here and we know our indigent health care programs still have shortcomings. Maybe with better data we can dispel some false notions and begin to think about doing mare about these issues. First we all need to understand the poverty is real, right here in well to do Plano.

BRIC a BRAC

When former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk went to Washington as US Trade Representative, some wag suggested he take along a good book. It was an apt comment. It did look like he would have some time on his hands. International trade was going nowhere. Agreements negotiated during the Bush administration were gathering dust, the Doha round of WTO talks was stalled with no progress expected, even NAFTA was threatened. There really didn’t seem to be much to negotiate and in fact not much happened for two and a half years.

But over the last couple of months there has been a startling resurgence in trade developments. First a ban on Mexican trucking in the US was lifted, at least temporarily, and Mexico dropped a number of retaliatory tariffs. Then long dormant agreements with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia were approved by congress and signed into law. At a meeting in Hawaii President Obama announced he expects to complete negotiations early next year for US participation in the eighteen nation Trans Pacific Partnership. Japan applied to join shortly after. Canada may soon follow. In two weeks Russia will almost certainly be invited into the WTO and, lastly, the US has entered into talks for a deal with the European Union. I hope Mr. Kirk finished his book.

Free trade purists and advocates for the poor like me would prefer all this be done through the WTO in part because, with the exception of Russian accession to the WTO, none of it involves the BRICs, the four major emerging economies that many expect to be the juggernauts of the new century. But maybe there is a silver lining here. Brazil, Russia, India, and China all have to be apprehensive at being excluded from trading blocs that account for so much of the world’s commerce. And a major reason Doha stalled is that under developed members balked at additional reforms required to move it forward. The majors are essentially saying OK, we will do it without you. If that prompts some rethinking among the BRICs, so much the better.

I wish the church had more to say on this. The USCCB Pastoral Letter Economic Justice for All dates from 1986 and, aside from setting out a few principles and expressing special concern for the poor, it hardly mentions trade. Other than an endorsement of fair trade practices, the bishops have had little to say on specific trade proposals. Fair trade’s potential to overcome poverty is minuscule in the grand scheme of things. Looking back over the years since WWII, expanding international trade has had a great deal to do with the emergence of untold millions from abject poverty into the middle class. It looks to do it again over the coming decades. If we are as concerned about the plight of the poor as we claim to be, we should be at the forefront on this issue. We have an opportunity to do real good and instead we sit on the sidelines.

It seems to me increased integration of the world’s most developed economies, and a significant number of the not so developed, would provide powerful incentives for BRICs and others to join in, and to adopt market, legal, and social reforms entry would require. That would be good, right? It is exactly what happened with the WTO and, imperfect as it is, WTO has been a healthy development for all its members. By actively promoting such arrangements the church would be in a better position to influence terms, and to help protect the interests of the poor who are often the most vulnerable to increased outside competition, at least in the short term. Shouldn’t we be doing that rather than be left complaining about negative effects after the fact?