Over-medicating the poor

Rather than race, ethnicity or religion, class is the prism through which I see most issues that affect our society. I think our public discourse is pitifully short of serious discussion on the topic, as some -- those on top of the socioeconomic pecking order -- push the story that there are no classes in America or that individuals can navigate the caste system upward with just a little elbow grease.

But that is one of our national myths. Take this story, for example, from today's New York Times:

New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.

Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?

That's just one of many ways -- some of them out in the open and some, like this, in the shadows -- that working class and poor people are screwed by the system.

Criminalizing poverty

Barbara Ehrenreich -- author of 20 books, including the bestseller "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America" -- has a piece in The New York Times today on the criminalization of poverty. She writes:

The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.

Despite much public rhetoric to the contrary, class is a large and often determining factor in many aspects of American life. Not only are the poor politically powerless, but they are vilified as being lazy, shiftless and stupid. Though frequently the subject of anecdotes that conclude they are scamming the system, most people on the bottom of the economic ladder are desperate to free themselves from their circumstances. When, as a child, I was sent to the corner store with food stamps I felt humiliated by the experience, keeping the paper coupons hidden in my pocket and only approaching the counter when I thought the fewest people would see me.

There's a famous quotation from French Nobel Prize winner Anatole France:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

The statement is, of course, ironic, but amazingly the Ehrenreich story points out that an American local public official, recently and without irony, said, “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance.”

Mind the gap

Roland Merullo has a column in today's Globe on the gap between the haves and have-nots in America. He writes,

...it is both morally repugnant and socially destabilizing to encourage too wide a gap between the working and investment classes, the poor and the rich. More than any other single factor, it is government policies -- the philosophies and actions of the people we elect -- that determine the size of that gap.

Merullo grew up in Revere and is the author of Revere Beach Boulevard, Revere Beach Elegy and In Revere, In Those Days, among other books.

Unlucky numbers

The media is filled with joyous stories about the Dow topping 13,000 yesterday. One headline even reads: "Rally, Romp and Rejoicing." We are conditioned to believe that a rising stock market equals a strong economy -- something good for all of us, right? -- but that is far from the truth.

When media and government say "the economy," they are generally referring to the wallets of the wealthy. When the economy is booming -- using the stock market's leading index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as a bellwether -- then corprate executives, lobbyists, bank owners, oil tycoons and their friends are gorging themselves at the trough.

Meanwhile, wages for working men and women -- after being adjusted for inflation -- are falling. As usual, the average person has to struggle to make ends meet. The market's rise is no reason for us to celebrate.