How Better Call Saul Thoroughly Debunked Barbara Ehrenreich’s Absurd Definition of Poverty

     https://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/01/Ehrenreich-FINAL.pdf

      One of the few times a Fall 2016 Lindenwood University student would have encounter left-wing propaganda at that otherwise fairly calm and apolitical business-oriented college was in a student’s general education freshman English classes. There, a student would have the deep misfortune of reading an article written by an active Democratic Socialists of America member, Dr. Barbara Ehrenreich titled: “Time to Wake Up: Stop Blaming Poverty on the Poor”. While it definitely does display a left-wing bias, such as by overstating the War on Poverty’s success, as well as the mild retreat from it in the 90s, the article does seem to be a good expose on what poverty in America is like and what women and minorities in particular often go through. A infamously memorable line from that article is where the plot was lost, however. It read: “This would have been the moment for the pundits to finally admit the truth: Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.”  A freshman at this time would have then noticed the “About the Author” section after this essay in this textbook and how it explicitly mentioned Ehrenreich’s Democratic Socialists of America membership and realized that something was not right. Wasn’t socialism, at least in part, responsible for skyrocketing inflation in places like Venezuela and Argentina at this time? Whatever else they might have had a shortage of, it seemed money was the least of it. They seemed to have a dangerous surplus of the stuff, with pictures of gigantic stacks of pesos and Bolivars being shown in the news and the viewer learning they would be be equal in purchasing power to around a few American dollars. All the same, in those years before the infamously “transitory” inflation that Jerome Powell was clearly the smartest person in the room about, one could at least give Ehrenreich the benefit of the doubt that in writing this, she meant a shortage of the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. dollar. This would still make her definition of poverty as off-base, as that same student would realize years later, but at least the premise was plausible. America had a strong currency and if the poor just got more of it, they’d be alright. Seems oversimplified, but you just got to get these unnecessary classes out of the way.

            Years later, having learned that money itself has nothing to do with poverty and is merely a medium of exchange, you will have realized just how wrong that definition truly was. Even for a type of money that keeps its value, such as gold, it can lose its purchasing power if dispersed widely enough. Indeed, this is what happened to gold when Mansa Musa went on his famous Hajj and distributed his gold among the poor he encountered along the way. Prices went up. Similar events happened in ancient Greece when Alexander the Great sent loot from Persia back home and in Europe after the Conquistadors conquered the Americas and sent silver back to the continent. Aside from somebody who is heavily in debt, such as American famers in the 1890s, poverty then could clearly not be solved by money if spreading it around just lead to higher prices. Surely, price controls are the solution, right? Just have the omnipotent government fix the problem of high prices by fiat. That famously caused a large black market in Allende’s Chile and in Venezuela in recent years, so that couldn’t be it. It turns out that a medium of exchange can indeed help you when you are in debt, as famously encapsulated in the stories of Germans walking into banks in Weimar Germany, and dropping a gigantic stack of marks on the desk of the bank, and paying off their mortgage in the process, but that was it. What really defined poverty was a shortage of wealth.

            Money and wealth may seem like interchangeable terms and indeed, in popular parlance, they are often treated as such, but they are very different. Wealth is what money is actually used to pay for. Food, clothing, housing, medical care, access to clean water, etc. would be wealth. Wealth has to be produced. It can not just be typed into existence, as money at the Federal Reserve is. Savings and investments by entrepreneurs have to be put to use. A business strategy has to be formulated and long-term plans have to be made. Production has to occur. That is what we owe our prosperity and subsequent standards of living to. A freshman college student may not have been able to formulate this at the time, but they had seen the satirical meme asking “Why pay taxes when they can just print more money?” and realized there was more to the economy that Ehrenreich let on.

            Several years later, this principle was brilliantly, if unintentionally, captured by an episode of the Breaking Bad prequel series, Better Call Saul. In the eighth of episode of the shows’ fifth season, “Bagman”, our protagonist, Jimmy McGill, now unabashedly acting as the infamous criminal lawyer, Saul Goodman, travels to the Mexican border in order to be the bagman responsible for collecting Lalo Salamanca’s $7 million of bail money. Shenanigans ensue and ultimately, it is him and other Breaking Bad favorite, Mike Ehrmantraut, left alone in the harsh New Mexico desert with $7 million in duffel bags, but little else. Certainly not a motorized vehicle to escape or enough water to better survive the effects of the elements. Just two people with over $3 million split between them. Using the absurd logic of Ehrenreich, these two were not in poverty. Sure, they had almost no wealth and their lives were at serious risk because they were in the middle of nowhere, but they had far from any shortage of money. If Ehrenreich saw this episode, she might have indeed revaluated her definition of poverty to be a little less rigid than simply lacking money. She probably would have conceded it is a shortage of wealth. 

            Several years later, this principle was brilliantly, if unintentionally, captured by an episode of the Breaking Bad prequel series, Better Call Saul. In the eighth of episode of the shows’ fifth season, “Bagman”, our protagonist, Jimmy McGill, now unabashedly acting as the infamous criminal lawyer, Saul Goodman, travels to the Mexican border in order to be the bagman responsible for collecting Lalo Salamanca’s $7 million of bail money. Shenanigans ensue and ultimately, it is him and other Breaking Bad favorite, Mike Ehrmantraut, left alone in the harsh New Mexico desert with $7 million in duffel bags, but little else. Certainly not a motorized vehicle to escape or enough water to better survive the effects of the elements. Just two people with over $3 million split between them. Using the absurd logic of Ehrenreich, these two were not in poverty. Sure, they had almost no wealth and their lives were at serious risk because they were in the middle of nowhere, but they had far from any shortage of money. If Ehrenreich saw this episode, she might have indeed revaluated her definition of poverty to be a little less rigid than simply lacking money. She probably would have conceded it is a shortage of wealth.