Reality TV Saves the Poor June 20, 2008

- Buffy Weill-Greenberg

Living in squalor? Cramming four kids in a one-bedroom apartment? Well, here in America don’t look to the guv’ment to help you. Turn on your TV and get help from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

The premise of the Sears sponsored Extreme Makeover (oh, and by the way, the CEO of Sears Holdings earns 3.42 million, according to Forbes) is a fundamentally conservative one — we don’t need a hand-out from the government, we just need altruism (often in the form of corporate sponsors and excessive consumerism.)

Extreme Makeover takes a family living in unlivable conditions and transforms their trailer, apartment, house into that basic human right that’s so far from basic in the US — a safe, comfortable place to live. That’s not the role of TV, it’s the responsibility of our government to ensure each person has housing, a responsibility that our government shirks.

Here’s one family featured on Extreme Makeover:

Ginyard family: Veronica Ginyard and her family had a life of adversity and struggle. Having bought the first and only home she could afford, Veronica was raising her eight children — including two sets of twins — in a home that would be cramped for a family of four, let alone nine. A strong woman, she was determined to raise her children in a safe and loving home, keeping them off the streets and away from violence for good. But the house wasn’t much of a safe haven.

The extremely hazardous home had exposed wires sticking out of the drywall, mold from constant flooding in their basement, plus holes in the walls and ceilings. The kids were sleeping in makeshift bedrooms in the basement and attic. Veronica was working two jobs just to make ends meet and used public transportation to/from work. “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” came to their rescue. Also in the episode, Grammy-winning superstar Patti LaBelle performed at a candlelight vigil outside the Ginyard’s new home. Original airdate was May 28, 2006.

(Source)

Extreme Makeover personalizes the tragedy of a family’s poverty to the exclusion of all else; it’s a perfect television arc: tragedy, rebuilding, success. Why did she need to work two jobs? Why did she need to stuff a family of 9 into an “extremely hazardous home”? The outside causes (the decreasing wages of the working poor, the cuts and cuts and cuts to affordable housing programs, the Republicans’ fight to keep the minimum wage down, our profit-driven healthcare industry) are absent.

President Bush’s FY 2009 proposed budget was, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, “woefully lacking”: At at a time when the demand for low income housing assistance far outstrips the supply and when there are 2.8 million more poor families in the United States than there are homes for rent that they can afford, the FY09 low income housing budget is woefully lacking.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, George Bush’s wife made an appearance on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in Biloxi, MS. What a perfect photograph: the Bush administration makes thousands homeless in MS and LA and then Laura Bush appears on Extreme Makeover for a photo op, talking about the show’s decision on whose house — out of the thousands — to rebuild: “They haven’t chosen one yet. I’m trying to encourage them to maybe choose a school or a library to do, which would help everybody in the community.”

Extreme Makeover isn’t alone in its conservative, consumer philanthropy. Most celebrities and other television shows are in on the game too. Stars who make millions sign a guitar to be auctioned off, participate in telethons asking us to donate, auction off their designer clothes. The winner of The Celebrity Apprentice got to donate a check of $250,000 to a charity of their choice. $250,000. Donald Trump’s net worth is $3 billion, according to Forbes. $250,000. $3 billion.

The wealthy — the wealthy celebrities, corporations, CEOs, networks — could try to help more directly by voluntarily capping their salary at $1-4 million/year and donating the rest to charity; that could begin to redistribute the highly concentrated wealth in our country. The global affairs journal, Foreign Policy, asked for the “one solution that would make the world a better place.” Haaaar-vard based psychologist Howard Gardner suggested an income cap in the United States. Too Much explains:

The United States needs an income cap, Gardner posits in the new Foreign Policy, that limits the amount of money a single individual can annually take home to no more than “100 times as much money as the average worker in a society earns in a year.”

“If the average worker makes $40,000,” Gardner proposes, “the top compensated individual may keep $4 million a year.”

Gardner’s Foreign Policy contribution also advocates a cap on wealth, proposing that “no individual should be allowed to accumulate an estate more than 50 times the allowed annual income.”

If that allowed annual income were $4 million, then Gardner’s proposal would allow no one, at death, to bequest a fortune greater than $200 million. Any individual wealth above that would have to “be contributed to charity or donated to the government.”

A cap on income and riches, Gardner adds, would raise billions, even trillions, “to begin to solve the problems about which others are writing in this collection of solutions to save the world.”

In addition to an income cap, there are other solutions as well to redistribute wealth, like raising the income tax instead of cutting taxes for the country’s wealthiest. Jon Whiten of Media Massage sums it up well:

As Daniel Brook noted in his great book The Trap, the current tax code isn’t some given — it wasn’t always this way. Writing about Franklin Roosevelt’s actions, Brook notes

To hold down the top, he proposed, first in 1936 and again in 1942, capping annual incomes by instituting a 100 percent income tax bracket. … Congress found his proposal too radical but met him halfway, instituting a 94 percent tax on income over $200,000 (a couple million dollars in today’s money). After the war, the top rate was lowered to 91 percent.

Of course, we’ve brought that way down since then. Reagan, upon election, slashed top tax rates for millionaires from 70 to 28 percent, and we’ve only kept rolling down that hill since. It seems like the only way we can come out is to put in place radical plans like FDR’s.

Maybe if the CEO of Sears (who rakes in $3+ million) and her ilk had to pay more in taxes (instead of enjoying the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy) we wouldn’t need Sears advertorials like Extreme Makeover to give a poor family a middle class home. But where’s the television drama in that?

Take Action: Sign this petition asking the wealthy to voluntarily impose an income cap on themselves and donate the rest to an organization that works to fight poverty.