Aliquippa's Ty Law Exposes a Wasted War on Poverty

"Unfortunately that's the mentality for some because a select few of us made it. Even if we put all of our money together, we cannot change the facts. We can probably fix up a hundred homes to where they look real nice and pristine. But that's not going to change the environment with the drugs and the fact that there ain't no jobs." - Ty Law, Playing Through the Whistle

After starring at the University of Michigan Ty Law was a 1995 first round NFL draft pick of the New England Patriots. Law played fifteen years in the league, was a two-time All Pro, played in several Pro Bowls, and he also has three Super Bowl rings. Most recently Law was the 20th former Patriot to be inducted into the team's Hall of Fame. Law is but one of many football stars to have honed his skills in Aliquippa, PA. NFL Hall of Famer Mike Ditka is also an Aliquippa product, as is fellow Hall inductee Tony Dorsett. Future Hall of Fame defensive back Darrelle Revis is one of the more recent star athletes to emerge from Aliquippa High's legendary football program.

Back to Law, what's intriguing about him is that through interviews with Sports Illustrated's S.L. Price for Price's very interesting new book, Playing Through the Whistle: Steel, Football, and an American Town, Law ably shows why attempts by politicians - Democrat and Republican - to fight poverty in the U.S. will generally achieve little to nothing.

The sportswriter in Price tells the story of the decline of the once prosperous Pennsylvania steel town of Aliquippa, but thanks to his focus on some of the athletes who made it out, Price is explaining something much bigger than perhaps even he realizes. Through his subjects like Law, Price is revealing the certain folly of the efforts from both major political parties to fix what has little to do with money or policy, and lots to do with personal decisions.

The quote at the top is Law responding to the view held by some Aliquippa residents that the limping town's most famous sons need to give something back to what is dying. By U.S. standards, Aliquippa is poor. But that's where it gets a little bit hazy. While Aliquippa registers as poor (per capita annual income of $20,000) by rich American standards, most of the world's poor would be very pleased to live there. And at that income.

Indeed, while its residents get by with aforementioned per capita earnings of $20,000, residents of Shanghai have it much worse in a comparative sense. Per capita income in what is China's richest city comes in at roughly $7,000 annually. How we define poverty (or something close to it) in the U.S. is not how people around the world define it. America's poor live very well when their living standards are measured against the rest of the world. No doubt this explains why the world's poorest frequently risk everything to get to the United States. To those on the outside looking in, the United States doesn't have a poverty problem; rather it's the country where the world's poorest seek to move in order to cure their poverty.

As the income stats in Aliquippa reveal yet again, even America's poorest live very well in a relative sense. "Poor" is an adjective that means many different things to many different people. Measured against the rest of the world, the poor in the U.S. don't have a problem that involves a lack of money.

Yet explicit in the poverty fixes conceived by the U.S. political left is that poverty can be erased fairly simply with bigger and bigger checks. Ok, but Price's interview of Law shows how simplistic such a view is. As Law notes, while money will for a time revive houses that are in dis-repair, it's not going to solve American-style destitution that is rooted in bad decisions.  Law reminds the reader that once the houses are cleaned up the drug use that frequently leads to bad outcomes will resume on the way to briefly restored houses falling back into dis-repair. Law is very explicitly saying that Aliquippa's economic problems aren't financial; rather they're driven by individual error.

And that speaks to Law's bigger point. Responding more specifically to the view that he perhaps owes the residents of a limping Aliquippa, Law essentially asks "why?" As he tells Price, "There wasn't nobody out there [when I was in high school] running with me at midnight, there wasn't nobody dealing with what I was dealing with at home." Translated, Law's correct personal decisions are what made it possible for him to escape a bad situation. Law's personal choices ensured that he would escape American-style poverty whether he made the NFL or not. Why does he owe his hard-earned wealth to those who, coming up in the same environment as he did, chose the wrong life paths?

Regarding the quote that begins this piece, Law ended it with a question ahead of a confident assertion. Thinking about what will become of Aliquippa assuming he and other rich former residents pay to rebuild it, Law asked "How you going to maintain it? It's going to get right back like it was before we fixed it up." Law's question followed by his prediction signaled yet again that Aliquippa doesn't have a money problem. If we ignore per capita income that by global standards is quite high, Law's point is that bad decision-making of the drug and alcohol variety among the town's existing residents would quickly reverse any near-term fixes that Law and others could fund. Aliquippa's problem once again has little to do with money.

And that's why enterprise zones and tax cuts talked up by the right won't mean much either. Too often forgotten by political conservatives is that new American arrivals from around the world who don't even speak English cure their poverty most often upon reaching U.S. soil. The jobs available stateside offer levels of pay that afford lifestyles unheard of for the poor in other parts of the world. To the rest of the world, the whole of the U.S. is an enterprise zone.

So for Democrats to presume that more money will fix what is a creation of bad decisions amounts to highly wishful thinking. And while reductions in the tax burden are always appealing, an erasure of the tax burden in Aliquippa isn't going to change a situation that is defined by bad choices.

Hard as it is for truly compassionate people to admit, the United States doesn't have a poverty problem. Not even close. Empirical evidence supporting the previous claim is per capita income figures that reveal even down-and-out towns like Aliquippa as quite well-to-do in a global sense. Looked at anecdotally, evidence that the U.S. doesn't have a poverty problem is the continued inflow of striving immigrants from around the world. If there were no opportunity for the globally poor to thrive in the U.S. upon arrival, they would surely go elsewhere.

After that, readers need only remember what Law told price about his hometown. Money won't fix what springs from lousy choices. America doesn't have a poverty problem as much as some in America have burdened themselves with bad decisions. What policymakers seemingly keep forgetting is that bad choices can't be legislated away.