Let’s Recall Poverty Before the Safety Net

Huffington Post blogger Dan Morgan looks back nearly 50 years to tell us what poverty was like in his early reporting days.

This is an important, timely post because it reminds us of how poor people lived — and died — before the creation of today’s safety net.

Here in the District of Columbia, Morgan found “people living in basement apartments with dirt floors. Many were hungry, cold and short of coal for stoves. Some children were staying home because they had no shoes.”

Found a penniless woman with no coat to brave the cold weather for a trip to the social service agency. A blind man who made the trip, but was living with his nine children in an unheated place because the agency wouldn’t — or couldn’t — help him buy fuel.

In California, Morgan met a family that had lost three babies to dehydration while picking cotton there in 1936.

Still dreadful conditions 20 years later, he writes, when Michael Harrington chronicled farm worker poverty in that agriculture-rich state.

Morgan cites some evidence that safety net programs have lifted Americans out of poverty.

For example, the official poverty rate for seniors dropped from 28.5% in 1966 to 9% in 2010, at least partly because the federal government started indexing Social Security retirement benefits to cost-of-living increases.

Two other examples based on the Census Bureau’s supplemental poverty measure. You can see them in this nice infographic from the Half in Ten campaign.

But Morgan’s main point is that safety net programs have changed the quality of poverty.

In other words, poor people, by and large, don’t suffer the same acute, life-threatening deprivations as they did before we began building the network of programs that make up today’s safety net.

Morgan focuses on what may be our biggest success — federal nutrition assistance programs.

“Clinical malnutrition,” he writes, “has given way to what government and private agencies call ‘food insecurity.’”

“Poor nutrition, not malnutrition is the biggest problem” now, says anti-hunger expert and advocate Joel Berg.

And indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2010 figures, children in only 1% of American households sometimes didn’t get enough to eat because their parents couldn’t afford to feed them.

WIC alone, Berg estimates, has prevented 200,000 babies from dying at birth.

“Progressives,” Morgan concludes, “should not be timid about extolling this achievement. And conservatives, above all, should welcome it” because safety net programs “enable millions more people to participate in the great American market,” e.g., by using food stamps to buy groceries, vouchers to pay rent to private landlords.

Many conservatives do appreciate the safety net, Morgan says. But, even by his own showing, many don’t.

For example, he quotes Newt Gingrich, whose latest tome notes that the 2009 poverty rate was about the same as when the War on Poverty began. “What did we get in return?” Newt asks — a rhetorical question if ever there was one.

We hear the same thing from the Republican Study Committee, which counts a large majority of House Republicans as members.

“Americans have spent around $16 trillion on means-tested welfare,”* it says. “Even with all these resources devoted to assistance for the poor, poverty is higher today than it was in the 1970s.”

This is the send-up for its broad-gauge attack on virtually the whole range of federal programs that constitute the safety net.

And RSC member Paul Ryan, who chairs the influential House Budget Committee, has personally championed radical safety net cuts.

As we head into the Fiscal Year 2013 budget season, both the administration and Congress will be looking for ways to reduce non-defense spending by $54.7 billion.

“The safety net will be a fat target,” Morgan warns.

Some major programs won’t get hit by the automatic cuts the failure of the Super Committee will trigger. But that doesn’t mean they’re safe, since Congress is perfectly free to change them — or the law that partly protects them.

Other programs are wide open, as the Congressional committees and subcommittees parcel out the mandated reductions.

We often focus on defects in the safety net — people who aren’t served, people who are but not sufficiently. This is still important.

But, taking a leaf out of Morgan’s book, I feel we urgently need to show how much good safety net programs do — and to revive the history of what poverty in America was like before them.

* This figure comes from the arch-conservative Heritage Foundation — a not always reliable source. The RSC is also indebted to the Foundation for its uniquely expansive definition of “welfare”.

Cut Poverty In America In Half? New Report Shows How, Tells Why

A new report from the Half in Ten campaign takes on one of the biggest challenges of our time — how to significantly reduce poverty in America.

The challenge it addresses is actually even bigger. It envisions not merely lifting many millions of people above the poverty line, but expanding opportunity so as to grow a stronger middle class.

To this end, the report establishes three priorities for the next 10 years:

• Create more good jobs, i.e., jobs that pay “at least a moderate income” and provide paid time off, plus health care and retirement benefits
• Strengthen families and communities so that “all families … can raise their children in safe, healthful environments”
• Promote family economic security by strengthening both work supports and the safety net for people who aren’t employed and also by facilitating asset building

Separate chapters for each of these, with trend analyses, recommended strategies and many, many data points. A real gold mine for advocates here.

Groundbreaking Indicators

What’s truly groundbreaking are the indicators linked to the goals. Two sets of these.

The first are benchmarks for measuring progress in poverty reduction. They include data from both the Census Bureau’s official poverty measure and the much better “supplemental measure” it’s about to issue.

Also included are some more targeted indicators from the Census reports. These will give us two perspectives on public policies.

On the one hand, we’ll see how many people were kept out of poverty by the Earned Income Tax Credit and some key public benefits.

On the other hand, we’ll see how many people fell below the poverty line due to cost burdens public policies could more effectively address, e.g., health care and child care costs.

Rounding out these indicators is the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s overall food insecurity figure. This broadens the set from poverty per se to one of the major hardships it commonly imposes.

The second set of indicators are for the three top-level priorities. A total of 17 of these — eight for jobs, four for families and five for economic security.

At least some of them will be tracked not only nationwide, but for each state and the District of Columbia. An interactive map gives us baseline state-level priority indicators, plus two state-level indicators from the priority/hardship set.

In short, we’ve got an enormously ambitious agenda here — not only what’s amply laid out in the report itself, but in the commitment to tracking.

The report starts the clock, with indicators from 2010.

Going forward, we’ll have annual figures that show progress, if any, toward half as much poverty in 2020 — 23.1 million fewer Americans so poor as to fall below the poverty line. Also progress along the pathway to shared prosperity that’s mapped by the strategies.

Political Will

The leaders of the three nonprofits that founded Half in Ten say the goal is achievable. We have the knowledge and the resources — deficit hysterics notwithstanding.

We know from past experience that sensible strategies, backed by strong leadership and adequate funding, can make a big dent in the poverty rate and build a more robust, diverse middle class.

But why, with everything else going on, should we as a nation commit to such strategies now?

Half in Ten answers that they’re in our national interest because they’ll drive economic growth and long-term competitiveness in the global marketplace.

They’ll also, it says, restore trust in basic national values like the belief that hard work pays off — what we sometimes call the American Dream. Tamp down what seem to be some stirrings of social instability too, I think.

What we need — and clearly don’t have — is the political will to embrace the challenges of creating a pathway to prosperity for the poor and near-poor in our society.

Creating that will is our collective responsibility. The Half in Ten report gives strategies we can advocate, with facts and figures to support them. The ongoing tracking will help us hold our elected officials accountable.

Most important perhaps is the basic message. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

Would A New Mass Movement Turn Around The Black Male Crisis?

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert pulls together diverse facts and figures to show that “a tragic crisis of enormous magnitude is facing black boys and men in America.”

Most of the indicators have been reported before, but seeing them all together is still a shocker:

• In 2008, the on-time high school graduation rate for black males was 47% — even worse in several major urban areas. (In the District, it was 41% — down by 17% for the year before.)
• Jobless rates for black men in inner cities are “astronomical,” such that, in many areas, virtually no one has a legitimate job.
• More than 70% of black children (presumably about half of them boys) are born to unwed mothers.
• Community leaders in poor communities say that many of them are being raised by a grandparent or other relative or ending up in foster care.
• More than a third of all black children are growing up in poverty. Here again the figure is presumably about the same for black boys.
• Black men have a near one-in-three chance of being incarcerated at some point in their lives.
• A majority of those without a high school diploma have spent time in prison by their mid-30s.
• Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men — in most cases due to “murderous wounds” inflicted by their peers.

Herbert asserts that the “heroic efforts” needed to alleviate this crisis won’t come from the government or our society as a whole because there’s “very little sentiment in the wider population for tackling the extensive problems” it reflects.

So, he says, the black community has to mobilize “on the scale of the civil rights movement” to “demand justice on a wide front.” At the same time, it has to establish “a new set of norms, higher standards, for struggling blacks to live by.”

No doubt a portion of the black male population is in a world of trouble — and, as Herbert says, for a “myriad of reasons,” including persistent race discrimination. But would a campaign like the civil rights movement halt “the terrible devastation?”

Consider the differences.

The civil rights movement had very specific solutions to the very specific problem of race discrimination. The solutions were new federal laws to bolster and expand Constitutional protections — voting rights, school desegregation, equal employment opportunity, equal access to and treatment in public accommodations, nondiscriminatory practices in the housing market and related financing.

These affected blacks, regardless of economic and educational level. And they were indeed matters of simple justice. That’s why the civil rights movement gained active support from so many predominantly white groups. Seems to me that any effective mass movement on behalf of the disadvantaged would have to do likewise.

The civil rights rights movement paved the way for a plethora of Johnson-era programs aimed at eradicating the ingrained disadvantages of slavery, Jim Crow laws and less explicit, but no less powerful forms of discrimination.

Many of the programs are still with us today, though some have morphed over time — Head Start, Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (now No Child Left Behind), the youth Job Corps, the Legal Services Corporation, Medicaid, welfare and more.

Later administrations have added programs — the Work Investment Act, for example, and the Community Development Block Grant, which targets communities with high poverty rates.

Yet we’ve still got all those black boys and men on a “socioeconomic slide” into “an ever-deepening pit of social and economic degradation.”

I think it’s too simple to attribute this to a lack of concern.

The federal government is still making large investments and exploring new approaches. Likewise many state and local governments. There are scads of nonprofits working on the issues — and foundations supporting them. Academic research centers, think tanks and independent experts regularly issue new research and reform proposals. Whites, as well as blacks volunteer their time.

My sense is that, on a broad scale, we really don’t have the answers, though we do know enough to do a better job than we’re doing now. Whatever consensus might be forged would be far more complex and iffy than prohibiting race discrimination — or enforcing the laws now on the books.

Could a campaign like the civil rights movement translate a demand for justice into a relatively limited, compelling list of asks that would galvanize a critical mass of the population? Would they get to the roots of the crisis?

What would the black community do that hasn’t already been tried to establish a new set of norms for its struggling members? Is there really, in the sense Herbert means it, a black community anyway?

Traditional Values Get New Packaging

The launch issue of National Affairs includes a lengthy and thought-provoking article by Ron Haskins, co-director of the Brooking Institution’s Center on Children and Families.

Basically, Haskins seeks to shift the debate on anti-poverty policies from income inequality to upward mobility. After all, he says, the American dream isn’t economic equality. It’s the chance to get ahead.

The first part of the article marshals economic studies to show that income inequality in the U.S. isn’t really as great as it’s commonly said to be–or increasing as much as alleged.

But this effort to correct the inequality story is just a preamble to the heart of the argument. Haskins dives into that with an account of what he and Brookings colleagues found when they analyzed long-term data on economic mobility together with data on employment, family composition, education and other personal characteristics.

These, he says, are what really matter because the reasons people are poor “have to do not only with economics but also with culture, history, and especially individual behavior and personal choices.”

Looking at the impacts of getting a four-year college degree, he concludes that mobility is “alive and well in America”–though not what it could be, given what we see in other industrialized countries, or what it should be, given the “enormous” investments in anti-poverty programs.

What we need, he says, is more public policies, like student financial aid, that support personal effort. But that’s only part of the agenda. Haskins and his colleagues recommend:

• Expanding the “serious” work requirements and the work supports in TANF to include beneficiaries of the food stamp program and subsidized housing–this because they view welfare reform as a great success.
• Expanding programs that focus on the early growth and development of poor children.
• Promoting marriage and two-parent families because “the growth of female-headed families is like a giant poverty-generating machine.”

Much of this makes me very uncomfortable. No doubt that our traditional cultural values–education, hard work, marriage and responsible child-rearing–are correlated to prosperity. No doubt that personal responsibility–or lack of same–helps determine what income bracket we’re in. And no doubt whatever that expanding supports for low-wage workers and helping poor children get a good start in life are important and worthwhile.

But my sense is that Haskins’s agenda is about half a step away from blaming poor people for their situation–and maybe not even half a step away from a very rigid and conservative view of what a family should be.

And is economic mobility–the chance to move up (and down) the income scale–really the be all and the end all anyway? My dream for America is different.