RONALD REAGAN famously said, “We fought a war on poverty and
poverty won.” With 46 million Americans — 15 percent of the population —
now counted as poor, it’s tempting to think he may have been right.
Look a little deeper and the temptation grows. The lowest percentage
in poverty since we started counting was 11.1 percent in 1973. The rate
climbed as high as 15.2 percent in 1983. In 2000, after a spurt of
prosperity, it went back down to 11.3 percent, and yet 15 million more
people are poor today.
At
the same time, we have done a lot that works. From Social Security to
food stamps to the earned-income tax credit and on and on, we have
enacted programs that now keep 40 million people out of poverty. Poverty
would be nearly double what it is now without these measures, according
to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. To say that “poverty
won” is like saying the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts failed because
there is still pollution.
With all of that, why have we not achieved more? Four reasons: An
astonishing number of people work at low-wage jobs. Plus, many more
households are headed now by a single parent, making it difficult for
them to earn a living income from the jobs that are typically available.
The near disappearance of cash assistance for low-income mothers and
children — i.e., welfare — in much of the country plays a contributing
role, too. And persistent issues of race and gender mean higher poverty
among minorities and families headed by single mothers.
The first thing needed if we’re to get people out of poverty is more
jobs that pay decent wages. There aren’t enough of these in our current
economy. The need for good jobs extends far beyond the current crisis;
we’ll need a full-employment policy and a bigger investment in
21st-century education and skill development strategies if we’re to have
any hope of breaking out of the current economic malaise.
This isn’t a problem specific to the current moment. We’ve been
drowning in a flood of low-wage jobs for the last 40 years. Most of the
income of people in poverty comes from work. According to the most
recent data available from the Census Bureau, 104 million people — a
third of the population — have annual incomes below twice the poverty
line, less than $38,000 for a family of three. They struggle to make
ends meet every month.
Half the jobs in the nation pay less than $34,000 a year, according
to the Economic Policy Institute. A quarter pay below the poverty line
for a family of four, less than $23,000 annually. Families that can send
another adult to work have done better, but single mothers (and
fathers) don’t have that option. Poverty among families with children
headed by single mothers exceeds 40 percent.
Wages for those who work on jobs in the bottom half have been stuck since 1973, increasing just 7 percent.
It’s not that the whole economy stagnated. There’s been growth, a lot
of it, but it has stuck at the top. The realization that 99 percent of
us have been left in the dust by the 1 percent at the top (some much
further behind than others) came far later than it should have — Rip Van
Winkle and then some. It took the Great Recession to get people’s
attention, but the facts had been accumulating for a long time. If we’ve
awakened, we can act.
Low-wage jobs bedevil tens of millions of people. At the other end of
the low-income spectrum we have a different problem. The safety net for
single mothers and their children has developed a gaping hole over the
past dozen years. This is a major cause of the dramatic increase in
extreme poverty during those years. The census tells us that 20.5
million people earn incomes below half the poverty line, less than about
$9,500 for a family of three — up eight million from 2000.
Why? A substantial reason is the near demise of welfare — now called
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF. In the mid-90s more
than two-thirds of children in poor families received welfare. But that
number has dwindled over the past decade and a half to roughly 27
percent.
One result: six million people have no income other than food stamps.
Food stamps provide an income at a third of the poverty line, close to
$6,300 for a family of three. It’s hard to understand how they survive.
At least we have food stamps. They have been a powerful antirecession
tool in the past five years, with the number of recipients rising to 46
million today from 26.3 million in 2007. By contrast, welfare has done
little to counter the impact of the recession; although the number of
people receiving cash assistance rose from 3.9 million to 4.5 million
since 2007, many states actually reduced the size of their rolls and
lowered benefits to those in greatest need.
Race and gender play an enormous part in determining poverty’s
continuing course. Minorities are disproportionately poor: around 27
percent of African-Americans, Latinos and American Indians are poor,
versus 10 percent of whites. Wealth disparities are even wider. At the
same time, whites constitute the largest number among the poor. This is a
fact that bears emphasis, since measures to raise income and provide
work supports will help more whites than minorities. But we cannot
ignore race and gender, both because they present particular challenges
and because so much of the politics of poverty is grounded in those
issues.
We know what we need to do — make the rich pay their fair share of
running the country, raise the minimum wage, provide health care and a
decent safety net, and the like. But realistically, the immediate
challenge is keeping what we have. Representative Paul Ryan and his
ideological peers would slash everything from Social Security to
Medicare and on through the list, and would hand out more tax breaks to
the people at the top. Robin Hood would turn over in his grave.
We should not kid ourselves. It isn’t certain that things will stay
as good as they are now. The wealth and income of the top 1 percent
grows at the expense of everyone else. Money breeds power and power
breeds more money. It is a truly vicious circle.
A surefire politics of change would necessarily involve getting
people in the middle — from the 30th to the 70th percentile — to see
their own economic self-interest. If they vote in their own
self-interest, they’ll elect people who are likely to be more aligned
with people with lower incomes as well as with them. As long as people
in the middle identify more with people on the top than with those on
the bottom, we are doomed. The obscene amount of money flowing into the
electoral process makes things harder yet.
But history shows that people power wins sometimes. That’s what
happened in the Progressive Era a century ago and in the Great
Depression as well. The gross inequality of those times produced an
amalgam of popular unrest, organization, muckraking journalism and
political leadership that attacked the big — and worsening — structural
problem of economic inequality. The civil rights movement changed the
course of history and spread into the women’s movement, the
environmental movement and, later, the gay rights movement. Could we
have said on the day before the dawn of each that it would happen, let
alone succeed? Did Rosa Parks know?
We have the ingredients. For one thing, the demographics of the
electorate are changing. The consequences of that are hardly automatic,
but they create an opportunity. The new generation of young people —
unusually distrustful of encrusted power in all institutions and, as a
consequence, tending toward libertarianism — is ripe for a new politics
of honesty. Lower-income people will participate if there are candidates
who speak to their situations. The change has to come from the bottom
up and from synergistic leadership that draws it out. When people decide
they have had enough and there are candidates who stand for what they
want, they will vote accordingly.
I have seen days of promise and days of darkness, and I’ve seen them
more than once. All history is like that. The people have the power if
they will use it, but they have to see that it is in their interest to
do so.
© 2012 Peter Edelman
Peter Edelman teaches at Georgetown University Law Center and
co-directs the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public
Policy and the author, most recently, of “So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So
Hard to End Poverty in America.”
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