Urban war on poverty

[Now over 50 years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.  Johnson's so called "war on poverty" has been a source of conflict and contentious debate since it became law.  No doubt his efforts relieved millions from the suffering of poverty, including senior citizens who benefited from Johnson's Medicare program. 

Viet Nam interfered with Johnson's plans, distracted him and the nation and brought the real progress he led to a standstill.  Today the battle has shifted to the great cities of the United States.  The following essay describes the new terrain of whatever war might be underway against growing poverty in our nation.]

Waging the 21st-Century War on Poverty

By Ben Hecht | January 8, 2014

 

Lyndon Johnson signing the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.

[Now over] Fifty years ago today, during his State of the Union address, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty in America.” This war was to be waged primarily through federal legislation. An array of bills and acts resulted in the creation of programs such as food stamps, Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid and work-study. Today, these programs make for the basis of a contentious, and often divisive, national debate about how Americans live and what we as a society envision as the rights of the most vulnerable among us.

Read the entire report here. 

Declaring war on poverty

Fifty years ago President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a "war on poverty" as a key component of his Great Society strategy.

Johnson was a poor Texas boy who understood poverty.  He emerged as the most powerful arm-twister in the Congress!

His results on poverty were actually impressive, if you look at the numbers (efforts drove national poverty rate down 19% in the very short-lived effort thanks to the waste and escalation of the Vietnam conflict).

Naturally, lots of people are remembering, analyzing and commenting on Johnson's approach to poverty, both pro and con, at the anniversary (for a good example that gets at the complexities of poverty read here).

The discussion is also  in large measure due to the fact that the U. S. continues to struggle with the challenge of poverty in a land of amazing wealth.

So, what steps could be taken to wage a war on poverty, 21st century style?

Here's a beginning list of notions and strategies:

1)  Make universal national service  a requirement for every U. S. young person before the age of 24.  Deploy these young people in community service focusing on health improvement, education, public works, gerontology, nutrition and community development, among other possible disciplines.  Pay a sliding scale stipend with housing plan and educational credit upon completion of 2-year tour.

2)  Raise the minimum wage to livable range for everyone who works:  $13-15 an hour.  Such a move would virtually guarantee that all who worked would escape poverty.

3)  Regulate hourly work week practices of American corporations so that part-time job options were no longer forced on American workers simply to ensure that benefit packages were reduced or eliminated. Reward companies that evidenced a commitment to fair work plans for their employees and penalize those who did not..

4)  Re-energize urban and rural school districts by offering state-of-the-art trade school training to students seeking such trades labor options.

5)  Fully fund and adequately promote the Earned Income Tax Credit program.

6)  Fully fund and adequately promote the child credit deduction.

7)  Provide pre-K and kindergarten for all American children.

8)  Reform/restore funding for Pell grants and other programs that make it possible for all U. S. students who desire it to attend colleges.  Incentivize universities that accommodate low-income students and that provide creative options for low-income students.

9)  Create national strategies to "bring jobs back to the U. S."  Reward U. S. companies who actually return jobs to the U. S. using tax credits and other rewards.

10)  Create federal "investment zones" in pulverized urban and rural areas of the U. S., like Detroit.  Reward companies who relocate to and invest in such communities.

11)  Make the reduction of poverty a genuine national priority.  

12)  Require every faith community in the U. S. to "adopt" and provide whatever is needed  for at least one (1) homeless person continually in order to maintain a tax exempt status.  

Dr. King's fight for economic justice--Taylor Branch and James Cone

Taylor Branch's books about the American Civil Rights Movement are classics.

 I was fortunate enough to sit in the classroom during seminary with James Cone.

 Both men command our attention, especially today.

 Watch and then react.

When poverty was a real concern. . .

These days, politicians and public officials seldom make an issue out of the concerns, needs and tough issues facing poor and low-income persons.

That has not always been the case in American politics. Here's a campaign ad from 1964.

How do you think it would play today?

 
 

Back to the 60s

Last week the following grim report put the spotlight on what we've known for a decade here at CitySquare.  Namely, poverty has been on a steady rise since the early 2000s.  The numbers explain our dramatic increase in persons seeking us out for assistance.  We can do better than this, can't we?

 

US poverty on track to rise to highest since 1960s

HOPE YEN | Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.

Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.

The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.

Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

"I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I'm here, applying for assistance because it's hard to make ends meet. It's very hard to adjust," said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.

Fritz says she grew up wealthy in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, but fortunes turned after her parents lost a significant amount of money in the housing bust. Stuck in a half-million dollar house, her parents began living off food stamps and Fritz's college money evaporated. She tried joining the Army but was injured during basic training.

Now she's living on disability, with an infant daughter and a boyfriend, Garrett Goudeseune, 25, who can't find work as a landscaper. They are struggling to pay their $650 rent on his unemployment checks and don't know how they would get by without the extra help as they hope for the job market to improve.

In an election year dominated by discussion of the middle class, Fritz's case highlights a dim reality for the growing group in poverty. Millions could fall through the cracks as government aid from unemployment insurance, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps diminishes.

"The issues aren't just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy," said Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy.

He pointed to the recent recession but also longer-term changes in the economy such as globalization, automation, outsourcing, immigration, and less unionization that have pushed median household income lower. Even after strong economic growth in the 1990s, poverty never fell below a 1973 low of 11.1 percent. That low point came after President Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty, launched in 1964, that created Medicaid, Medicare and other social welfare programs.

"I'm reluctant to say that we've gone back to where we were in the 1960s. The programs we enacted make a big difference. The problem is that the tidal wave of low-wage jobs is dragging us down and the wage problem is not going to go away anytime soon," Edelman said.

Stacey Mazer of the National Association of State Budget Officers said states will be watching for poverty increases when figures are released in September as they make decisions about the Medicaid expansion. Most states generally assume poverty levels will hold mostly steady and they will hesitate if the findings show otherwise. "It's a constant tension in the budget," she said.

The predictions for 2011 are based on separate AP interviews, supplemented with research on suburban poverty from Alan Berube of the Brookings Institution and an analysis of federal spending by the Congressional Research Service and Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute.

The analysts' estimates suggest that some 47 million people in the U.S., or 1 in 6, were poor last year. An increase of one-tenth of a percentage point to 15.2 percent would tie the 1983 rate, the highest since 1965. The highest level on record was 22.4 percent in 1959, when the government began calculating poverty figures.

Poverty is closely tied to joblessness. While the unemployment rate improved from 9.6 percent in 2010 to 8.9 percent in 2011, the employment-population ratio remained largely unchanged, meaning many discouraged workers simply stopped looking for work. Food stamp rolls, another indicator of poverty, also grew.

Demographers also say:

—Poverty will remain above the pre-recession level of 12.5 percent for many more years. Several predicted that peak poverty levels — 15 percent to 16 percent — will last at least until 2014, due to expiring unemployment benefits, a jobless rate persistently above 6 percent and weak wage growth.

—Suburban poverty, already at a record level of 11.8 percent, will increase again in 2011.
—Part-time or underemployed workers, who saw a record 15 percent poverty in 2010, will rise to a new high.
—Poverty among people 65 and older will remain at historically low levels, buoyed by Social Security cash payments.
—Child poverty will increase from its 22 percent level in 2010.

Analysts also believe that the poorest poor, defined as those at 50 percent or less of the poverty level, will remain near its peak level of 6.7 percent.

"I've always been the guy who could find a job. Now I'm not," said Dale Szymanski, 56, a Teamsters Union forklift operator and convention hand who lives outside Las Vegas in Clark County. In a state where unemployment ranks highest in the nation, the Las Vegas suburbs have seen a particularly rapid increase in poverty from 9.7 percent in 2007 to 14.7 percent.

Szymanski, who moved from Wisconsin in 2000, said he used to make a decent living of more than $40,000 a year but now doesn't work enough hours to qualify for union health care. He changed apartments several months ago and sold his aging 2001 Chrysler Sebring in April to pay expenses.
"You keep thinking it's going to turn around. But I'm stuck," he said.

The 2010 poverty level was $22,314 for a family of four, and $11,139 for an individual, based on an official government calculation that includes only cash income, before tax deductions. It excludes capital gains or accumulated wealth, such as home ownership, as well as noncash aid such as food stamps and tax credits, which were expanded substantially under President Barack Obama's stimulus package.

An additional 9 million people in 2010 would have been counted above the poverty line if food stamps and tax credits were taken into account.

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, believes the social safety net has worked and it is now time to cut back. He worries that advocates may use a rising poverty rate to justify additional spending on the poor, when in fact, he says, many live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.

A new census measure accounts for noncash aid, but that supplemental poverty figure isn't expected to be released until after the November election. Since that measure is relatively new, the official rate remains the best gauge of year-to-year changes in poverty dating back to 1959.

Few people advocate cuts in anti-poverty programs. Roughly 79 percent of Americans think the gap between rich and poor has grown in the past two decades, according to a Public Religion Research Institute/RNS Religion News survey from November 2011. The same poll found that about 67 percent oppose "cutting federal funding for social programs that help the poor" to help reduce the budget deficit.

Outside of Medicaid, federal spending on major low-income assistance programs such as food stamps, disability aid and tax credits have been mostly flat at roughly 1.5 percent of the gross domestic product from 1975 to the 1990s. Spending spiked higher to 2.3 percent of GDP after Obama's stimulus program in 2009 temporarily expanded unemployment insurance and tax credits for the poor.

The U.S. safety net may soon offer little comfort to people such as Jose Gorrin, 52, who lives in the western Miami suburb of Hialeah Gardens. Arriving from Cuba in 1980, he was able to earn a decent living as a plumber for years, providing for his children and ex-wife. But things turned sour in 2007 and in the past two years he has barely worked, surviving on the occasional odd job.

His unemployment aid has run out, and he's too young to draw Social Security.

Holding a paper bag of still-warm bread he'd just bought for lunch, Gorrin said he hasn't decided whom he'll vote for in November, expressing little confidence the presidential candidates can solve the nation's economic problems. "They all promise to help when they're candidates," Gorrin said, adding, "I hope things turn around. I already left Cuba. I don't know where else I can go."
___
Associated Press writers Kristen Wyatt in Lakewood, Colo., Ken Ritter and Michelle Rindels in Las Vegas, Laura Wides-Munoz in Miami and AP Deputy Director of Polling Jennifer Agiesta contributed to this report.