America’s War On Poverty, America’s War On The Poor
David Coates
January 2014 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the State of the Union Address
in which Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty. This anniversary
is leading to much soul-searching here in the United States.
Partly that soul-searching reflects the
high levels of poverty that persist in contemporary America. The US does
not define the poverty level as the EU does: as a percentage of median
income, and therefore as normally a rising target. It defines it still
in money terms, with the poverty level adjusted only for size of family
and inflation.
There is much debate here currently
about the adequacy of that measure. When the War on Poverty was first
launched, the percentage of Americans with incomes lower than the
poverty level for their size of family stood at 19%. After a decade of
sustained policy, that percentage had fallen to 11.1%. The official
poverty rate then stabilized, oscillating between 11% and 15% with each
business cycle. As a result of the 2008 financial crisis and resulting
recession, it is currently back to a peak of 15%, with almost one
American child in five growing up in poverty. At stake in the
soul-searching now underway is whether poverty persists in these
proportions in modern America because, as Ronald Reagan once famously
put it, “in the war on poverty, poverty won;” or whether, on the
contrary, the war on poverty failed because his administration (and
subsequent administrations) stopped fighting it.
The political conflict around that
question is now intense. Advocates of a renewed war on poverty point to
the significant impact on poverty levels made by key government
programmes. Take those programmes away, they say, and the level of
poverty in the United States would be dramatically higher. On the most
recent data available to us, the Earned Income Tax Credit reduced child
poverty by 5% in 2012 alone. Food and nutrition programmes had much the
same effect. Advocates point too to the involuntary nature of most
contemporary poverty. The vast majority of Americans who are currently
poor are poor in spite of their own best efforts. They are poor because
welfare payments are low and limited. They are poor because low-paid
employment (of the kind offered by, among others, America’s largest
employer – Wal-Mart) still keeps people below the poverty level. Or they
are poor because large-scale involuntary unemployment (there are still
three unemployed Americans for every available job) is steadily pushing
the long-term unemployed out of the American middle class.
The Politics of the War on Poverty
Unfortunately for the poor, however,
conservative critics of welfare provision do not see it that way. They
either deny that anyone is America (or, from the point of view of Paula Bennett and the Key led National Government, in New Zealand) is genuinely poor – so many of them
have televisions and cars after all – or they insist that most of those
now in poverty are there because of poor life-style choices or an
unwillingness to work. For such critics, the welfare net is not too
modest. It is too generous. Any narrowing of the gap between welfare
income and low pay removes the pressure on the long-term unemployed
actively to seek work. Indeed, so certain are conservative critics of
this truth that, in the current US Congress, Republican legislators
voted in November to cut food stamps and cannot now be persuaded in
sufficient numbers to extend long-term unemployment insurance to the
more than one million Americans whose insurance ran out in December. And
among the Tea Party
base of the Republican opposition to welfare provision, it must be
recognized, strands of racism linger. The American poor is still
disproportionately African-American and Hispanic, attracting arguments
from libertarians about the need to honor the defining American
tradition of self-reliance, and arguments from intense nationalists
about the need for repatriation and the closing of the border.
But the poor in America now come in many
colors including white, and in many ages – both young and old. The
social compact between firms and workers that once traded modest wages
for guaranteed healthcare and a reliable pension is eroding fast, and
though in 2014 Republicans will no doubt still point to “welfare queens”
as spongers on the public purse, they too have now to address the
poverty issue in all its complexity – not least because many of their
potential voters are either in or on the edge of poverty themselves. So
many of the men now in poverty in America are keen to find work but
cannot, and so many of the women are grandmothers struggling to survive
on a modest state pension, or are high school graduates struggling to
find work of any kind at all, that their plight is simply too evident
and too entrenched to be ignored by even the most strident critics of
welfare provision. Whether they like it or not, poverty in America has
become a problem for Republicans. For Democrats it needs to become a
cause.
The current political gridlock in
Washington is leaving more and more Americans vulnerable to poverty.
There is an enhanced churning here as well as an enhanced volume:
between 2009 and 2011 the incomes of approximately one American in three
(31%) fell below the poverty level for a while, remaining there for at
least two months. The evidence is clear. Political gridlock and the
resulting absence of effective anti-poverty programs in the contemporary
United States benefit the rich, but they leave the rest of us with
increasing income inequality, vast areas of urban blight and suburban
drabness, and diminished access to the American Dream. Lyndon Johnson
was right:
the man who is hungry, who cannot find work or educate his children, who is bowed by want, that man is not fully free.
But try telling that to a Republican
legislator who is safe in his/her gerrymandered constituency only so
long as the Republican Party’s Tea Party base is not enraged by any
softness on the poor.
There is a lot at stake in 2014 in
America, as the last mid-term elections of the Obama administration
approach. We can expect Democrats to press the poverty button heavily as
they campaign. Let us hope, for the sake of the American poor, that
this time pressing that button works: that at long last the progressive
message on wage growth and income distribution gets through to the
American electorate on a scale sufficient to return power to more
compassionate legislators than those currently controlling the House.
A fuller version, with appropriate footnotes, is at www.davidcoates.net
