the [alternate] patriot

Friday, September 30, 2005

Understanding Poverty in America

TomPaine.com
has an excellent article about poverty in America, written by Dr. Nancy Cauthen, deputy director of the National Center for Children in Poverty . an excerpt:

We need to confront two major challenges.

We need a bold agenda that supports working families so that parents can once again aspire to providing their children with a better future. This means addressing stagnating wages and families’ need for workplace flexibility. It means improving public education—including integrating our schools not just across race and ethnic lines but also across income—and increasing access to higher ed. It means figuring out how to make decent housing, health care and child care affordable for all. It means rebuilding our public institutions and national infrastructure.

A clear lesson from the New Deal and Great Society is that the most successful programs—Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and Medicare—target people across income. In contrast, means-tested programs tend to be meager and stigmatizing. As the saying goes, programs for poor people are poor programs.

The second challenge is to address the needs of the most disadvantaged. Before Katrina, more than half of New Orleans residents did not own their homes; one in five households did not have a car, and eight percent had no phone service. Families trapped by this kind of deep poverty—and living in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poor people—need more than the Band-Aid? approaches that have passed for anti-poverty programs in the past.

Thousands of Americans have been prompted by Katrina to ask what kind of society we want to have. Rising inequality—and the near absence of any meaningful level of social mobility—belie America’s promise of equality, opportunity and justice for all. After 25 years of talk about “personal responsibility,” it’s time to talk also about the obligations of government to its citizens.">TomPaine.com - A Poverty Of Understanding: "We need to confront two major challenges.

We need a bold agenda that supports working families so that parents can once again aspire to providing their children with a better future. This means addressing stagnating wages and families’ need for workplace flexibility. It means improving public education—including integrating our schools not just across race and ethnic lines but also across income—and increasing access to higher ed. It means figuring out how to make decent housing, health care and child care affordable for all. It means rebuilding our public institutions and national infrastructure.

A clear lesson from the New Deal and Great Society is that the most successful programs—Social Security, Unemployment Insurance and Medicare—target people across income. In contrast, means-tested programs tend to be meager and stigmatizing. As the saying goes, programs for poor people are poor programs.

The second challenge is to address the needs of the most disadvantaged. Before Katrina, more than half of New Orleans residents did not own their homes; one in five households did not have a car, and eight percent had no phone service. Families trapped by this kind of deep poverty—and living in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poor people—need more than the Band-Aid? approaches that have passed for anti-poverty programs in the past.

Thousands of Americans have been prompted by Katrina to ask what kind of society we want to have. Rising inequality—and the near absence of any meaningful level of social mobility—belie America’s promise of equality, opportunity and justice for all. After 25 years of talk about “personal responsibility,” it’s time to talk also about the obligations of government to its citizens.

Thomas Jefferson would not like where we are today. He realized that the health of the Republic depended on not too grat a division between the top andthe bottomof society.

Palema 3:03 PM

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