Census data show nearly one in two Americans have fallen into poverty or could be classified as low-income. Meanwhile, more than a third of African-American and Latino children live in poverty.
Peter Edelman talking:
Our economy has been very unkind to the entire bottom half of our people over the last 40 years. We have terrific public policy in place, although it’s threatened now by Paul Ryan, as you just showed. But we’ve done a lot, from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, to food stamps and the earned income tax credit. We’re keeping more than 40 million people out of poverty now by the public policy that we have. But that’s fighting against the flood of low-wage jobs that we’ve had over the last 40 years and the fact that people in the bottom half have been absolutely stuck, that the wages for people at the bottom have not—have grown only 7 percent over that 40-year period. So we’re fighting uphill with the public policies that we have. It’s even harder for people who are—which is single moms in this economy, who are all by themselves in this low-wage economy trying to earn enough to support their children. It’s very, very hard to do that with the flood of low-wage jobs that we have.
We’ve had a terrible hole ripped in the safety net that we have for the lowest-income people in this country. It’s nice to hear him say if there is a problem, he’s going to fix it—not too credible, since he says he’s not even focusing. But 20 million people now—and these are census numbers—live in deep poverty, extreme poverty, incomes below half the poverty line. That’s below $9,000 for a family of three. Why is that? Well, partly because the economy has been so weak at the bottom, but the most vulnerable people have lost the safety net of cash assistance. I’m talking about mothers and children, welfare. The 1996 law turned everything over to the states to do what they want. And basically, right now, welfare is gone. We have six million people in this country whose only income is food stamps. That’s an income at a third of the poverty line. In the state of Wyoming, there are 644 people in the whole state, 4 percent of the state’s poor children, receive TANF, Temporary Assistance to Needy Children [Families], what we now call welfare. Nineteen states serve less than 10 percent of their poor children. It’s a terrible hole in the safety net. Welfare has basically disappeared in large parts of this country.
The Clinton administration presided over a drastic transformation of U.S. welfare laws. people talk about the tremendous rift in Washington between Democrats and Republicans, but you might say, on the issue of poverty, it’s a kind of bipartisan affair, even to mention the word. President Clinton in 1996 at the welfare reform signing ceremony.
states have a block grant, so there’s no legal right to it. And starting in the late 1990s, when the welfare rolls plummeted, the states actually found that they had money to spare. Instead of raising benefits or letting people who actually needed help get it, they pushed people away at the door. That’s how they got the rolls down to about four million people, from 14 million. And they started spending the money in other ways. So we come to the recession, and they’re spending the money on other programs. They’re spending money to support the child welfare system, a number of other programs, but they’re not helping families that have desperate need. And that’s because it’s entirely up to them what they do with the money, as long as it stays in some way that’s related to the question. But they don’t have to extend a dollar of benefits to low-income people. And that’s why we have such a—such a tremendous diminution in the case log.
Jason Deparle did a fabulous piece of reporting two years ago in the New York Times — and these are government figures, but nobody had really gone and dug them up — and found that—it’s an astonishing number—found that six million, 2 percent of our population, have no income except those food stamps. The food stamps is the sole thing that stands between them and being totally without any income.
They have succeeded in destroying cash assistance in large parts of the country, and so now the attempt is to paint food stamps as the new welfare. And it’s just kind of mind-boggling, because with the particular weakness in the economy during the recession, there are so many people who would have been in so much deeper trouble without food stamps. And it’s one of the great policy successes of our country. And it certainly has proven to be one of the strongest for lowest-income people, one of the strongest anti-recessionary tools that we could have. So he’s just off in some la la land. I mean, it’s a totally political formulation. It turns out not to have had a lot of traction. Of course, Gingrich turned out not to have a lot of traction.
in 1979 the top 1 percent took in 9 percent of all personal income, but that figure went up to 23.5 percent in 2007.
I think it’s really impossible, as it turns out, wholly apart from just the merits of the fact that people at the top ought to pay the fair share of the cost of having our democracy, but now it’s a question of resources. And it’s not just taxation of the wealthiest. We have to figure out how to get—as we get out of this recession in the coming couple of years, how to get enough money to run our government for all purposes, and then have an argument about the priorities, that we should do enough about poverty and about the environment and healthcare and many things, and we should be more careful with the way we spend our money on defense.
I think that we’ve reached a point of inequality—and I’m very much supportive of Occupy and the idea that was such a—such a clear, crisp statement of the 1 percent and the 99 percent, that we really have to think about the whole population here. We can’t just isolate and say there are people here we should help. It all fits together. We really should be all one country. And there’s a moral decay, I think, at the point where we get so much, so much stuck at the top. You know, over the last 40 years, it isn’t that we had no growth; it all stuck at the top. The number you read shows that. And the entire bottom half, not just people whom we call poor, have lost out in that. So we really have to talk about inequality. And Occupy started us. It’s now not quite as visible or as active, but we need to talk about inequality. And in the 99 percent, we need to talk about everybody, all the way down to the bottom.
there are 103 million people who have incomes below twice the poverty line, below $36,000 for a family of three. And those are people who are struggling every day. They’re not poor. They don’t think of themselves as poor. But they are definitely having a huge difficulty in making ends meet every month.
racial dimension of poverty in the U.S. You say that between 2005 and 2009, the median wealth of Hispanics fell by 66 percent, of African Americans by 53 percent, while whites lost comparatively little, 16 percent. And yet you point out that the vast majority of the poor in the U.S. are white.
One is that the largest number, not 50 percent, but the largest number of those who are poor are white, and anything that we do in terms of the earned income tax credit or food stamps, whatever it is, the beneficiaries, the largest group are white. So, politically, that needs to be understood better. It’s important because you need a majority to pass things in the Congress. You need majority support for what you do. But at the same time, we have to have an emphasis and a focus in an honest discussion of the role that race plays in this, and gender, as well, although gender is really about—largely, about women of color, at the lower economic end. So we have disproportionate poverty among African Americans and Latinos. It’s been true always. And even with the progress we’ve made in building an African-American middle class, at the bottom that’s still true. So, we have to have race and gender on the table in our discussion of poverty.
Peter Edelman, professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He was top adviser to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and also a member of President Bill Clinton’s administration until he resigned in protest after Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform legislation. His new book is So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America.
– source democracynow.org