Eradicating Poverty

It is 1976. The war in Vietnam has ended and billions of dollars are no longer required for an unconscionable tragedy in Southeast Asia. The gross national product, which reached one trillion dollars in 1971, is accelerating toward the 1.7-trillion-dollar rate projected for 1980. So Government revenues are increasing rapidly, even though taxes don't go up, and the Seventies will end with an extra 90 billion dollars a year in Federal income.

At this point there is a solemn moment of national stocktaking. There is no doubt that the resources are at hand to abolish poverty. The issue is whether we will bother. For whether the fiscal savings from Vietnam and those billions in tax revenues will be used for a social purpose is a political question, not an economic fact. Powerful forces will be dedicated to maintaining our present system, so brilliantly described by the late Charles Abrams as "socialism for the rich and private enterprise for the poor." Under it there are discreet and handsome doles for the affluent and an occasional pittance for the hungry. The nine billion dollars in tax deductions on mortgage interest that primarily benefit suburban homeowners, for example, is about four times greater than the appropriation for public housing: the 15-billion-dollar write-offs each year for people playing the stock market cost more than Richard Nixon's proposed welfare reform.

On the other side, there will be those who realize that unless there are massive and planned social investments, the poor will surfer and the entire society will most likely come unstuck. In what follows, there is the enormous assumption that the latter point of view prevails in the course of what will certainly be a bitter political struggle. Given its victory, it is obvious that we have the money to end poverty. But do we have the democratic creativity to spend those billions effectively?

I think the answer is yes. There are three crucial areas for social investments that would end poverty. First, every citizen must be guaranteed a really adequate income. Second, every able-bodied American must be given a legal right not simply to a job but to a relevant, useful and decently paid job. And third, the nation must redeem a promise it has been making--and breaking--ever since 1949: that everyone has the right to a livable dwelling. If we would do these things, it's rather obvious that we would help the poor. It's not so obvious, but just as true, that we would be aiding the affluent as well.

Ironically, it was Richard Nixon who made the guaranteed income a matter of national debate and sponsored the first genuinely new social principle in America since the New Deal. Lest the President be unfairly accused of cryptoradicalism, it should be immediately noted that his implementation of the principle is penny-pinching and potentially repressive. In understanding the glaring inadequacies of his version of it, one can get a clearer idea of what a guaranteed income should really be like.

In the August 1969 speech that launched the Administration's current Family Assistance Program, Mr. Nixon, of course, explicitly denied that he was talking about guaranteed income at all. He began that historic address with some philosophic observations that he proceeded to contradict within a few minutes. As he defined the crisis of the welfare system, "a third of a century of centralizing power and responsibility in Washington has produced a bureaucratic monstrosity, cumbersome, unresponsive and ineffective." Having delivered himself of this conservative cliché, the President then proposed to take away the right of the 50 states to set welfare levels by establishing a Federal minimum and, through a vast increase in Washington's responsibility, to raise the benefits for an impoverished child in Mississippi by 500 percent. His scheme is, in other words, a first step toward the nationalization of welfare in America.

One of the reasons Mr. Nixon could get away with such a blatant contradiction is that most Americans are even more confused about the welfare system than he is. In the popular stereotype, the relief rolls are filled with lazy chiselers who live riotously at society's expense. In fact, less than 40 percent of the poor receive any public assistance at all. And the average welfare allotments for the minority lucky enough to get help, the Riot Commission told us a few years ago, are only half of what the recipients actually need. In Mississippi, to take a predictable extreme, a welfare mother is supposed to raise a child on $9.30 a month.

It's no accident that the majority of the poor are excluded from even these shamefully low benefits. The various local systems are usually carefully designed to bewilder those who urgently need help and, through residence requirements and bureaucratic red tape, to keep as many of them as possible oil the rolls. And in the heyday of the notorious "Man-in-the-House" rule (lawsuits and reforms have made things somewhat better in recent years), investigators would swoop down (continued on page 172)Eradicating Poverty(continued from page 149) on a woman to see if she were living with anyone. If she were--and in some states even if the man were her unemployed husband--her "sin" would be visited upon her children, who would be deprived of benefits the law had provided for them.

A good part of the recent and dramatic rise in the number of people on welfare reflects the fact that the poor--through such groups as the National Welfare Rights Organization--are challenging these indignities and claiming rights to which they've been theoretically entitled since the Thirties. Yet, even with these gains, the fact remains that the most successful welfare program in this country excludes American citizens. Since Cuban refugees had the good luck of not being born in the U. S., they qualified for a completely Federal program. It was integrated, comprehensive--health care, job counseling, financial assistance and the like--and quite successful. In taking his first timid steps toward a guaranteed income, Mr. Nixon hasn't proposed to treat the native-born as well as the Cuban exiles, but he is trying to get them at least a few of the advantages of Federal care.

Under the Family Assistance Program, the minimum income would be fixed at $1600 for a family of four. In theory, that sum is to be supplemented by $894 in food stamps, for a total of $2494. In practice, there are counties that don't participate in the food-stamp program at all and, in any case, it's a scheme primarily designed to help affluent farmers, not to feed the hungry. But even accepting Mr. Nixon's optimistic assumptions, an income of $2494 would create a category of Federally approved poverty at a level of 66 percent of basic necessities. The nonpoor, hearing that a guaranteed income had been enacted but not bothering about the details, would then assume that the problem had been solved. Our callousness, in short, would have become righteous.

But the lack of money is not the worst aspect of the President's plan. The cruelest details are all based on one of the most powerful of our antisocial myths: that the poor won't work. Mr. Nixon wants to require everyone on welfare to take a job or training and to lose all benefits for refusing. The implication is that a tough-minded Chief Executive is going to force shiftless millions to shape up. In fact, there are fewer than 80,000 employable males among the 8,400,000 Americans receiving assistance, and a third of the poor live in families headed by a full-time male worker who labors long, hard hours for starvation wages.

The great majority of those getting welfare aid are children, the aging or--and here we come to Mr. Nixon's real target--welfare mothers. So all of the President's puritan rhetoric about the nobility of work--he originally wanted to call his idea "workfare"--is a way of saying that it's public policy to force poverty-stricken mothers into the labor market as soon as their youngest child reaches school age. It is also, I suspect, a way of punishing "fallen" women, since many in this category are welfare mothers who had children without benefit of clergy.

There are, to be sure, mothers who should be encouraged to work, and an extensive network of day-care centers should make it possible for them and for others who are not poor to do so. But psychologists would certainly argue that at least some of the welfare mothers should stay home, take care of the house and be at hand when their children come home from school. In our male-dominated statistics, housework isn't "work" unless it's performed by a hired domestic (when a man marries his housekeeper, the G. N. P. therefore goes down).

If we could break with that absurdity, however, we might realize that paying a poor woman for the work of caring for her house and children will, in many cases, be better for her and for the society than coercing her into a job.

So Mr. Nixon has introduced an excellent new principle--which could be a powerful weapon in the struggle against poverty--in a way calculated to make it as ineffective, and even as counterproductive, as possible. Benefits should not be two thirds of need but in the neighborhood of the $5500 for a family of four proposed by Senator Eugene McCarthy. And there should be an escalator clause that automatically increases the benefits as the cost of living rises, as well as periodic upward adjustments to keep pace with the growing economy.

But wouldn't such an adequate guaranteed income tempt more and more Americans to become the parasitic wards of an overly indulgent state? Of course it would--if the labor market is left in its present scandalous condition, with 10,000,000 jobs paying less than a minimum wage that is set too low in the first place. This is one of the many reasons why there must also be a Federally guaranteed right to work.

For all of Mr. Nixon's celebration of the glories of working, he has not proposed to provide a single job. In other words, he wants all these welfare mothers to be forced to scramble for openings in the existing labor market. And since the only standard specified is that the job must pay the rate "prevailing for similar work in the locality," local officials could use their life-and-death power over these women in order to create a cut-rate employment agency. In Georgia, for example, the rolls used to be cut to the bone at harvest time to create a pool of docile, hungry labor. Now Mr. Nixon may well be committing Federal power to such practices.

Last August, Senators Abraham Ribicoff and Fred Harris recognized this ugly potential when they urged that money be appropriated under the Family Assistance Program to fund 30,000 public-service jobs for welfare recipients who go through training but can't find work. That's much, much better than Nixon's scheme, but it's only the beginning of a beginning, for the irony is that a truly radical program--one in which the Government would not be a reluctant "employer of last resort" for the rejectees from the private sector but would aggressively and creatively channel the wasted talents of the poor into socially useful jobs--would help the affluent almost as much as the poverty-stricken. A Federally guaranteed right to work could be not a burden but an enormous opportunity for America.

As long ago as 1966, the Automation Commission identified 5,300,000 useful jobs that Washington could finance in education, health care, social services and beautification. Two years and several civil disorders later, the Riot Commission told the Government to fund 1,000,000 of them at once. Instead, subsidies were given to private employers for hiring men whom, in the tight labor market of the period, they desperately needed. This program mainly succeeded in one industry--auto--and as soon as the recession hit, the companies began to back off from their promises and to fire the hardcore unemployed whom they had signed up with such fanfare.

But Washington could have financed stable and extremely useful jobs in the public and nonprofit sector. Medicine, for instance, is in the midst of such a crisis that the President himself has sounded the alarm: We spend more ol our G. N. P. on health than Britain and Sweden, yet the quality of our care is inferior to theirs. And there are responsible studies emphasizing that we cannot overcome this problem without the wide use of paraprofessionals--nurse's and doctor's aides who would be recruited from among the poor.

We cannot, in short, waste the lives of the working poor in joblessness or dead-end occupations. We need them, and a Federal right-to-work policy could be a mechanism for channeling them into critical areas that would improve the quality of life not just for the poor but for the entire society.

Indeed, a conservative argument should now be stood on its head. Whenever there is a campaign to raise the minimum wage, those on the right always insist on the conventional wisdom of Economics I: If the Government arbitrarily prices labor higher than its market value, that will motivate employers to mechanize such jobs out ol existence. (continued on page 232)Eradicating Poverty(continued from page 172) Therefore, they conclude triumphantly, the do-gooders are actually harming the poor and the minorities whom they claim to defend when they raise the minimum. There is a certain element of truth in this point, but only if the Federal manpower program is simply and idiotically confined to a minimum-wage law. If, however, we understood that we should want to shift people from menial to meaningful occupations, then we could welcome the very effect that the conservatives view with alarm. We might even consider putting the highest minimum-wage rates on the dirtiest jobs, so that employers will develop machines to do that kind of work and men and women will be freed to make a contribution to society.

As a matter of fact, there is now evidence that meaningful work is the only kind of employment that will attract people. If we fail to create it, things will not just remain as bad as they are; they will get worse. If the choice at the bottom of the economy is between welfare on the one hand and sweatshop or stoop labor on the other, more and more people are going to drop out and just take the Government check. The very psyche of the poor is changing and a struggle against poverty has to take that into account.

In the bad old days when want was general and American social services were the worst in the civilized world (they still are), people were forced to accept--and even fight for--inhuman jobs. Those who submitted to this vicious process were told by the pillars of society that such pursuits ennobled them and demonstrated their worth to their fellow men and to God. This consoling thought failed to persuade everyone, as the particularly violent history of American labor shows. But it did provide a rationalization for backbreaking, tedious occupations--one in which the President of the United States believes to this very moment.

But these attitudes are not eternal, especially since the poor now understand that in an era of rampant mechanization, such jobs are not really necessary. So it is that in New York in recent years, where the payments under Aid for Dependent Children were competitive with the worst jobs, the mothers have become more and more reluctant to take such work. To conservatives this will probably come as one more proof of the flabbiness and decadence of the welfare state; to me, it is a gain. Those women are not being lazy. In New Jersey, when a guaranteed income was given a trial run, people with regular jobs kept them even though they didn't have to--but were more conscious of their own dignity.

They are quite right to insist that a society as technologically sophisticated as this one must now concern itself not simply with the quantity of work but with its quality as well.

The authoritarian response to this situation, as in Nixon's workfare program, is to substitute legal coercion for the failing discipline of the labor market. That is not going to produce the self-reliance and independence that the President seems to think inheres in each and every job. It is much more likely to evoke sullen resentment and shoddy work. If, instead of preaching homilies on the value of labor, America actually utilized the wasted talents of those who now toil in the economic underworld, this would upgrade our health, our education, our social services and all the rest. The poor would benefit--but, again, so would society as a whole.

Yet even if we provide every citizen with either an adequate income or a decent job and millions still live in the urban and rural slums, poverty still will not be abolished. The very environment of misery itself must be dismantled. In making this point, I don't want to get into the enormous complexities of housing, not the least because the problem is analyzed in Mayor Stokes's contribution to this symposium. I simply want to emphasize how crucial it is to redeem the promise first made by the nation in 1949--that every American has a right to a livable dwelling place--and to counter a sincere but dangerous romanticism that is sometimes found among some of the most dedicated fighters against injustice. The militants rightly argue that the insurgencies of the poor themselves--blacks and Puerto Ricans raising basic questions about the schools and the police, welfare mothers organizing to fight unresponsive bureaucracies, migrant farm workers organizing unions--have been among the most important single byproducts of an "unconditional war on poverty" that turned out to be a skirmish. Yet they then go on to overestimate the rebelliousness and fraternity among people forced to struggle--often with one another--for the necessities of life. As a result, they don't understand how crucial it is to do away with the slums altogether.

The slum is not, as some have alleged, a "natural" community. It is a heterogeneous place where some families have remarkable strengths and others have been overwhelmed by the pathologies of want. The good jobs are increasingly out in the suburbs, and since the Federal Government has spent more than ten times as much on highways that benefit the suburbs than on mass transit, it is often impossible for the poor to get to the new factories. Moreover, the sanitation department doesn't usually bother too much about cleaning up these teeming neighborhoods, and the citizenry is torn between a fear of police brutality and a desire for more police to curb the ubiquitous, semipublic criminality that no middle-class area would tolerate for a moment. Some of the people are the walking wounded of poverty: others are hustlers, junkies, impoverished enemies of the poor; and still others are engaged in a courageous battle to transform the intolerable conditions around them.

The last group obviously deserves the enthusiastic support of every partisan of change. But that should not lead to the illusion that utopia can be built in a slum. Poverty, even when it is democratically controlled, is still poverty. Indeed, it is significant that people such as Senator Goldwater and William F. Buckley, Jr., have had kind words for the cause of community control. They are, one suspects, quite content to let the blacks have dominion over the miseries of Harlem as long as the wealthy are supreme on Park Avenue and Nob Hill.

And slums are not naturally rebellious, either. They create despair as well as militance, passivity as well as anger. So it is that election statistics record that the poor, who have the greatest need for political power of any group in society, register and vote less than anyone else. When that is understood, it will be understood that doing away with the slums is not to destroy a fortress but to break people out of the prison of their power-lessness.

This is emphatically not to suggest that we first tear down the tenements and the shacks and then find housing for those who lived there. That was the standard scenario after World War Two and it allowed the Federal Government to raze more housing than it ever built. Usually, the areas that were cleared were not used for new homes for the site dwellers but for apartments for the rich or for public monuments. So any programs dealing with this issue must stipulate that it is against the law to tear down a unit of housing before an acceptable, and better, replacement for it is ready.

But how is that to be done? The public-housing program is already in a shambles and some of the huge projects, like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, are so crime-ridden that they literally have been abandoned to rats. The suburbanites, particularly those who have just lied from the cities, are organizing to "defend" their property against the poor and the minorities. And the Nixon Administration, which, in a recent case, was militantly challenged by white suburbanites on this count, has clearly decided to back down. Yet I still think the problem can be solved--but only if the United States of America decides to stop subsidizing racist and propoverty patterns of living. If people want to be antisocial, they should at least be required to do so with their own money.

Middle-class and rich homeowners in America, as I noted earlier, get much more relief from the Government than do the poor. They have had cheap, Federally underwritten credit over the years; they get princely tax deductions that cut the interest costs even more; they are not required to count the rental value of their home as income; and they are numbered among the prime beneficiaries of the more than 50 billion dollars in Federally financed highways that facilitate commuting. So all of these Government monies have had the effect of exacerbating the social crises that the Government deplores, above all by creating Shangri-Las of white, affluent irresponsibility while the central cities rot.

I suggest that these people be told that Washington is not going to pay for racial and class apartheid in this country. A recent Massachusetts law shows one way of implementing that principle. Under it, every developer of private housing must set aside a certain (relatively small) percentage of units for low-income families. If that were to become a national policy--and the Government could promote it simply by threatening to withdraw its largess from noncooperators--it could make the private-housing market an agency for uniting, rather than dividing, the society. And it would also deal with the rational fears that sometimes coexist with irrational prejudices in this area, for it would guarantee a balanced dispersion of former slum dwellers that would not overwhelm a neighborhood or drive property values down.

Something like this idea has already been suggested to President Nixon. In January 1970, an urban-renewal panel, headed by Miles L. Colean, told him that aid "of all sorts" should be withheld from cities that reject low-cost housing. The Civil Rights Commission then proposed that Federal agencies not be allowed to go into communities unless they provide decent dwellings for the poor and the minorities. And the President's own Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, George Romney, has urged a Federal law prohibiting these suburbs from using their zoning powers to block migration from the central cities. Mr. Nixon has ignored this advice, which is one of the many, many reasons that I am not sanguine that his Administration wants to bother to abolish poverty. But the fact that so many pillars of the community, some of them Republicans, are thinking along these lines is a sign of how effective a policy of stopping Federal aid to housing discrimination could be.

Though Mayor Stokes and leaders of other large cities might tend to disagree, I truly believe the best chance of destroying the physical environment of poverty is through building entire new cities and towns. If the Government were to underwrite the infrastructure for ten new cities of 1,000,000 people each and ten new towns of 100,000 people each, these new communities could be integrated and provide homes for the poor from the very first day. No one would be required to live in them: but anyone who refused would be freely turning his back on the massive Federal subsidies that alone would make them possible. Separatists of all colors would have the right to compete for their enclaves on the completely private--and much more expensive--housing market.

This approach would demand a considerable investment of tax money. So would a guaranteed income and, in the first phase, at least, a guaranteed right to work. But why, then, would the affluent citizen take all these pains for the minority who are poor? The best answer to that question is that Americans should be persuaded to destroy poverty out of motives of human decency and social justice. And among the young generation, there are more and more people who are willing to make exactly that commitment. But there are still many Americans who will not be convinced by an appeal to ideals. That is why I want to address myself to their self-interest.

Poverty is extremely expensive to maintain. Welfare costs are, of course, rising and the price of police and fire protection in the slums is higher than anywhere else. For these reasons, almost all of the once-great cities of this land are now on the verge of social bankruptcy: They cannot afford the poor. But suppose that when the war ends in Vietnam, this nation made a decisive new commitment. Rather than ameliorating the intolerable through reluctant reforms, we would make a gigantic investment in our people and our future. We would rescue the talents we now waste in unemployment and underemployment. We would destroy the physical environment that now pens in the children of poverty--almost half of the total--who are going to be the mothers and fathers of poverty tomorrow.

If we did that, we would save money as well as human lives. For those millions would no longer be dependent "problems." They would be contributing to the society, making it better for all. For proof, just consider one of this country's most successful social programs: the GI bill. Out of gratitude toward returning Servicemen alter World War Two. the nation gave away millions of dollars in free college education. It is now obvious that, among other things, this was one of the shrewdest investments ever made. Not only did those veterans enrich themselves intellectually but their increased skills and knowledge were a major factor in promoting affluence. And the same could happen with the poor.

If we refuse to act, there will be yet another cost; it was described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, headed by Milton Eisenhower. "In a few more years, lacking effective public action," the commission said, central cities will be deserted at night and only "partially protected" by crowds during the day; the high-rise apartments of the rich will be "fortified cells"; guns will be universal; armed guards will "ride shotgun" on all public transit and patrol all public places. "Individually and to a considerable extent unintentionally," the commission concluded, "we are closing ourselves into fortresses when collectively we should be building the great, open, humane city-societies of which we are capable."

The dark future the commission projects has already begun. And one of the most basic reasons why today is so bleak, and tomorrow could be worse, is that we have let poverty fester in the midst of affluence. So when the war ends in Vietnam, this nation will find itself at one of the most fateful moments of choice in its history. It could decide to take all those billions and to use them for more socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor. It would then stimulate the economy through subsidies for private consumption by the wealthy and public consumption by the military. Or America could decree that it is the birthright of every citizen to have a decent home and an adequate income, either through a meaningful job or directly from the Government. If we took the latter course, poverty would be abolished and the entire society would be qualitatively improved, for the rich as well as for the poor. On the 200th anniversary of the United States, in 1976, we might even boast that we have finally guaranteed all of our people life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.