PENNIES FOR THE POOR

In recognition of the difficult financial straits that many poor people face, some states have been providing modest cash assistance to help the working poor hold onto their jobs. The sums, reported in yesterday’s New York Times, are paltry. Arkansas leads the pack, providing $204 dollars a month extra to poor workers. California is talking about dishing up an extra $40 per month. Michigan, where the economy is tanking, provides a whopping $10 per month for six months. And Massachusetts—that bastion of liberal profligacy—-provides $7 per month as a supplement. Reports the Times: “Alison Goodwin, a spokeswoman for the human services department in Massachusetts, acknowledged that the benefit was ‘modest.’ But she said it would increase the work participation rate.” $7 per month. I doubt it.

It’s been a dozen years since President Bill Clinton signed the legislation that abolished Aid to Families with Dependent Children and replaced it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). At that time, many observers, myself among them, described TANF as an anti-welfare program, not an antipoverty program. Proponents of welfare reform bellyached about the dangers of “dependency.” The belief that dependency is a state to be avoided is peculiar sociologically. It rests on a very old but dubious American belief in the value of individual independence, one that resonates rhetorically but does not begin to describe the countless ways that we depend on our families, our neighbors, our communities, and, yes, even our government, whether we are rich or poor. To that end, welfare reformers fashioned policies that raised the barriers to welfare receipt, established cut-offs, and instituted work requirements. TANF would carve out paths to independence and self-sufficiency that would liberate poor women (the primary target of welfare reform) and their children from debilitating government handouts.

Well we now know that the barriers to entry and the cutoffs worked—-in dramatically reducing welfare rolls. But we also now know that TANF did nothing to reduce rates of poverty. Why? Because remunerative, entry-level jobs are scarce. The lack of affordable, accessible day care options is a big barrier to women who want or have to join the paid labor force. The sorts of unskilled jobs that attract most former or would-be welfare recipients are not known for their stability and security. Most of them do not provide a cushion for women who have to take a day off to care for a sick child or an unhealthy relative. You miss a day or two of work and you’re fired. But most problematically, most of these jobs simply do not pay enough to provide the basic resources necessary for subsistence.

Consider this hard fact. In 2004, the average yearly income for the poorest fifth of households in the country was a mere $14,700, in contrast to a remarkable and rising $155,200 for the richest fifth. Try living on $14,700 a year with or without children. It's not easy.

A recent Pennsylvania study makes clear the difficulty that working poor families face in achieving self sufficiency. Economist Diana Pierce calculated that a one-parent family with two children (one in preschool, one in elementary school) living in the Philadelphia metropolitan area would need a little more than $42,000 per year to live above the subsistence level. (That works out to a full-time job that pays a little over $20 per hour). Her figures are based on conservative assumptions about monthly expenditures: $1,053 a month for day care (that might seem high, but it only works out to a little more than $45 a day, pretty cheap really); $800 a month for housing (that doesn’t get you much these days); $503 per month in food (try feeding your two kids on that budget for a month, given skyrocketing prices for basic foodstuffs like eggs and milk); $290 a month for healthcare; and $70 a month for transportation (the study was conducted before the dramatic increase in fuel prices).

Even some of the better-paying entry-level jobs, assuming you get hired full-time and don't leave work for a family crisis, pay much less. In 2005, food prep workers in Pennsylvania made only $14,828 per year; retail salespeople earned only $18,783 per year, and janitors garnered a little over $20,000 per year (in part because some janitorial jobs have been unionized).

The old system of welfare was broken. But twelve years after TANF was signed into law, it’s time to admit that welfare reform is broken too. Michael Harrington once described America as a nation that offered socialism to the rich and the free market to the poor. His statement remains the most apt description of public policy in an era when we dole out $7 or $10 a month extra to the working poor, but offer huge tax breaks to wealthy people who invest in the stock market or who inherit minor or major fortunes.

DOWN AND OUT IN AMERICA

John McCain is burnishing his credentials as a compassionate conservative, one who is in touch with the suffering American people, those forgotten, those left behind. From Selma, Alabama, to Youngstown, Ohio, to Inez, Kentucky, then to New Orleans, McCain is filming one great political ad after the next. It's McCain as JFK touring Appalachia. McCain as LBJ allying himself with the civil rights movement and calling for a War on Poverty of sorts.

I think it's more like McCain as OJ, returning to the scene of the crime in a shameless act of opportunistic self-promotion. All three of these places are gory messes, left for dead by four decades or more of failed public policies. The GOP has taken nothing but photos and jobs and left nothing but Bruno Magli footprints and a bloody glove. So hop into your white Bronco and let's go on a roadtrip with the G.O.P.'s presidential candidate.

Selma: this seventy percent black Alabama town has lost one-third of its population since John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr. attempted to cross its Edmund Pettus bridge in an act of defiance against Alabama-style Jim Crow. Four decades after the epochal protests, Selma has not yet overcome. The town is mired in unemployment. 8.4 percent of Selma's residents are out of work. One-third live in poverty. Here's the testimony of Jean Jackson, a retired schoolteacher who remembers the 60s protests, in an LA Times article published several weeks before McCain's visit. "Dr. King would be terribly disappointed," she says. "We are not doing as well, in some aspects, as we were before the movement. We have all the rights and privileges, but what good is it to have all the rights and privileges if [those things are] not going to feed us?"

But buck up Selma, John McCain has the answer for you: "It is time for change; the right kind of change; change that trusts in the strength of free people and free markets; change that doesn't return to policies that empower government to make our choices for us, but that works to ensure we have choices to make for ourselves. For we have always trusted Americans to build from the choices they make for themselves, a safer, stronger and more prosperous country than the one they inherited." The problem with McCain's history of Selma is two fold: 1) It took "policies that empower government to make our choices for us" to break down the barriers of Jim Crow in Selma. King, Lewis, and the marchers on the Edmund Pettus bridge were not just exhorting us to "overcome." They demanded--and won--federal policies that forced Alabama to open its voting rolls to blacks. If white Alabamans had been left to "choices they make for themselves," blacks would still be unable to vote. 2) McCain's "free markets" have not served Selma and its residents well. Under Republican and Democrat alike, federal policies have channeled funding, tax breaks, and other goodies to corporations that have not trickled down to the residents of Selma and America's many, many other Selmas. Selma's history is one of market failure.

Off to Youngstown, a poster child for the pathologies of the free market. Most of its once-coveted industrial jobs are now offshore. Its landscape is marred by the hulks of abandoned factories. Its residents are suffering mightily from the mortgage foreclosure crisis. The unions that brought its blue-collar workers into the middle-class are weakening. And McCain's party has consistently supported legislation that weakens the right of workers to organize collectively. McCain offers Youngstown residents a litany of Republican nostrums, most of which call for cutting taxes on corporations. But then there's this: "We need reforms to make sure that employers spend more on wages, and that your health plan is yours to keep." I'm not sure what McCain means by this, but given that he opposed even the modest increase in the minimum wage from a miserly$5.15 to a still inadequate $7.25, I am not holding my breath that he will introduce any wage-upping reforms anytime soon.

Onto Inez, a hardscrabble town that was host to Lyndon Johnson four decades ago. Here McCain offers a re-reading of the War on Poverty that is rather ahistorical. "I have no doubt President Johnson was serious and had the very best of intentions when he declared the war on poverty in America. But the army he enlisted was mostly drawn from the ranks of government bureaucracies." OK, but two problems here. One is that poverty rates in the United States plummeted in the 1960s, in large part because of the War on Poverty. In 1959, 22.4 percent of Americans lived beneath the poverty line. By 1973, that figure had fallen to 11.1 percent. The steepest drops came between 1964 and 1969. Part of that poverty reduction was the consequence of an economic boom (one that happened under two Democratic presidents and was marked by the growing labor force participation of women and African Americans, the consequence of the civil rights movement). But a large part of the reduction in poverty in the 1960s came from the expansion of transfer payments to the poor. McCain's history fails on another count. The War on Poverty took a huge amount of flack at the time, notably because of its Community Action Program (remember Maximum Feasible Participation?), which put the administration of anti-poverty programs in the hands of community organizations and non-profits. One of the legacies of the War on Poverty is that many anti-poverty programs, for better and for worse, are not run by federal bureaucrats at all, but shaped and administered by non-governmental organizations at the state and local levels. Bad history, John.

I'll be listening for what Johnny Mac has to say about New Orleans. I'm not hopeful.