|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Children : Civil & Human Rights : Economy : Health : Housing : Labor : Political-Economy : Urban Development |
|
US Poverty: Chronic Ill, Little Hope for Cure |
Current rating: 0 |
by Bernd Debusmann
(No verified email address) |
06 Oct 2005
|
The black-equals-poor scenes from New Orleans do not portray the full picture. There are three times as many poor whites as blacks in the United States and the poverty rate for whites has risen faster than that for blacks and Hispanics.
Academic experts also say the government's figures minimize the true scale of poverty because they are outdated. The formula for the poverty level was set in 1963 on the assumption that one third of the average family's budget was spent on food.
This is no longer true. Housing has become the largest single expense and tens of thousands of the "working poor," the label for those who work at or near the minimum wage, are forced to sleep in cars, trailers, long-term motels or shelters. |
Four decades after a U.S. president declared war on poverty, more than 37 million people in the world's richest country are officially classified as poor and their number has been on the rise for years.
Last year, according to government statistics, 1.1 million Americans fell below the poverty line. That equals the entire population of a major city like Dallas or Prague.
Since 2000, the ranks of the poor have increased year by year by almost 5.5 million in total. Even optimists see little prospect that the number will shrink soon despite a renewed debate on poverty prompted by searing television images which laid bare a fact of American life rarely exposed to global view.
The president who made the war declaration was Lyndon Johnson. "Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope, some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. This administration declares unconditional war on poverty in America."
That was in 1964. Then 19 percent of the U.S. population lived below the official poverty line. That rate declined over the next four years and in 1968, it stood at 12.8 percent.
Since then, it has fluctuated little. Last year, it was at 12.7 percent, proof that poverty is a chronic problem.
The state of poverty in the United States is measured once a year by the Census Bureau, whose statistics-packed 70-plus page report usually provides fodder for academic studies but rarely sparks wide public debate, touches emotional buttons, or features on television. Not so in 2005.
The report coincided with Katrina, a devastating hurricane which killed more than 1,100 in Louisiana and Mississippi. Live television coverage with shocking images of the desperate and the dead in New Orleans showed in brutal close-up what the spreadsheets of the census bureau cannot convey.
SCENES SHOCKED WORLD, SHAMED AMERICANS
The images shocked the world, shamed many Americans and prompted comparisons with conditions in developing countries from Somalia and Angola to Bangladesh. The pictures from New Orleans showed poor black people begging for help. Most of the rescuers, when they finally arrived, were white.
The percentage of black Americans living in poverty is 24.7, almost twice as high as the overall rate for all races.
In predominantly black New Orleans, that disparity translated into those with cars and money, almost all white, fleeing the flood while more than 100,000 car-less blacks were trapped in the flooded city.
Some commentators wondered whether the crisis showed that political segregation, America's version of apartheid which formally ended with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, had merely been replaced by economic segregation. Poor black Americans in one part of a city, affluent whites in the other.
A host of other American cities have such divides, including Newark, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Miami and the U.S. capital itself. It is a 10-minute drive from the White House to the heart of Anacostia, the city's poorest neighborhood, but they could be in different worlds.
But the black-equals-poor scenes from New Orleans do not portray the full picture. There are three times as many poor whites as blacks in the United States and the poverty rate for whites has risen faster than that for blacks and Hispanics.
Academic experts also say the government's figures minimize the true scale of poverty because they are outdated. The formula for the poverty level was set in 1963 on the assumption that one third of the average family's budget was spent on food.
This is no longer true. Housing has become the largest single expense and tens of thousands of the "working poor," the label for those who work at or near the minimum wage, are forced to sleep in cars, trailers, long-term motels or shelters.
U.S. POVERTY WORST IN INDUSTRIALISED WORLD
"Every August, we Americans tell ourselves a lie," said David Brady, a Duke University professor who studies poverty.
"The poverty rate was designed to undercount because the government wanted to show progress in the war on poverty.
"Taking everything into account, the real rate is around 18 percent, or 48 million people. Poverty in the United States is more widespread, by far, than in any other industrialized country."
Poverty is a universal problem, as is inequality. The world's 500 richest people, according to U.N. statistics, have as much income as the world's poorest 416 million.
The post-hurricane poverty scenes were so remarkable for most of the world because of the perception of the United States as the rich land of unlimited opportunity.
No other country spends so much money -- billions of dollars -- to keep job-hungry foreigners out; no other country has an annual lottery in which millions of people play for 50,000 permanent resident "green cards," no other country has as many legal and illegal immigrants, all drawn by dreams of prosperity.
For many Americans they remain just that: dreams. While there are arguments over how poverty is measured -- conservatives say the census overstates it because it does not take into account food stamps and other subsidies -- there is consensus on one thing.
The minimum wage, which rose by 15 cents to $6.35 an hour on October 1, is not enough to keep you above the poverty line. Yet minimum wage jobs, without health insurance or vacations, are the only jobs available to millions of people with only basic education.
The well-paid unskilled jobs in heavy industry which once lifted working-class Americans into the middle class are largely gone and the decline continues. Since 2001, the United States has lost more than 2.7 million manufacturing jobs. Low-paid clerical work is being outsourced to developing countries.
Another U.S. president, the late Ronald Reagan, had it right when he said, in 1988: "The federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won."
Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited
http://www.reuters.com |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
Comments
|
Congress Seeks to Cut Food Aid for Poor |
by Libby Quaid
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
06 Oct 2005
|
Under orders to cut agriculture spending by $3 billion, Republicans in Congress propose reducing food programs for the poor by $574 million and conservation programs by $1 billion, The Associated Press has learned.
The proposal by Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., also would cut farmers' payments by 2.5 percent across the board.
Under the plan, payments would be reduced by $1.145 billion over five years. But that is considerably less severe than President Bush had proposed. Bush sought a 5 percent reduction in payments, plus a far-reaching plan for capping payments that would slash billions more dollars from subsidies collected by large farm operations.
The AP obtained a summary of the budget-cutting plan, which is scheduled for a Thursday morning vote in Chambliss' committee.
Congress ordered the $3 billion in cuts in a budget outline passed earlier this year. Leading Republicans indicated they would rather target food stamps and conservation programs than simply make the deep cuts that Bush was seeking, and the administration backed off its plan in April amid fierce opposition from farmers. Cotton and rice growers would bear the brunt of payment limits.
It's not fair for nutrition and conservation programs to shoulder more of the burden, said environmental groups, anti-hunger advocates and taxpayer organizations fighting the cuts.
"Subsidies get $20 billion a year; conservation gets less than $4 billion — to expect farmers who want to help the environment to shoulder as heavy a load as fat-cat cotton producers is terrible policy," said Scott Faber, spokesman for the Washington-based advocacy group Environmental Defense.
Government conservation programs pay farmers to stop farming certain land or to change their practices to help the environment.
Congressional Democrats were also hostile to the cuts.
"It is hard to see this budget balanced on the backs of poor people and struggling family farmers when agribusinesses continue to reap millions without payment caps in place," said Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., a member of the Senate Agriculture appropriations subcommittee.
Another subcommittee member, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., said he and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, are still pushing for Bush's payment limits.
Faber called the budget cuts "a body blow" to global trade talks being held by the World Trade Organization. Developing nations are insisting that the U.S. and other wealthy nations cut subsidies.
"Developing nations won't open their markets to our farm products unless we're willing to reform our farm subsidies. This sends exactly the wrong signal at exactly the wrong time," Faber said.
The $574 million cut in food stamps would come from restricting access to this benefit for certain families that receive other government assistance. The restriction would shut an estimated 300,000 people out of the program.
The $1.05 billion conservation cuts would curb the number of acres that can be enrolled in the biggest of the programs, the Conservation Reserve Program, and limit spending on two others, the Conservation Security Program and Environmental Quality Incentives Program.
The payment cuts would affect all payments and marketing loan gains for producers of corn, wheat, rice, soybeans, cotton and other subsidized crops. Dairy producers, too, would see a 2.5 percent drop in payments from the Milk Income Loss Contract program, which pays to help producers cope with dips in market prices. The MILC program expired Friday, but supporters are trying to get Congress to renew it.
Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press
http://www.ap.org |
|
