No masking the poverty

THE FORCED revelry of Mardi Gras is over. The final dissonant notes of marching bands have died away; the last glittering beads have been thrown against the sorrow of a wounded city. Watched from a distance, New Orleans is America, struggling under a sparkling facade.

The city’s tragedy offered us a chance to do some good for ourselves, but we’re missing it. We now suffer from an extremely short attention span. Last September, President Bush gave a stirring speech in New Orleans about what he called the “deep, persistent poverty” displayed on television after Hurricane Katrina. “That poverty,” he declared, “has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.”

His bold action has been to submit a federal budget that will actually weaken important antipoverty programs.

This is odd. This nation used to be more easily outraged when wrongs were done to its own people. When black children were jeered and threatened as they tried to enter white schools in the South, when civil rights demonstrators were assaulted with police clubs and fire hoses, the images mobilized the conscience of the country.

When urban riots tore across the country in the 1960s, they set in motion crosscurrents of generosity and fear. Often sparked by police brutality, the disorders were fueled by long grievances over decayed housing, joblessness and other hardships, and so bolstered support for funding the ongoing War on Poverty. They impelled President Johnson to create the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which famously concluded: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal.” Yet the rioting also reinforced stereotypes of blacks as violent, triggering a law-and-order backlash that resulted in the election of conservatives who opposed large government programs.

In 1992, the Los Angeles riots galvanized the country for a while, but only a while. They led to the establishment of a nonprofit corporation, Rebuild L.A., which raised millions of dollars for the city’s poor neighborhoods -- but only one-tenth of the money needed.

By the time Katrina hit, the country had succumbed to a gigantic case of attention deficit disorder. We gazed briefly through the window at poverty, clucked that we were shocked, shocked, that such destitution existed in our midst, and then changed the subject.

In the intervening months, Bush has given us no commission, no program, no plan, no “bold action.” Instead, he proposes five-year reductions in vocational education, housing, food assistance and other vital services for the most vulnerable Americans. Between 2006 and 2011, housing subsidies are expected to drop by 11.6% and nutrition assistance by 14.9%.

These are called discretionary programs. Many grew in the last five years, but they do not increase automatically, the way retirement and health subsidies do. They have to be re-legislated annually by Congress. And so they are caught in the squeeze between two lines on a graph: the rising cost of mandatory spending and the falling revenues from tax cuts.

The space between those lines -- where this money comes from -- is shrinking, and it will vanish in 2012 when the lines intersect, predicts Gene Steuerle, a budget expert at the Urban Institute. In the dance of budget legislation, he told me, “programs for children and working families wear stone slippers -- they don’t get the automatic growth of health, retirement and tax breaks, hence compete for leftovers, of which there soon won’t be any.”

While New Orleans was straining to celebrate Mardi Gras, the Federal Reserve was issuing a gloomy report on the widening disparity between the rich and the poor. The wealthiest 10% of the nation’s households had an average net worth in 2004 of $3.11 million, up 6.1% from 2001. The poorest 25%, whose assets equaled their debts in 2001, dropped into the red; they owed an average of $1,400 more than they possessed.

Nobody wants to raise taxes, and Republicans least of all. But this disappearing area of funds between the two converging lines cannot be preserved responsibly without a tax increase, which would be a good investment.

The chain reactions of poverty are costly. Bad housing conditions -- mold and roaches -- can exacerbate children’s asthma, for example, leading to expensive emergency room treatment, missed days of work by parents and missed school by youngsters. Uninsured patients leave hospital bills unpaid, leading to higher premiums for the insured. Poor nutrition impairs cognitive ability, leading to school failure. Dropouts earn less, pay less in taxes, have worse health and commit more crime. Either we pay now to address these problems or pay later for not addressing them.

Bush should take his own words seriously: “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.”