For Every Solution, a Drawback : No Tactic Yet Found to Win Poverty War

Soapy was a bum.

He didn’t like to bathe. His home was a bench in the park. When leaves began to fall and his quilt of Sunday newspapers no longer sufficed, he decided to get arrested so a judge would pack him off to spend the cold brutality of the winter, as a guest of the taxpayers, in the congenial warmth of the poorhouse.

But, in O. Henry’s classic story, even at this pitiful scheme Soapy failed. Six times he tempted the comforting arm of the law. He tried to eat a meal and stiff the check. He tried to act drunk and be disorderly. He tried to steal an umbrella. And each time he bungled it. He seemed doomed, no matter what, to liberty.

Wasted Reformation

Then, in a magic moment, as he heard the Sabbath anthem echoing from a fine, gabled church, he realized the error of his ways. It reminded him of days when his life was rich with such things as “mothers and roses and ambitions.” He resolved to reform--and, at that very instant, of course, a policeman pinched him for loitering. The judge dispatched Soapy, and his dashed conversion, away to the poorhouse.

O. Henry wrote that story 75 years ago, but things are even more paradoxical for the poor today. At a time when one in seven Americans is poor--and the poverty rate is at a 20-year high--the government is doing less to help them. More research about poverty accumulates each year, but public policy often is shaped on the basis of myths about the poor and misconceptions about what the public wants to do for them.

An intensive study by The Times, of which this is the fifth and final part, shows:

--Although President Reagan has whittled back aid to the poor, the newest evidence is that the public would prefer he do much more--not less--to ease the burden of the needy. According to a Times poll, 73% of the public favor government action on behalf of the poor and 57% would even be willing to approve a 1% federal sales tax to pay for it. About 55% say that Reagan cares most about the rich; only 2% say he cares most about the poor.

--If Americans sometimes picture the poor as derelicts like Soapy the bum, a more accurate image is far more pathetic. Nearly 40% of the nation’s 35.3 million poor people are children. The world’s wealthiest nation now has a growing number of children at risk of death and disease, hunger and cold, poor schooling and housing, abuse and neglect. The ultimate cost will come in higher medical bills, rising crime and other social ills.

Poverty Programs Worked

--Although social programs are frequently maligned, the anti-poverty efforts that began with the New Deal and accelerated dramatically during the 1960s and 1970s largely have been successful. America’s poverty rate was cut by half between 1960 and 1973, and it has only started rising sharply again since 1979. Social programs do not work miracles but they do work. They have provided protection against hard times--cash, food, housing, medical care, job training--a safety net that is still in place, if fraying.

--Despite the fact that most who suffer poverty stay poor only a short time, an underclass of welfare-dependent women, street hustlers, small-time criminals and the homeless festers in almost every large city. A group hard to define, let alone count, the underclass has been neglected by researchers and policy makers alike. The nation appears to have written off part of its urban centers as territory gone bad.

--Although the nation has fallen into one of its periodic fits of suspicion about whether the poor are lazy--and even wonders if public aid lures them away from jobs--their work ethic actually is quite strong. Poverty far more often is the result of things beyond individual control: the jittery economy, low wages, ill health or simple bad luck.

“What characterizes the ‘80s is just the reverse of the ‘60s,” according to Sheldon Danziger, director of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin. “In the ‘60s, we thought we could do anything and we were willing to pay for it. Today, we’ve swung in the other direction and we’re too critical. The tendency is to think nothing works.”

There are five basic approaches to helping the poor--give them cash; provide them food coupons, subsidies and medical services; create jobs; offer them job training; wait for the rising tide of the economy to lift them from distress.

They all work, but they work imperfectly. Drawbacks come with every solution, and it is difficult to fuse the best combination at an acceptable price.

--Cash is the easiest. Social Security payments, now indexed to inflation, are credited with cutting the poverty rate among the elderly by more than half since 1967. But giving money to people sometimes makes them less eager to work. Although this is not a problem among the elderly--who no longer are expected to hold jobs--it is a proper concern about the recipients of welfare, the other major cash program.

--Food stamps, Medicaid, housing grants and similar programs are known as “in-kind” benefits. They allow the government to better control how public aid will be spent. But the in-kind programs tend to require their own bureaucracies, which raise administrative costs. Besides, they, too, can make recipients less inclined to work.

--Jobs for the able-bodied poor clearly are preferable to welfare. But creating public service jobs--whether they are cleaning parks, collecting garbage or building bridges--is very difficult without taking away private sector jobs. If the jobs are indeed truly additional positions, then there is the expense of the wages. And, if the wages are low, they tend to bring down the salaries of others who work at similar jobs.

--Job training, especially for those skills most needed in the workplace, is a good investment that allows some of the poor to eventually make their own way. But it is very expensive and the failure rate is high. It, too, ultimately depends on job creation. If the workplace is without extra jobs for the newly trained, they will simply compete for jobs already filled, bumping others into unemployment.

--The “rising tide that lifts all boats,” the catch phrase for economic boom so popular with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Reagan, actually best lifts all yachts. The wealthy better withstand bad times and profit more from the good. Although a strong economy clearly helps some of the poor get jobs, prosperity often ignores the unskilled, the disabled and single mothers home with their small children.

No ‘Silver Bullet’

“We’ve tried a lot of things and nothing is the silver bullet,” says Robert Reischauer, executive vice president of the Urban Institute, a research organization specializing in social problems and government policy. “But poverty is a very difficult problem. We, as a society, shouldn’t expect impossible results.”

In the last 20 years, the safety net has been woven during both Democratic and Republican administrations. However complicated its pattern and frayed its edges, there is a logic to the weave. In it, necessity and responsibility and compassion are intertwined, and its resilience is a great part of what surely defines Americans as a people.

The problem of poverty is confounding, and much remains to be learned. The anti-poverty effort has had its successes and failures, the former often forgotten because the latter have been so discouraging.

Some current anti-poverty measures, however, enjoy the support of many liberals and conservatives alike.

--The poor have been taxed deeper into poverty, and there is bipartisan agreement that their burden should be lightened. One way to do this would be to increase the personal income tax exemption. Another would be to raise the earned income tax credit, a special tax break for low-income workers with children. The President already has recommended these changes.

‘Workfare’ Being Tried

--Experiments with “workfare”--requiring welfare recipients to intensively search for jobs, and sometimes do community work, in return for their benefit checks--are going on in nearly half the states, including California. Where these programs genuinely offer job opportunities and are in no way a punishment for being poor, many liberals and conservatives seem to agree the efforts should continue.

--There is a wide consensus that tougher child support laws need to be enacted, making sure that paternity is established for each child. Fathers would then be made to pay adequate support based on their incomes, removing much of that public burden. New legislation in Wisconsin may serve as a model for the nation.

--Thousands of mothers are prevented from working only because they lack reasonably priced child care. More subsidized quality day care would make entry-level jobs a reasonable alternative to a welfare check.

--America is the only developed nation where teen-age pregnancy is on the rise. One million adolescents become pregnant each year, opening a trap door that will drop many of them into a lifetime of poverty. Many analysts now believe that there is a critical need for a coordinated federal effort to caution teen-agers against pregnancy, as well as to assist young mothers with education and job training.

Varying Welfare Payments

Other measures under consideration are more controversial--as well as costly:

--Welfare benefits vary from state to state depending on a complex formula, which involves federal matching of state payments. This causes the maximum welfare benefit for a family of four to vary from $775 in Alaska to $120 in Mississippi. Many favor a minimum federal contribution, regardless of each state’s payment, that would improve the living standards of millions of welfare recipients, most of them children.

--Benefits have been declining sharply against the costs of living. After adjustment for inflation, the median state benefit for a family of four has fallen by nearly 40% since 1970. Thus, some have proposed pegging benefits to a percentage of the poverty line, which is adjusted for inflation, to help recipients keep pace with rising prices.

--Half the states permit welfare payments to two-parent households, so that a jobless father does not disqualify his wife and children from benefits. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if this were extended to the entire nation, the cost would be an estimated $800 million in 1986.

No Single Solution

These changes, of course, would only alter the texture of the fabric. No single measure will erase poverty--or even swiftly cut it to size. Dramatic improvements will result only from a combination of a strong economy, low unemployment and carefully planned and generous anti-poverty programs.

An important part of the policy debate, too, is to understand that the problem of poverty did not arrive yesterday and it will not be gone tomorrow. Poverty is not specific to this country--or this generation or even this century. That despair rises from disparity is a theme as old as history, and that the duty of the strong is to help the weak is an obligation as rooted as morality itself. Hammurabi, ruler of Babylonia almost two thousand years before Christ, listed the protection of widows and orphans as an essential part of his famous legal code. Ancient Hebrew doctrine made it a duty of the virtuous to give and a right of the needy to receive. Christians believe that Jesus, by his earthly example, sanctified poverty. To help the poor was proof of devotion to God and necessary to eternal salvation.

But, if the poor have been exalted in religious teachings, they have been eyed with suspicion in everyday life: The feeble and lame and orphaned may have seemed worthy of a village’s spare bread, but mixed among them were loafers and drifters--and they did not.

No Charity for the Impious

In 4th-Century North Africa, St. Augustine suggested that charity be withheld from the impious. In 14th-Century Europe, work was sometimes forced on the jobless. In 1587, Pope Sixtus V banned begging in Rome.

This great suspicion--and sometimes contempt--for the needy eventually led to England’s milestone Poor Law of 1601. Although it recognized the poor’s legal right to public help, it declared that vagrants--or anyone else healthy enough to work--had to earn their own way or risk prison, whippings or death.

This same ambivalence was carried over to the American colonies.

Calvinism was the ethic of 17th-Century New England, and its followers believed that a man’s lot was predetermined by God: The wealthy owed their riches to divine grace and the poor were condemned because of their own sins and sloth.

“For those who indulge themselves in idleness, the express command of God unto us is, that we should let them starve,” Puritan leader Cotton Mather said.

About 200 years later, far less devout “social Darwinists” advanced a similarly harsh conclusion: Society is a jungle and it correctly rewards the fittest and punishes the feeble.

Confined to Poorhouses

Nevertheless, America grew up as a place where the poor were rarely ignored. This sometimes meant that they were shepherded into county poorhouses, where the able-bodied were compelled to work and children were made to study. In theory, this not only sheltered them from their surroundings but cleansed them of an impoverished spirit within.

Instead of well-ordered refuges, however, the poorhouses were usually awful places, home to both the young and old, the sane and insane, the decrepit and the drunk. Although born in reform in the 1800s, they themselves became objects of shame.

Not all the poor suffered the poorhouse, of course. The needy numbered far too many for that. Many survived by begging or living off the land.

In the 1870s, a depression left millions jobless. The nation feared riots. Private charities started bread lines and soup kitchens, dispensing coal, clothes and even cash.

But charity workers came to suspect that a number of those accepting help could have survived on their own. Charity, they supposed, actually wooed people into poverty.

“In its most extreme forms, this led to the reasoning that . . . giving shoes to poor children so that they could go to school encouraged parents to keep their children out of school in order to get them free shoes,” Columbia University historian John A. Garraty wrote.

‘Visitors’ Inspected Poor

The charity workers insisted that relief must be linked to moral counseling. This was done nationwide by an army of “friendly visitors” who inspected the poor in their homes, noting their inner failings and urging more appropriate behavior. The movement was called “scientific charity.”

In time, however, the pendulum swung back. Charity workers eventually realized that poverty was a problem complicated by far more than misguided morals. No amount of “friendly visits” would remedy woes rooted in joblessness or low wages.

By the early 1900s, the storied “other half” was indeed almost that. Using the standards of those times--far lower than those now--about 40% of the nation was poor, according to historian James T. Patterson of Brown University. Blacks were so poor and isolated that they were “virtually invisible to reformers.”

Still, poverty remained largely a state and local concern. The federal government did not get involved until the Great Depression, when millions of middle-class Americans discovered that poverty--and not a chicken in every pot--was just around the corner.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s recovery strategy employed millions in public works. It marked an important precedent, and not all welcomed the change. To many Americans, WPA (the initials of the Works Progress Administration, one of those public works programs) stood for the lazy man’s motto--”We Piddle Around.”

Unforgettable Lesson

Yet, the country emerged from the Depression with an unforgettable lesson: Whims of the economy, more than any human weakness, could cause poverty; and a great people must guarantee aid as a right.

In 1935, Congress approved the Social Security Act, aimed at preventing destitution among the elderly, the crippled and the blind. In addition, it provided for widowed mothers with children, a program that later became Aid for Families with Dependent Children, more commonly called welfare.

In the years after World War II, the nation thrived. Few American leaders noticed that the “other half” had merely shrunk into the “other quarter.” Ghetto tenements and country shacks teemed with the poor from sea to shining sea.

When poverty was finally rediscovered, Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson spoke not of the poor’s laziness but of the non-poor’s neglect of its responsibilities. Washington would become the poor man’s main pipeline to help.

To Social Security and welfare were added a variety of social programs. And, by the beginning of this decade, 10 million people received welfare, 20 million got food stamps. Federal spending for social programs--largely Social Security and Medicare--was $313 billion.

Social Programs Cut

Then the pendulum again reversed its arc. The Reagan years have brought budget cuts to social programs and a turn in attitude as well.

“In the past two decades, we’ve created hundreds of new programs to provide personal assistance,” the President said in a 1981 address to the nation. “Many of these programs may have come from a good heart, but not all have come from a clear head.”

Some of the vexing conflicts about the poor have returned.

Like the friendly visitors of 100 years ago, social analyst Charles Murray and others in the vanguard of the current critique suggest that inner weaknesses plague the poor more than business cycles and that public relief only encourages laziness.

In his controversial book, “Losing Ground,” Murray proposes “scrapping the entire federal welfare system and income-support structure for working-age persons . . . . It is the Alexandrian solution: cut the knot, for there is no way to untie it.”

But the eraser is no easier to use than the pencil. In an interview, Murray admitted that wiping away the system is not feasible. His suggestions, actually, were new programs, one for job training and another for public service jobs, an agency to employ anyone willing to work at less than the minimum wage.

‘These Idiotic Ideas’

Similar programs, of course, have been tried for years, and Murray, chagrined, knew it: “Ten years down the road, they’re going to say . . . Murray got caught up in the necessity of coming up with practical solutions, and so he came up with these idiotic ideas, and what happened is that it was CETA all over again.”

CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, was a job-training program, discredited by critics such as Murray and discontinued by the federal government. It went the way of the county poorhouse and “scientific charity” and a thousand other well-intentioned attempts that did not work well enough.

Only poverty goes on--nettlesome, perplexing and, most of all, enduring.

Almost 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Thucydides wrote that poverty was “no disgrace to acknowledge but a real degradation to make no effort to overcome.”

Now, as then, the challenge is to be benevolent in a time of limitations, to be equitable in a world of inequality, to be persistent in the face of a problem that seems never-ending.

It is an age-old matter of the pocket and the heart.

Times researcher Nina Green contributed to this story.

ATTITUDES ON POVERTY These graphs show results of a Los Angeles Times poll on poverty taken April 20-26, 1985. The nationwide telephone poll questioned a random sample of 2,446 respondents. The poll was directed by I.A. Lewis KEY: xxx poor respondents *** non-poor respondents vvv all respondents Do you approve or disapprove of the way President Reagan is handling poverty?

Approve xxx 21 *** 37 vvv 34 Disapprove xxx 62 *** 57 vvv 58 Don’t Know xxx 17 *** 6 vvv 8

Do you think most poor people are lazy or hard-working?

Lazy xxx 22 *** 26 vvv 25 Hard working xxx 58 *** 48 vvv 50 Don’t know xxx 20 *** 26 vvv 25

Do you think most poor people prefer to stay on welfare or do you think they would rather earn their own living?

Prefer welfare xxx 20 *** 25 vvv 25 Earn own living xxx 68 *** 62 vvv 63 Don’t know xxx 12 *** 13 vvv 12

Do you think we’re coddling the poor--that live on welfare--or do you think poor people can hardly get by on what the government gives them?

Coddling xxx 26 *** 23 vvv 23 Hardly get by xxx 64 *** 68 vvv 68 Don’t know xxx 10 *** 9 vvv 9

When poverty programs failed, do you think it was because they were never given enough money to make them work, or because money was wasted on useless projects that didn’t help poor people, or do you think poverty programs failed because the money was intercepted and never got to the poor people who needed it?

Never given enough xxx 5 *** 6 vvv 6 Wasted on projects xxx 30 *** 41 vvv 39 Never gets to poor xxx 50 *** 40 vvv 42 Don’t know xxx 15 *** 13 vvv 13

Do you think poverty in the U.S. is a problem that will be finally solved or do you think it will always be a major problem for our society?

Finally solved xxx 13 *** 8 vvv 8 Major problem xxx 85 *** 90 vvv 89 Don’t know xxx 2 *** 2 vvv 3

Even if the government were willing to spend whatever is necessary to eliminate poverty in the U.S., do you think the government knows enough about how to do that, or not?

Yes xxx 28 *** 22 vvv 22 No xxx 56 *** 73 vvv 70 Don’t know xxx 16 *** 5 vvv 8

Do you think that the distribution of money and wealth in this county today is fair, or do you feel that the money and wealth in this country should be more evenly distributed among a larger percentage of the people?

Fair today xxx 16 *** 31 vvv 28 More evenly dist. xxx 71 *** 61 vvv 61 Don’t know xxx 13 *** 8 vvv 11

Do you think that welfare benefits give poor people a chance to stand on their own two feet and get started again, or do you think they make poor people dependent and encourage them to stay poor?

Get started again xxx 31 *** 16 vvv 19 Neither xxx 9 *** 11 vvv 11 Stay Poor xxx 43 *** 61 vvv 59 Don’t know xxx 17 *** 12 vvv 11

Generally speaking, do you think the federal government should spend a great deal more money on poverty programs, or somewhat more or somewhat less, or do you think the federal government should spend a great deal less money on poverty programs?

Great deal more xxx 26 *** 11 vvv 14 Somewhat more xxx 26 *** 50 vvv 45 Somewhat less xxx 22 *** 19 vvv 19 Great deal less xxx 12 *** 8 vvv 10 Don’t know xxx 14 *** 12 vvv 12