Exploding Myths

If government policies are based--as they seem to be--on the premise that the poor are lazy, then they must be rewritten from top to bottom. The myth that the poor shun work, when in fact many work harder than the well-to-do and for far less reward, did not stand up under the kind of close inspection involved in last week’s Times report on poverty.

On another crucial point, a team of Times reporters wrote that the statistical picture for the poor is as grim now as in any recent time. In the latest federal count in 1983 there were 35.3 million poor people--one American in seven. That’s an increase of 11 million in five years. And the poor are getting poorer. At last count the poorest Americans had only 60% of the money that they needed for life’s basics. The most tragic statistic of all says that one-fourth of all children under 6 live in poverty. Half of black American children are poor.

Behind the statistics are real people. Hard-working people like Gilbert Maxwell, who cleans up at a shrimp-packing plant in Brunswick, Ga., for $10,800 a year. Or elderly people like Rob Green, 75, and his wife of Dawes Hollow, W.Va., who live on potatoes, beans, a little bacon and a few onions. Or the countless infants who die because their mothers did not eat well during pregnancy and seldom, if ever, saw a doctor.

Why has a country as rich as the United States done so little for its poor?

Programs first launched during the New Deal in the 1930s and then greatly expanded in the 1960s actually had some success in reducing poverty rates and lifting some of the poor into the middle class. But there were also enough failures to give government intervention a bad name. Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter allowed inflation to eat away the value of anti-poverty aid. By the time Ronald Reagan became President, the political climate allowed deep cuts in programs providing job training and public-service employ-ment, unemployment insurance, food stamps, compensatory education and nutrition for children.

That climate must be changed. If there is one myth that the Times research exploded, it is that there are undeserving poor who will not work. Most of the poor are women with children or the elderly or the infirm. Of the remaining poor, two-thirds work, and work hard--cleaning shrimp plants, making beds in hotels, picking up other peoples’ garbage.

Specific steps that government could take to help lift some of the poor out of poverty or to cushion hardships for those who are still locked there include:

--Providing welfare payments to the needy even when fathers remain in the home, to encourage families to stay together.

--Enacting minimum federal standards for welfare benefits; they vary widely around the country.

--Lightening the poor’s tax burden by increasing the personal income-tax exemption.

--Conducting more intensive experiments with “workfare”--requiring welfare recipients to do community work in return for their benefit checks--as long as they are not structured in ways that punish people for being poor.

--Passing tougher child-support laws.

--Encouraging corporations and local governments to provide reasonably priced child care. More subsidized day care would make entry-level jobs a reasonable alternative to a welfare check.

--Encouraging family-planning programs rather than cutting their funds in endless debates over abortion.

In a series of lectures at Harvard University in April, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) outlined much of this program. He said during the lectures that Americans “are a surpassingly generous people, not least one supposes because we are, in the end, so blessed, so well-off generally.” Faced with natural disasters, Americans aid families that they know to have been devastated. Poverty is our biggest national disaster, and the poor need that same spirit of sharing today.