Commentary : Step Back in Time to Help Poor

We have come to an interesting turn in the history of providing for indigents in America. It is important to recall that governments were first established to permit the few to control the many with little regard for the lowest level of society.

Over the past 200 years we have seen the emergence of the middle class as the dominant force in government. In the past century we have seen the emergence of the concept that society, through government and voluntary organizations, should provide food, shelter and a reasonable standard of medical care for those in need without regard for their ability to pay.

In the West, government services for the poor were largely left in the hands of counties, which face an obligation under the Welfare and Institutions Code to assure these services.

In the Southwest, welfare was often a means to retain the better and more compliant undocumented workers when work was slack. With the great depression of 1930, and the apparent inability or unwillingness of local and state government to respond to the swollen ranks of the poor, came tentative federal initiatives, followed by the New Deal with a strong federal role in providing work, welfare and Social Security.

The federalization of welfare and most everything else accelerated with World War II. Finally, the great initiative wove a complex federal bureaucracy whose costs led to the great retreat from the war on poverty led by the Republican Party and its epitome of cheerful indifference, President Reagan.

Unhappily, the truly poor are still there fighting poverty with diminished help. The bulk of them cannot manage the system and wander between degrees of extreme need with a wretched quality of life. They falter and fail in employment, in school, in hospitals and in the welfare system itself. Churches and voluntary groups do what they can but the need quickly overwhelms their resources.

I find it fascinating that the retreat from the war on poverty has not been attended by a major retreat from other basic functions of government. Roads are built. Police function with marginal but adequate resources. Libraries and schools survive. Marinas to hold yachts are built.

Meanwhile, when we can’t find tax dollars to house unwanted infants in the county, we turn to the rich and famous for charitable donations and build Orangewood. We have fund-raisers for the Poison Center. For national disasters, we turn to the Red Cross.

I don’t understand what happened to our priorities. Why don’t we use tax dollars to care for the poor and raise funds for roads and marinas? To retreat in the war on poverty is one thing; for government to abandon it to the private charities is something else.

I believe we should try to elect county fathers who think that their obligation under the Welfare and Institutions Code has a high priority. It is clear that Orange County’s fathers are more penurious than most. A comparison of Orange County tax dollar spending for basic human services does not compare well with other urban areas. In fact, it is shameful.

A recent study by UC Irvine Medical Center researchers disclosed that many lower-income patients with serious and life-threatening illnesses still don’t receive adequate medical care.

I would acknowledge that the current system is a mess, in large part due to well-intended state and federal initiatives which cost enormous dollars and provide limited value for their effort. I believe there is a fundamental flaw in welfare which workfare and similar initiatives won’t fix for the bulk of the indigent. The fundamental flaw lies in the fact that we forget that we lost the war on poverty and believe we are still providing funds to poor people that will allow them to find housing, buy food and clothes like the rest of us, and go to any doctor or hospital when they get sick.

You can’t manage that system, provide good service, promote rehabilitation, and avoid cheating in that framework with the dollars available. I am convinced we would be better off to have relatively small and Spartan apartments and dormitories where the homeless can go, where food is provided in a cafeteria setting, and where a few clinics and hospitals are subsidized to care for these people.

Such settings would not be pleasant and would hopefully motivate people to seek a way out. But they would make an honest statement of our regard for the poor. The “County Farm” and hospital needs to return to Orange County, and to most parts of the nation. We could make it a better place than we left it after the Great Depression. It was, in many ways, a better model for caring for the poor than we have been able to manage today.

The County Farm model isn’t a very liberal idea, it even sounds reactionary to many conservatives. But it did work fairly well. And it is very clear we are not ready to pay for more. Sometimes going back is progress.