Public Apathy Runs High as Problems of Poor Mount

Faced with the dangerous crisis of poverty, the American body politic seems trapped in an extraordinary collapse of political will.

Most politicians and many of their constituents have chosen to ignore the crisis or to throw up their arms in despair. The few who have not given up content themselves with trying to sew on patches.

That at least is how it seems for many who work closely with the problem every day.

“I don’t get the sense that we have said to ourselves that these problems are worthy of our efforts, we can solve them and, by golly, we’re going to do something about them,” says Robert Johnson, administrator of Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, which serves most of Atlanta’s inner city.

“I almost get a sense that some problems become so big that we are just willing to tolerate them because we don’t want to mount the effort.”

The challenge for the 1990s, as the festering consequences of unabated poverty grow ever larger, more expensive and more dangerous to the larger society, is to break through a seeming public apathy and develop support for workable solutions, many experts agree.

“The challenge for the ‘90s,” says Robert Greenstein, director of the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “is to identify those things that work and then convince the public that these are not only good investments but necessary investments, that we’re not going to be throwing money at things that don’t work but we’re going to carefully test what does work and doesn’t work.”

Analysts agree that unlimited and uncontrolled social spending cannot solve all problems. But that, they argue, should not be used as an excuse for spending no money at all.

“Just plain money won’t solve the problem,” says Gary Orfield, a University of Chicago political scientist. On the other hand, he says, “Targeted money” for specific, proven programs, coupled “with the necessary requirements will help the problem.”

‘Some Things Work’

Some advocates of federal action against poverty say that public support for potentially workable programs has been eroded in part by the political battles of the last two decades between liberals and conservatives.

They point to sociologist Charles Murray, for example, who has argued for abolishing all federal welfare programs and transferring the money into a job-creating free market on grounds that welfare has hurt the poor. In his book, “Losing Ground,” Murray declared that free-spending liberals “tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead.”

Says Greenstein: “There has been some real poisoning of the atmosphere in recent years in a cynical way to convince the public that nothing works. The fact of the matter is that some things work and some things don’t and there really are a number of things that do work.”

“And as we identify things that work, we need to make the investments in those things for the future,” Greenstein said.

Indeed, workable solutions for parts of the poverty problem have already been identified.

Head Start has shown that preschool children can be provided with the social and developmental skills and the self-esteem they need to profit from entering grade school. Food stamps, despite occasional fraudulent use, have kept millions from going hungry. Federal housing subsidies, before being slashed during the Reagan era, helped thousands upon thousands find shelter.

Social Security and Medicare, while not given only to the poor, helped slash the poverty rate for the elderly from 28.5% in 1965 to 12% in 1988--by far the biggest success story of the War on Poverty.

The Ford Foundation Task Force on Social Welfare and the American Future concluded last year that past social programs have been more successful than most Americans believe. “People at all levels have benefited from some government-supported social protections like Social Security, Medicare and mortgage interest deductions,” the foundation stated in its report.

“We know, for example, what must be done to bring healthy babies into the world. We know that high-quality programs for preschool children pay dividends in later years. We know how to combine health, education and family support services to help disadvantaged schoolchildren. We know that employment programs . . . can offer cost-effective improvements in the lives of many, including mothers on welfare,” the Ford Foundation said.

In particular, it concluded, early childhood intervention programs for disadvantaged preschoolers are “among the soundest human investments.” At-risk children who are detected early and given good health care, proper nutrition and safe environments are more likely to be productive citizens--and less likely to require public support--later in their lives.

“What good preschool child-development programs do is help tilt the odds for poorer children away from failure and toward success,” the report stated.

Ford researchers found, for example, that a $5,000 investment per child per year in the Perry Preschool Project in Ypsilanti, Mich., during the early 1960s bore remarkable dividends to the participating children.

By the time those children reached the age of 19, according to the study, society had benefited in savings of $3,000 per child in costs associated with delinquency and crime, $5,000 in special or remedial education programs and $16,000 in public assistance. On top of this, when compared with children who did not have the preschool training, each child had paid $5,000 more in taxes to the government.

If programs like the one in Ypsilanti have demonstrated such benefits, why are they not being expanded on a national basis?

There is not universal agreement on the answer to that question, but among the elements:

--Competition for scarce government dollars in an era of tight budgets and slow economic growth.

--The political weakness of the poor as a group.

--The perception by white America that poverty is primarily a problem of black America.

--A lack of strong national leadership on the poverty issue.

More Taxes?

President Bush occasionally has called attention to some of the problems of poverty, but he generally has taken the position that the federal deficit and concerns about the larger economy require that the private sector and local government bear primary responsibility. “We have more will than wallet,” he said in his inaugural address.

More recently, the President’s Domestic Policy Council quashed dozens of potential policy options presented to Bush by an interagency group formed to offer suggestions for reformulating the nation’s anti-poverty programs. According to individuals involved in the year-long discussions, the council rejected the proposals last month as fiscally expensive and politically unpopular.

Constance Horner, undersecretary of health and human resources and the head of an interagency task force studying the worsening problems of health care, made it clear in a recent interview, for example, that her group would not seriously consider national health insurance or mandatory employer-supplied insurance as potential solutions.

National health insurance is far beyond the limits of the present budget and mandatory insurance could “drive up employer costs so much that employers cut back on jobs,” she said. Advocates of greater aid for the poor argue that raising taxes would be cost-effective in the long run. They note that, among the world’s seven leading industrial nations, only Japan taxes its citizens at a lower rate than the United States and spends less for programs to aid the poor. The other five nations--Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada--outrank the United States in both categories.

Raising taxes would impose a drag on an already anemic U.S. economy, however, and neither the Bush Administration nor the Democrats have shown much enthusiasm for a major tax increase targeted specifically to help the poor.

If those on the firing line are growing increasingly bitter about political leaders cutting back on the federal commitment to the poor, the political weakness of the poor as a segment of society gives them little recourse.

“How dare they come into areas where kids are starting at a deficit--meaning their parents may have been poor, they may not have had good nutrition, they may not have had good health care--and say they’re going to spend one-third the money?” demanded Climentene Jones, the medical director of Chicago’s school-based health clinics.

As Jones ruefully admits, voices such as hers do not make much of an impact in Washington. “Let’s face it,” she said, “the people who have the money, this is not their priority.”

The poor themselves, never very well organized politically, do not vote in sufficient numbers to exert the sort of influence wielded by such groups as the elderly. Nor have others organized powerful lobbies on their behalf.

In recent memory, the poor commanded a degree of political power only in the mid-1960s, and then only because President Lyndon B. Johnson became their chief advocate. The Vietnam War put an end to that brief period of federal emphasis on fighting poverty.

“Johnson had the power to do it all with Congress,” Richard Goodwin, the White House speechwriter who coined the phrase Great Society , said a year ago just after the 25th anniversary of the launching of the program. “That’s what was forfeited in the war. The Great Society was abandoned as an ongoing process.”

Racial Attitudes

Relatively slow economic growth since Vietnam has helped keep the federal purse strings tight, but the nation’s racial attitudes and perceptions probably have been a bigger factor in the failure to mount a new war on poverty.

Although America has more poor whites than poor blacks--20.8 million whites and 9.4 million blacks in 1988--the whites fit so easily into the background of white middle-class neighborhoods that they are relatively unnoticed.

“White poor people in urban communities are not concentrated in areas of high poverty,” said the University of Chicago’s Orfield. “A lot of (poor whites) tend to be elderly. A lot of them tend to have serious health problems of some sort. A lot of them are recently divorced. Many of them still have connections to the middle class and many of them actually live in predominantly middle-class neighborhoods.”

Thus the most visible poor are black, trapped in inner-city ghettos and personified by teen-age single mothers, unmarried and unemployed men and the ceaseless violence of the drug trade and the street crime it spawns. David T. Ellwood, professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, believes the perception of blacks as poor and as different from the rest of society has contributed to the lack of political will to help them.

“The less the public perceives that ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’ the more the public will see the needy as a different class of people with different values and attitudes from the rest of society,” Ellwood wrote in his book, “Poor Support.” “The erosion of empathy . . . shows up in diminished political support as well as less sensitivity and understanding.”

Social scientists such as Ellwood at Harvard and William Julius Wilson at the University of Chicago have proposed structural changes that might help the nation escape from conundrums of poverty. Like conservatives, they see great flaws in our welfare system.

Despite the serious economic and political obstacles, both Ellwood and Wilson have proposed a deliberate federal policy of creating employment--good jobs that ensure wages above the poverty level for able-bodied workers, perhaps through a public-works program to rebuild the nation’s highways, bridges and airports.

To take many off the welfare rolls, they also propose increased income tax credits to low income workers, a comprehensive system of day care for mothers who can never expect to earn enough to support their children without such service and a system of collecting child-support payments from delinquent or reluctant parents.

The day-care and child-support programs might, in fact, generate political support since they would also benefit many working-class and middle-class families. One child-support program, currently on trial in Wisconsin, compels non-supporting parents to provide a “guaranteed minimum benefit” per child. Under the program, the state collects a prescribed amount from the absent parent through payroll deduction and makes regular payments to the custodial parent.

Specialists argue that without child support and access to quality child care, many single working mothers find it virtually impossible to compete for promotions or even achieve economic self-sufficiency.

Ellwood also argued the need for expanded health-care benefits through a combination of private and government health plans. Adequate care early in life, he said, would prevent much more costly care later in life.

Although there is no massive public support for a comprehensive program to deal with the crisis of poverty, several stirrings indicate that Americans may be slowly becoming more receptive to the need for action.

The World Policy Institute reported last year that 74% of Americans believed that “the growth of an underclass of poor people” was a very serious or extremely serious problem. It said that 71% strongly approved of programs to “substantially increase national spending on education to create a much more literate and productive labor force.”

“If you talk in terms of welfare, people think of welfare Cadillacs, welfare queens, cheating and so on,” said Tom W. Smith of the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. But when asked about increased spending on “assistance for the poor,” he said, more than 60% of Americans approve.

According to Smith’s polls, the percentage of Americans wanting the government to spend more on the problems of the big cities increased from 47% in 1977 to 54% in 1989. The share wanting the government to spend more on protecting the nation’s health rose from 59% in 1977 to 71% in 1989.

But the percentage wanting the government to spend more on improving the condition of blacks, while increasing, was still meager. While 27% wanted an increase in 1977, 36% favored one in 1989.

Perhaps most significant, many corporate leaders have become alarmed by the incessant problems of illiteracy and unaffordable health insurance. Thus far, these influential executives fret more about the effects of the crisis of poverty--such as job applicants without enough education to fill vacancies--than about the root of the crisis.

Yet these executives are also beginning to believe that the problems are draining the strength of the country. In the words of Owen B. Butler, the retired chairman of Procter & Gamble who is now chairman of the Committee for Economic Development, a group of business and academic leaders:

“If the United States is to be a world-class economy in the next century, we had best be preparing now to have a world-class work force.”

Yet such sentiments are likely to remain no more than that unless new national leadership emerges, most of those closely involved with the problems of poverty agree--preferably from the White House.

“I put it on the President,” said Grady Memorial Hospital’s Johnson. “I think national issues require national leadership. You’ve got to have someone who articulates the reason for doing things, the plans for doing things, who puts forth a budget for doing things, and who intermittently speaks to the issue and rallies people and gets people all gung-ho about taking on and tackling and seeing this as a national priority.”