Responsible Thinking to Break the Cycle of Poverty

“When millions of poor children cannot even imagine the lives we are calling them to lead, we know we have to face hard truths and take strong steps,” said Bill Clinton in his inaugural address.

Clinton, who used the word “responsibility” four times in his speech, was referring to the need for new thinking to break the cycle of poverty and welfare dependency that has grown alarmingly in recent years.

The new President is onto a trend, a shift in attitudes toward poverty that could mean real change in the next few years.

From poor communities themselves, calls are heard for a new emphasis on moral standards in educating and caring for the poor. And private industry, provoked by the Los Angeles riots, is more serious than ever about reducing poverty.

Both aspects of the trend were in evidence at a major conference on poverty, held at UCLA on the weekend before Clinton’s inauguration.

Calls for morality were conspicuous. One man, head of a neighborhood organization, told with dismay of a school principal unwilling to speak of basic honesty to a student who found a wallet in the school corridor. A successful career woman recalled her hardship as an unwed teen-aged mother and urged moral counseling to help young people avoid that burden today.

The emphasis was remarked upon by B. Kipling Hagopian, an organizer of the conference--and partner in Brentwood Associates, a major venture capital firm. “They were talking about God in there,” he said during a break.

Prominent Los Angeles corporations, law and finance firms put up more than a quarter of a million dollars to stage the conference. It was a practical, not a charitable, act.

Business understands the benefits of reducing poverty. For the general public, poverty is a discouraging subject, as tedious as energy conservation. But just as conservation yielded economies in the billions, so reducing poverty--like revaluing assets--can turn a loss to a profit by reclaiming human lives.

The 13 million Americans now on welfare cost government $22 billion a year in payments. California, with 12% of the nation’s population, has 20% of its welfare recipients--at a direct cost to the state of $2.9 billion this year.

But that doesn’t begin to capture the full cost. Each school dropout costs society about $5,000 a year in social services and lost taxes--$200,000 over a working lifetime, without even estimating the individual’s lost possibilities.

And the crime that accompanies poverty exacts an incalculable toll. Buildings in some sections of Los Angeles now have zero value because crime makes them unusable. We worry about earthquakes but often overlook the indirect losses from poverty.

But helping the poor is no longer simple. Until 1973, a rise in the gross national product automatically reduced poverty. “In the original war on poverty in the 1960s, we were working with Appalachia,” notes Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan, D.-N.Y., who spoke at the UCLA conference. “The problem in West Virginia was not enough money in the community.” So when government put money in, economic conditions could correct themselves.

But in South-Central Los Angeles--or New York City’s South Bronx or the South Side of Chicago--the problems of family breakdown compound economic troubles.

Money alone can’t help, and indeed the Clinton Administration has none to spare. “I’d be surprised if welfare funds increased,” said Moynihan, the new head of the Senate Finance Committee. “The one bill I must pass, in March, is the one to lift the ceiling on the national debt.”

Washington at bay is not the whole story. Business is stepping up its efforts. Barry Sanders, co-chairman of Rebuild L.A., points out that poverty is two-tiered. More than 60% of the unemployed in the Los Angeles area are people who have worked before and simply need a new job. Business investment and education, such as Toyota’s $3-million training program in Crenshaw or a new waste recycling business in Compton with job training at Compton Community College, are having good results. More will be forthcoming.

For the others, teen-age mothers who have never worked, teen-age fathers with police records, a solution may be the settlement house model of Jane Addams at Chicago’s Hull House and Lillian Wald at New York’s Henry St. Settlement in the 1890s. Those settlement houses worked in the community, counseling on family life and educating the poor.

Today’s expanded Head Start program, educating and caring for children almost from birth while also educating parents, could be a base for such a program, says Douglas Besharov, a scholar at American Enterprise Institute who works with the White House on programs for children and families.

Jane Addams’ reforms were an outgrowth of the settlement house movement in Victorian England. In her landmark book, “Poverty and Compassion,” historian Gertrude Himmelfarb notes that among Victorian reformers, whether their convictions were religious, socialist or capitalist, “there was a strong consensus that the objective of reform was that it contribute to the moral improvement of the poor.”

She means practical assistance to help people lead independent, self-respecting lives, not blue-nosed prudishness. People need help, not moral indifference.

“Let’s shape incentives to keep families together--pay more for a man in the house rather than deny benefits,” Larry Townsend, head of public services for Riverside County, told the UCLA conference. He received a standing ovation. A new spirit is stirring, remembering old truths.

“We must do what America does best,” said Clinton in his inaugural address. “Offer opportunity to all and demand responsibility from all.”