The Alienated Poor Are Today’s National Threat : Employment: People with no prospect of a decent job or a middle-class life are bound to reject society’s institutions.

“Personal responsibility” is all the rage among politicians these days. Time limits on welfare, requiring the idle poor to work, stiffer child-support laws, tougher punishment for violent criminals--all of these stem from growing impatience among politicians and the general public with people who are perceived as drains on society.

I understand this impatience and lead an organization that is also eager to reduce dependency.

I understand corporate America’s obsession with competitiveness, market share, productivity and profitability. As a taxpayer, I sympathize with elected officials worried about budget deficits, tax burdens and anxious, exasperated citizens.

But we must resist calls for the more punitive actions being proposed and consider the kind of society America is becoming. A mere generation ago, blue-collar workers were the widely celebrated backbone of our economy. Today, technology and the global realignment of work have redefined the economic function of cities and undermined the middle-class livelihoods of marginally skilled workers who live there. The American economy has turned sour for working people with strong backs but meager skills.

This reversal of fortune explains much of the social unrest afflicting our cities, especially among young people. Witnessing what has happened to their parents and grandparents, they’re skeptical that the legitimate economy will ever have room for them to earn a decent living. They know about hiring bias and employer preferences, and that most of the jobs readily available to them pay lousy wages on which they could barely support themselves, much less a family.

This should be of more than passing concern to fortunate Americans who are on the “up escalator” economically. Given irreversible demographic trends, much of the nation’s work force in the future will be drawn from the ranks of minorities and the poor. A sub-par labor force undermines American competitiveness.

What’s more, the growing alienation of the economically marginalized will eventually erode the credibility of the state and all major institutions that comprise it, including public institutions and private employers. We need look no farther than the collapse of the Iron Curtain to see the result of this loss of confidence.

As economic marginalization deepens, spreads and endures, America faces a grim future of widespread discontent, insecurity, ethnic tension and scapegoating. The tidal wave of economic change first hit the urban factories and blue-collar workers who toiled there. But change is slowly engulfing white-collar workers and corporate managers as well.

When asked if there ever again will be enough work for marginally skilled workers, some CEOs say there will, provided workers price their labor little enough so that it doesn’t pay to automate. Whether their pay will enable them to live above the poverty line is someone else’s worry.

But whether our society can ultimately function with so many people essentially out of the economic loop, locked out of the American dream, is everyone’s problem. There’s a glaring disconnect between emerging welfare policies, which insist that the poor work, and Federal Reserve Board policies that proclaim the economy overheated when unemployment falls below 6%.

It’s not too late to stem the destabilizing tide of economic marginalization. The solutions, however, lie in policies that politicians typically shun these days, including:

* Assurances that those who work won’t be poor. This means a much higher minimum wage at employer expense or more generous government wage supplements financed by better-off taxpayers.

* Determined efforts by employers to spread the job action around so that the labor market opens wide to inner-city residents.

* Publicly created jobs doing valued work in communities where there simply aren’t enough private jobs available.

With communism no longer a menace, the greatest danger to our national security now lies in the growing economic marginalization of so many Americans.

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I spoke with the West German defense minister at a luncheon. I asked whether, with their extensive intelligence operation inside East Berlin, his people had forecast the fall of the Wall? Or the fact that East German soldiers wouldn’t defend it? Or that, even if the soldiers had, the people would stand up to them? His reply to all three was a candid “No.”

Let’s hope our leaders have their ears closer to the ground than did our German friends. America’s fate as a civil society hinges on how well we hear the millions of fellow citizens who are seeking access to the economic mainstream, but increasingly denied entry.