Poverty Puzzle Can’t Be Solved by the Right or the Left Alone

It’s already tax time in poor neighborhoods, where H&R; Block storefronts are busier than polling places in primary states. As soon as the W-2s arrive, low-wage workers flock to the tax preparers, who set up temporary quarters on sleazy streets among check-cashing joints and payday loan sharks. Nobody wants to wait until April because “taxes” in those communities means money from the Internal Revenue Service.

The reason is the earned income tax credit, passed by Congress in 1975, one of the few anti-poverty measures that appeal to both conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats.

The law benefits only those people who have jobs but who earn a relatively low wage -- the working poor and those near poverty. It thus reflects values at both ends of the political spectrum. Republicans like it because it rewards work, cuts taxes and doesn’t fund a bureaucratic program. Democrats like it because it uses government to subsidize the meager pay of those at the bottom of the economy.

This rare form of liberal-conservative coalition is essential to address a national shame: the millions of Americans whose hard work never propels them very far above poverty. About 22% of the country’s labor force makes $8 or less an hour, according to Robert Lerman, an economist at the Urban Institute and American University in Washington, D.C. Among the 139 million people holding jobs for half a year or more, he calculates, about 29 million earn annual wages under $15,000.

But it will take more than the earned income tax credit to help these folks because poverty, or near-poverty, is not a single problem. It is many problems bound together in a cluster of mutually reinforcing hardships, and only a sweeping range of coordinated programs will make a difference.

Liberals and conservatives each have only part of the picture. Liberals tend to pin the blame on society -- on shredded government safety nets, the stagnant minimum wage, greedy corporations that exploit menial labor and inadequate public funds for job training and secondary education. They are partly right.

Conservatives tend to see individual responsibility in broken families, neglectful and spendthrift parents, teenage pregnancies, school dropouts and substance abusers. They too are partly right.

But unless the two sides get together, they will never get it wholly right. You can’t assemble a jigsaw puzzle and see the complete picture if you have only some of the pieces, and that’s what Republicans and Democrats have been trying to do.

The Republican pieces portray family and community; the Democrats focus on government and private industry. In reality, as I learned during five years of interviewing families across the country, it is hard to find a poor household that does not suffer from both self-inflicted wounds and injuries by larger economic and social forces.

Because the individual and social problems interact with one another, solutions require an interlocking mesh of public and private efforts to treat all the ills. Severe stress at home affects performance at work and school, for example. Lack of nurturing may damage cognitive development. Nutrition has an effect on learning. Decayed housing can exacerbate a child’s asthma, which leads to absenteeism by both child and parent. In other words, a job alone rarely improves the lot of a poor family.

The notion that each political party should respect the ideas of the other sounds quaint and naive in an era when talk shows have become shout shows and when political ambition can encourage candidates and elected officials to destroy their opponents rather than debate them respectfully. But cooperation is the only path to progress.

In recent years, Democratic politicians have done better than their Republican counterparts at borrowing from the other side. Today, just as President Clinton adopted the Republican notion of “welfare to work,” Republicans need to facilitate work by generously funding job-training and child-care programs that Democrats champion.

President Bush’s faith-based and marriage initiatives, although motivated by crude political appeals to the religious right, also contain kernels of sense. If Bush pandered less to his constituency, if federal funds for grass-roots anti-poverty programs were partitioned so they didn’t finance religion and if marital counseling helped stabilize families, the concepts would deserve better than the dismissal they have received from most Democrats.

Even Sens. John Kerry and Joe Lieberman endorse faith-based initiatives.

Poverty cannot be effectively reduced without a decline in political polarization -- not a very realistic wish during an election year in which the country is evenly divided between the parties. For the working poor, meanwhile, “when I get my taxes” will remain a common phrase followed by a pledge to catch up on bills or to save up for a better car to get to work or even for a down payment on a house.