Timothy T. Taylor Home Page
Resume
Journal of Economic Perspectives
Articles and Writing
Economics Textbook
Classroom Teaching
The Teaching Company
High School Pedagogy
Editing
Family
Contact

Articles and Writing

September 3, 1985
"Government Aid a Cushion, not a Trap, for the Poor"
San Jose Mercury News
By Timothy Taylor
<< Back to 1985 menu

THE poverty rate fell from 15.3 percent in 1983 to 14.4 percent in 1984, the Census Bureau announced this week. The decline was the largest since 1968 and the first significant fall since 1976. It will fuel a firestorm of debate over how best to attack poverty.

Patrick Buchanan, the president's director of communications, called the report "a triumph for Reagan policies, a triumph for Reagan philosophy." But given the record, he was pushing credibility a bit. The Reagan administration inherited an increasing poverty rate, which rose steadily from a 1978 low of 11.4 percent to its 1983 high.

While this year's reversal is welcome, it was accomplished in a year of boom economic growth. With the economy growing only 1 percent faster than inflation this year, claiming a "triumph" takes both confidence and precognition.

The philosophy behind Buchanan's response was outlined in "Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950-1980," by Charles Murray. Murray writes that between 1950 and 1969, the poverty rate fell from 30.2 percent to 12.1 percent. During that time, the government spent relatively little on transfer payments to the poor. In the late 1960s, the "Great Society" programs were developed to fight poverty. Spending on those programs doubled in real dollars from 1969 to 1980, and the poverty rate in 1980 was 13 percent.

Murray concluded that anti-poverty programs aren't helping the poor, a conclusion that found a powerful resonance in Washington. The New York Times editorialized in February, when the budget was being written, "In agency after agency, officials cite the Murray book as a philosophical base for... deep reductions in education, child nutrition, and housing assistance, and elimination of programs like Job Corps." Meg Greenfield reported in Newsweek that budget cutters said they had "Murrayed" programs.

Murray argues the merits of eliminating all federal anti- poverty programs except for unemployment insurance, which is the direction the budget could be headed. Spending on federal means-tested programs to assist the poor -- Supplemental Security Income, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Medicaid, school lunches, earned income tax credit, refugee assistance, and housing and energy assistance -- stayed constant in real dollars between 1980 and 1985, according to the House Republican Research Committee. The originally proposed 1986 budget would erode those programs 14 percent by 1988.

A fundamental tension does exist within the concept of charity. On one hand, it is a fundamental moral commandment to help other humans in need. On the other, it is also a fundamental principle to respect those you are helping, and to help them respect themselves.

In Murray's view, enormous government anti-poverty programs have stripped the poor of self-respect, made them dependent, and encouraged pathologies of poverty like illegitimacy, crime, dropping out of school and quitting jobs. He argues that increasing these programs will only drag more people into dependency.

Murray asks a valid empirical question, makes a valid philosophical argument and reaches a tempting conclusion. But he's wrong. The relationship between poverty and government spending is not as simple as he claims, and economic and demographic changes are the prime contributors to today's American poverty.

Although it started from a low base, federal social spending exploded in the 1950s and early 1960s, doubling from 1953 to 1961, and doubling again between 1961 and 1969. But powerful economic growth reduced poverty, despite what Murray would call a growing "disincentive" for the poor to seek work.

More recent experience doesn't bear out Murray's thesis either. As William O'Hare of the Population Reference Bureau pointed out, the freeze on federal welfare spending actually started in 1977, and that's just about when the poverty rate started rising. Further, inflation eroded AFDC benefits throughout the 1970s and cuts eroded them further in 1981. Robert Moffett of Rutgers University found that decline did not change the work effort of welfare mothers.

In theory, it may make sense that welfare would cause poor people to avoid work, but it doesn't seem to be true in practice. Shelton Danziger of the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research on Poverty calculated that leaving aside the elderly, the disabled, students and mothers with children under the age of 6, two-thirds of the heads of poor households work at least part-time. Other data show that half work full-time.

Danziger concluded, "The numbers show that poverty is far more a problem of job availability than work ethic.... Obviously, there are some bums out there. But, mostly, people are working or looking for work."

The poor affirmed their desire to work in a recent nationwide Los Angeles Times poll, where they supported "workfare" -- requiring eligible poor people to work at government jobs in exchange for assistance -- by a larger majority than the non-poor.

Eventually, most of the poor escape poverty by their own efforts, contrary to the myth of a permanent "underclass." Murray and other conservatives tend to presume the poor are trapped by government programs; liberals tend to assume they are trapped by the lack of government help and economic opportunities.

The Census Bureau does not collect evidence on how long people are trapped below the poverty line, but the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center does. Greg Duncan described their findings in "Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty," and found that about a quarter of the U.S. population fell below the poverty line for at least one year during the 1970s.

But only 2.6 percent of the population was "persistently poor," according to the Michigan researchers. That group is more than three-fifths black, predominantly female, in inner city ghettos and rural Southern counties, in desperate trouble.

But most of those below the poverty line are there for only a year or two. They fall into poverty because of unemployment, because a wage earner (usually husband or teen-ager) leaves the rest of the family, because a woman has a child and can no longer work.

Duncan writes, "On the whole, the main difference between them and the rest of the population was that they had experienced one or two bad years." This group leaves poverty upon marrying or getting a new job.

This group of working poor with children is a new development. Over the last two decades the number of impoverished elderly has fallen by about 2 million while the number of poor increased by more than 6 million. Meanwhile, the number of poor in families without husbands increased by 6 million, and the number of poor children under the age of 18 increased by 1 million.

A government program -- Social Security -- has been the main reason for reduced poverty among the elderly. But a lot of folks besides Charles Murray have noticed that other anti- poverty programs haven't worked as well. The Los Angeles Times poll found that a majority of both the poor and the non- poor believe that government anti-poverty programs have "seldom" worked.

When the Census Bureau released its figures, President Reagan responded predictably enough, saying that the fall demonstrated that "the greatest enemy of poverty is the free enterprise system." That's true, but not all of the truth.

The fast-moving, fast-changing U.S. economy and society generate new opportunities every year, but also seem to discard a certain number of people who are able and willing to work. The poverty statistics for the last decade demonstrate that just about as quickly as one person climbs out of poverty, another falls in.

Obviously, the government should promote economic growth and opportunity, but how best to do that is a separate and controversial topic. The 1985 poverty level will probably decline again, as previously poor people who got jobs during the 1984 boom earn money during a full year. But this year's flat economy won't provide many opportunities for the more than 30 million people currently below the poverty line.

How should society treat those who have "one or two bad years?" Since the late 1970s, the trend has been to freeze or cut back federal assistance, usually to reduce "fraud and abuse" or to maintain only a "safety net" for the "truly needy," even as the poverty rate increased.

Of course, all programs should be run with as little fraud as possible. But for the elderly, for children, for mothers with young children and for the disabled, cutbacks to provide a work incentive make no sense. The elderly will not become young, children will not age enough to work, the disabled will not be magically healed because the government cuts off support payments.

Cutbacks that hit the able-bodied poor make little sense either. The "safety net" is a good analogy, although often misused. People will fall into and climb out of poverty in our capitalist society, but government assistance programs determine how hard that fall will be, for the worker and dependents. Programs like food stamps, school lunches and Medicaid can reduce hunger and improve health, even if they do not "solve" poverty.

This evidence argues that in its attempts to ease the harshness of poverty and hasten the transition of the poor out of poverty, there is little reason to worry that government assistance will trap the poor into lives of dependency. By their own efforts, the poor are demonstrating that even fairly short-term poverty softened by government assistance is a plight they are more than anxious to escape.

<< Back to 1985 menu