Cease-Fire on Poverty

THERE are some words you've probably heard enough of during this Presidential campaign: prison furloughs, the Pledge, no taxes, good jobs at good wages, putting the fiscal house in order.

There is one word you may not have heard at all: poverty.

Two weeks ago, Assistant Professor of Economics Lawrence Lindsay, an adviser to Vice President George Bush and Robert Kuttner, a pro-Michael S. Dukakis columnist, debated the future economic course of this country at the Kennedy School. They talked a lot about the trade debt, the budget deficit and the impact of proposed programs on the rich and middle class.

Neither Lindsay nor Kuttner mentioned the poor. That meant blantantly ignoring the existence of almost one-sixth of the population. Lindsay, enraptured in his joyous account of the past eight years, even went as far as declaring, "It is impossible to find a major group in the population that has not gained."

That is wrong. A large segment of the population lost ground economically during the Reagan years--the poor. According to the 1988 United States Statistical Abstract, from 1981 to 1987 the number of Americans living in poverty increased by 3 million. The percentage of the population living in poverty also rose, as did the percentage of impoverished American children. More than one of every five American children (and two of every five Black children) currently live below the poverty level.

Lindsay didn't clarify his erroneous statement, and Kuttner didn't make any effort to correct him. Kuttner repeatedly said that Democratic proposals were geared to the "working man and woman" or "the middle class." Not even the Democratic representative chose to address the problems of the poor.

At one point this mutual omission became all too obvious. Lindsay trumpeted the fact that the median family income in the United States has risen by $200 over the last eight years. Kuttner responded that while the richest 30 percent of the population did gain, the bottom 70 percent lost.

Both men were right, but neither tried to reconcile the two seemingly contradictory statistics. While the 50th percentile of the population (the median) may have gained slightly, the bottom 20 or 30 percent lost so much that they dragged the bottom 70 percent down. Poverty reconciled the statistics, but it went unmentioned.

DUKAKIS and Bush would have been proud of their representatives. After all, neither candidate has cared to address the seriousness of poverty or propose explicit solutions. Dukakis has certainly gotten closer than Bush; he'll speak of "people without health insurance" or "people without housing." But neither can utter the word "poor" in the context of improving basic social policy.

Twenty-five years ago, President Lyndon Johnson unveiled his War on Poverty. According to his rhetoric, there would be no more hunger, homelessness or destitution anywhere in America. The poor were Americans just like everyone else, except they weren't sharing in the American dream. It was vogue to talk about the poor; poverty was seen as the evil, but the "poor" were not.

Now, the connotations of the terms are reversed. The poor are viewed as lazy; President Reagan reinforced that image when, holding the Washington Post want ads, he asked how anyone could not have a job with all those openings. Presidential candidates and other politicians desperately try to avoid the appearance of defending the poor, presumably for fear of losing their elections. Defending the poor is now tantamount to defending the stereotypical welfare cheat.

Paul Pierson, instructor in Government, believes one reason for the reversal in attitude is the shift in swing voters over the last 25 years. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson believed he needed the Black vote in order to win re-election. His War on Poverty represented, at least in part, an attempt to appeal to this crucial constituency.

Today, Blacks are firm supporters of the Democratic party. So are most poor Americans. The crucial swing vote now comes from the Reagan Democrats. This group dictates the terms of the policy debate; this group also refuses to listen to any discussion of poverty.

In 1985, the Analysis Group, a Democratic polling organization, interviewed a number of typical Reagan Democrats, blue-collar workers living in the suburbs of Detroit. For these people, the term "poverty" had strict racial connotations, and attempts to alleviate poverty were interpreted as taking money from their pockets to support Blacks.

In the book Reagan's Legacy, Stanley Greenberg, head of the Analysis Group, was quoted as saying, "The race question has been deeply assimilated, as it defines attitudes toward their neighborhood, Detroit, the Democratic Party, Democratic themes and the government. These Democratic defectors believe government has personally intevened to block their opportunities. Appeals to fairness, opportunity, etc. are now defined in racial terms that have been stripped of any progressive content."

A major challenge for social policy in the next decade will be to decouple the images of poverty and Blacks, so that politicians who propose progressive changes in social policy aren't defeated by racist hysteria. The facts must be emphasized: twice as many whites are poor as Blacks, and more whites receive Assistance to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits, what is commonly known as "welfare."

The broader challenge will be to convince voters that giving to the poor doesn't mean robbing the middle class; in fact, easing poverty contributes to the strength of a society. Alexis de Toqueville wrote that the community's interest is really just "self-interest properly understood." Americans must come to realize that is ultimately in their own interest to make society more equitable.