Assault On The Poor

It is never easy to be poor. The history of poor people in this country has been one long fight for even the smallest alleviation of hardship. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the uprisings of labor unions and unemployed people's organizations finally became enough of a threat to the capitalist system to make Franklin Roosevelt realize that saving the system necessitated reforms. The result was legislation establishing a minimum wage, Social Security, unemployment insurance, relief payments for those unable to work, and guaranteeing the right to form unions.

Similarly, the black civil rights movement and related poor people's movements of the 1960s forced Lyndon Johnson to institute his Great Society programs, including food stamps, legal services, Head Start, free school lunches, and a variety of others that were supposed to give low-income people the tools to help themselves.

Now Ronald Reagan has declared "A New Beginning for America," and all the small gains that poor people have organized, lobbied, marched, gone to jail, and even died for in this century are under attack. The Reagan budget for 1982 is not a well-meaning attempt to cut back government waste in order to get the economy back on its feet. It is a coldly calculated offensive aimed at wiping out the notion that people have a basic human right to a minimally decent standard of living. It is an ideologically motivated and premeditated assault on the poor.

Reagan and his aides have perceived correctly that a stagnant economy, snowballing inflation, and a string of international humiliations have put the U.S. into what Jimmy Carter called a "malaise." Reagan also sees that people are worried about their future, and he is betting that the relatively comfortable majority is worried enough to be willing to abandon the poor once and for all, and that the poor minority is fractionized and demoralized enough to be unable to defend itself. The Reagan administration has also perceived, again correctly, that most people are tired of hearing that our problems are complex and intractable, that resources are diminishing, and that there are no easy answers. So he has given the U. S. a plan, a comprehensive package of easy answers.

The plan is to redistribute income from lower income working people to rich people and big business through tax cuts and to redirect federal spending from the poorest people in the U.S. to an already bloated military establishment.

Of course Reagan administration officials deny that this will be the effect of their economic package. They claim that it is designed to curtail inflation, increase productivity, and put people to work. But in fact it will do none of those things.

Everyone agrees that inflation is out of control. The post-election polls last year showed that Ronald Reagan was elected as a result of people's conviction that something, perhaps anything, should be done about inflation. But to do something about a problem you must have some idea of its cause. Reagan accepts the classical economic assumption that inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods. By cutting government spending, the Reagan people hope to reduce the amount of money chasing around, and by giving money back to rich people and big business in the form of tax breaks they hope to encourage productive investments that will increase the amount of goods available. They claim that the poor, who are losing out in the spending cuts, will more than recover their losses when all those new investments create a bonanza of new jobs.

When it is summarized quickly enough by as skilled and ingratiating a performer as the president, this plan can begin to sound almost reasonable. But it is essentially a gamble, with the lives of poor people as the ante. We owe it to those people to look below the surface of this plan.

Reagan's assumptions about what causes inflation have slight basis in reality. Most economists agree that the real impact of federal spending on the inflation rate is marginal. The best estimate is that a $20 billion reduction in federal spending would result in a .3 per cent decrease in the rate of inflation. This is hardly enough to justify the massive cuts that are being made, particularly when you consider that Reagan is cutting social programs, the least inflationary, most productive kind of government spending, and wildly increasing military spending, which is the least productive, least job-producing, and most inflationary.

Government funds spent on poor people go directly into purchasing the necessities of life: food, clothing, shelter--thus subsidizing production and employment in those basic industries. Government funds spent on the military result in a few highly skilled jobs in capital-intensive, high-technology industries, but no useful production. Military spending results in products that nobody wants to buy and that we hope will never be used.

Since the beginning of his political career in California, Ronald Reagan has extolled the virtues of balanced budgets. He still claims that a balanced federal budget is his goal. But his program will not accomplish that goal either, despite the wholesale slashing of social services. The money that is being cut is so far outweighed by the military increase and the tax cuts that in fact Reagan's plan will increase the budget deficit by about $10 billion.

His plan to increase productivity and employment will not work either. The tax breaks for business will reduce by at least $65 billion the amount of taxes paid by corporations in the next five years; and 30 per cent of the benefit from his income tax cut will be going to the less than four per cent, of the taxpayers who earn more than $50,000 per year. Without some form of public control over investments, there is no reason to believe that corporations and wealthy individuals will use their tax-break largesse any more productively than they are now using their substantial cash reserves.

Rich individuals will simply have more money to invest in precious metals, rare coins, real estate, and other nonproductive speculation, and corporations will have more money to invest in overseas plants, capital-intensive service industries, and buying up smaller companies, none of which will do anything to create more jobs or increase basic production. All that Reagan's plan to unleash big business will likely produce is more inflation, more unemployment, more abandoned cities in the Northeast and Midwest, coupled with more destruction of the environment and more workplace injuries and diseases as a result of the easing of pollution and worker-safety regulations.

If the "New Beginning" is not going to put all the poor and unemployed people to work, then what is going to become of them? Reagan claims that in his budget-cutting he is leaving untouched seven programs that will insure the survival, if not the comfort, of the people he calls "the truly needy." This "social safety net" is the big lie of a proposal rife with deceptions. Even some people in the White House admit that the safety net doesn't really exist. The seven "safety net" programs are: 1) Social Security retirement benefits, 2) Medicare, 3) veterans' compensation, 4) Supplemental Security Income (SSI), 5) free school lunches, 6) Head Start, and 7) summer jobs for youth.

Nearly one-quarter of the people with incomes below the official poverty line receive no benefits from any of these seven programs. Another 37 per cent benefit only from the free school lunch plan. Three of the seven programs (Social Security, Medicare, and veterans' compensation) are not allocated on the basis of need but to whole categories of people (veterans and people over 65), regardless of economic status. Interestingly enough, veterans and the elderly are the only two groups of social service recipients who vote in large numbers, a fact that is not lost on Republican devisers of safety nets.

The summer jobs for youth program is often cynically referred to as "riot insurance." It is being kept intact in hopes of containing some of the rage of poor and minority youth that the other cuts are sure to heighten. The benefit of free school lunches will be sharply eroded if Congress passes Reagan's plan to deduct the cost of the lunches from a family's food stamp allocation.

SSI and Head Start are genuine safety net programs. But worthy as they are, they only serve a narrow segment of the truly needy population--the disabled in the case of SSI and low-income preschool children in the case of Head Start.

The truth is that as a result of the cuts in real social safety net programs (food stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, CETA jobs, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance), at least eight million families (about 20 million people) with incomes below the official poverty line will lose income.

So the Reagan plan will not stop inflation, balance the budget, increase productivity or employment, and the "social safety net" turns out to be, at best, a Republican political safety net. What the Reagan plan will do, however, is inflict great pain and hardship on the people in this country who already suffer the most. The following are just a few of the most cruel examples.

The Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) will be cut by 30 per cent. WIC provides food commodities to pregnant women, new mothers, infants, and children under 5 years old who are considered to be low income and nutritionally at risk. The aim of the program is to reduce the number of infant deaths and defects due to low birth weight and malnutrition. A Massachusetts study of 12,000 WIC participants showed a 30 per cent reduction in infant deaths when compared to a similar, low-income non-WIC population. The WIC program saves the lives of small children at a cost less than one-third the cost of future hospital care for children who would otherwise be born underweight and sick. Children will die as a result of the WIC cutbacks.

Food stamps are the single most important lifeline for low-income people in the U.S. The Reagan budget will eliminate food stamp benefits for about one million people and reduce the benefits of about 20 million others. This will mean an average cut of about $12 a month for each child in a family. If Congress passes Reagan's plan to cut food stamps for families with children who get free school lunches, a welfare family with three children could lose $300 to $350 a year in food stamps.

The food stamp cuts will result in hunger for the truly needy at the same time that the reduction or removal of benefits for people just above the poverty line will swell the ranks of the newly needy.

When people talk about welfare they usually mean AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children). AFDC provides a monthly income maintenance check to families whose head is unable to work or can't earn enough to support the family. As the name implies, 70 per cent of AFDC beneficiaries are children.

State governments set the payment levels and many of the regulations for AFDC, with the federal government matching the amount the state decides to spend. Payments are pathetically inadequate, and the conditions required by most states are woefully destructive of poor people's family life, morale, and dignity. For example, most states will pay no money to a family whose father lives at home, no matter how great the need. AFDC is the welfare mess that politicians used to promise they would clean up. Reagan is cutting the AFDC budget without making any effort to reform its operation. His cuts will not even touch the program's notorious concentric circles of red tape. The cuts are coming directly out of the benefits of some of the nation's poorest people.

Ironically, one of the major cuts in AFDC benefits will come from decreasing the work incentives that are built into the program. AFDC "disregards" a certain amount of earned income in order to insure that a recipient will not lose money by working at a low-paying job. The new cut will drop about 200,000 working poor families from the rolls and will remove the incentive to work for many of those who remain.

Housing is rapidly becoming unavailable to low-income people on the commercial market. Land speculation, condominium conversions, and gentrification are quickly diminishing the supply of low-cost rental housing. More and more often public housing is not just the last resort but the only option for poor people, and there is not nearly enough public housing to meet the need. Without a major government commitment to housing as a basic human right, the years ahead will see an epidemic of homelessness.

Reagan plans to reduce by 85,000 the number of new units of low-income housing to be built in 1982. The number of units of low-income housing called for in Reagan's 1982 budget is less than half the number of low-rent units lost to conversions, abandonment, and inflation each year. At the same time, the 1982 budget reduces by 40 per cent the allocation for repair of old and decaying public housing.

In addition to reducing the number of low-income units available, Reagan plans to shift some of the burden of paying for them from the government to the tenants. At present residents of federally subsidized low-income housing pay 25 per cent of their income in rent, and the government makes up the rest of the cost of the unit. Reagan is increasing the payment to 30 per cent. A five per cent rent increase would be manageable if it wasn't dealt out to people who are already living at a subsistence level. A study done at the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts showed that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics minimum family budget, a family of four with an annual income of $7,500 (1976 dollars) could not afford to spend one penny on housing. Under the Reagan rent hike, public housing tenants will have to pay an additional $6 billion in the next five years.

The best camouflaged damage to poor people in the Reagan budget is hidden under the rubric of block grants. Reagan's proposal is to roll dozens of social services programs into one big pile of money, slash 25 per cent off the top, and hand the remainder to state governments with few if any conditions or requirements on how the money will be spent.

The sinister effects of block granting can be seen most clearly in the case of education. First the 25 per cent dollar cut will wreak havoc on many already badly strapped school systems, but probably even more dangerous is the loss of accountability. Most of the gains toward equal educational opportunity for black, Spanish-speaking, learning-disabled, and handicapped children have come through conditions set on federal education funds.

Voters all over the country are becoming increasingly reluctant to pay the necessary local taxes to maintain public schools. With the influx of no-strings block grant money, it will probably prove politically irresistible for local school boards to avoid raising taxes by using the federal money to maintain their basic educational programs for "normal" students while ignoring the needs of powerless handicapped and disadvantaged children.

The plight of public schools will be worsened even further if Congress passes an administration-backed bill to allow a tax credit for half the cost of private school tuition up to $500. This would not be a deduction from taxable income but would be subtracted directly from taxes actually owed. Tuition tax credits will further deplete the middle-class constituency for public education, leaving the public schools abandoned to the poor and the minorities who can be ignored with political impunity. It would also have the long-term effect of further segregating and stratifying our society along race and class lines by undermining the only institution where some measure of social democracy has existed.

When the House of Representatives was debating the first budget resolution setting the spending targets for 1982, one of the sponsors of the Reagan plan said repeatedly that the Reagan budget "fires real bullets" at government waste, to which another representative replied, "When they hit some of these programs they are going to kill people." The words are not an exaggeration. The Reagan budget cuts will drastically increase the number of people who are poor, hungry, sick, ill-housed or homeless, uneducated, and without hope.

The other side of the suffering inflicted by the assault on the poor is the spiritual toll it will exact on the conscience of a nation that allows inhumanity to become a day-in day-out matter of official policy, not just toward the poor of El Salvador or South Africa, but toward people who live just across the tracks. The fact that Reagan has presented such a cruel program is only a mild surprise. The fact that it is being accepted so easily by the American people and their elected representatives is much more disturbing.

Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman, have done a brilliant job of dressing up their assault in a set of apparently rational and benevolent political assumptions that can allow people to inflict suffering while truly believing that their actions are harmless and morally neutral. Their assumptions have, almost overnight, become truisms in the moral vacuum of U.S. politics.

One assumption that is almost carved in marble in official Washington today is that Lyndon Johnson's Great Society (and its parent, the New Deal) has failed, and that it failed because there is something inherently wrong, or worse yet, inefficient, about the federal government acting to achieve humanitarian goals.

The Great Society commitments to a more just society can hardly be said to have failed when they were, from the very beginning, implemented in a begrudging and piecemeal fashion. Its programs have never been adequately funded, and despite almost 50 years of Democratic rhetoric, no administration has made the kind of genuine commitment to full employment that would be a necessary first step for a less bad society, much less a great one.

But if the Great Society can be said to have failed it is because, just as surely as you cannot serve God and Mammon, you cannot have a just and humane domestic policy and an oppressive, interventionist foreign policy at the same time. Lyndon Johnson tried his best to do both and as a result our country killed literally millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of our own people, crushed the raised expectations of the poor at home, lost the war, and began the process of wrecking the economy.

Reagan may not admit it, but he has obviously learned this lesson of history, for he is unashamedly ready to make the poor pay for his military buildup, which during the next four years will be three times bigger than the one during the peak years of the Vietnam War. Interestingly, the $26 billion military increase for 1982 matches almost exactly the amount being taken away from social programs.

Reagan and Stockman have very effectively used the healthy urge many people are feeling toward decentralization to sell their economic policies. They say that needs are better met at the state and local level and that big government should get off the backs of the people so they can do things for themselves at the grassroots. It is not surprising that people have responded positively to Reagan's occasional use of decentralist language, because there is more than a grain of truth in it.

But the bad use of a good idea may be even worse than a bad idea, and the Reagan administration's practice shows that its commitment to decentralism is purely rhetorical. While the "dole" programs, AFDC, food stamps, etc., are being kept alive, albeit at tragically reduced levels, several much less expensive programs that try to empower people to help themselves are scheduled to be eliminated. Among these are federally funded legal services, VISTA, neighborhood self-help grants, and the National Consumer Cooperative Bank. The direction of the cuts makes it clear that the last thing Reagan wants to see is poor people taking the initiative and acting on their own behalf.

The Reagan administration has further disguised its assault on the poor through what could be called an appeal to volunteerism. It says that since the failure of the Great Society shows that government cannot and should not intervene on behalf of low-income people, the needs of the poor should be met by the generosity of private citizens through charitable organizations and churches.

Again this is a dangerously bad use of what is, at least on paper, a good idea. This line of thinking has a special allure for Christians because it appeals to our clear biblical mandate to share our excess goods with the poor. But there are two major dangers inherent in this call for personal generosity.

First, this approach ignores the structural and systemic causes of poverty. People are not poor solely because the rich happen to be stingy people. The gross inequalities of wealth and poverty in the U.S. are the natural result of a social, political, and economic system that places the maximization of private profit above all other social goals. The human, social, cultural, and spiritual benefits that would result from a more just distribution of wealth and power will never show up on the all-important quarterly profit and loss statement. In fact this system contributes to to the lack of personal generosity in our society. It's hard to expect people to give of their own resources to meet the needs of poor people when the schools, the work process, and the relentless cry of advertising are encouraging them every day of their lives to be greedy, competitive, and conspicuously consumptive.

The other danger of the volunteerist approach is more immediate and direct. To say that the needs of the poor should be met by private charity is to say that the basic necessities for a decent life are not a God-given right of each person. This approach would say that poor people cannot demand their rights, they must (politely) ask for charity. It says in effect that we as a society have no social obligation to keep people from starving. This is the ideological driving wheel of the Reagan plan.

As Christians we are inheritors of the tradition of the law and the prophets that identified the worship of God with the just distribution of wealth. We profess as Lord a man who was poor himself, who proclaimed a kingdom where the rich and powerful would be cast down and the poor would hear the good news of liberation. He even said that whatever we did to poor, hungry, homeless, and imprisoned people we did to God's own son.

President Reagan's economic plan presents us with a bizarre mirror image of the kingdom of God. He envisions a society where the rich become richer, the poor are plunged deeper into misery and oppression, and plowshares are turned into swords. Christians must find ways to join with the poor in raising our voices against this plan and the assumptions behind it. Since the Reagan assault is a comprehensive one, there is no one thing that can be done to oppose it. A faithful Christian response will need to proceed on several levels.

First, we should fight the cutbacks. While many federal anti-poverty programs are demeaning of the poor and few if any get at the real causes of poverty, the fact remains that they are all there is for millions of people in this country. The immediate human suffering that the cutbacks will cause is more important than any theories about how that suffering could best be eliminated in the long run.

The outlook in Congress is bleak. Reagan has, in six months, succeeded in creating a new status quo with its own inert momentum, and the pressure to rubber-stamp his program is enormous. Both houses of Congress have already passed, by overwhelming margins, a budget resolution setting overall spending targets for 1982 that in effect gives Reagan everything he wants. Throughout the summer, congressional committees will be deciding which specific programs to cut by how much in order to meet the spending targets. The suffering that this budget will inflict needs to be brought into the congressional debate. Congress needs to hear from Christian people in letters, lobbying, and direct action.

If Reagan's block grant plan passes Congress, much of the action will shift to the state level. Many state governments are among the most corrupt and unresponsive institutions in our society. If they are given control over the housing, health care, child care, and education of the poor, Christians will need to begin the tedious process of learning what money is going where, joining with low-income people in defending the programs and organizations that are important to them. Churches could be particularly important at the local level in providing a place and an opportunity for low-income people's voices to be heard.

In addition to defending the government programs that are necessary for survival, Christians need to recognize their personal responsibility for meeting the needs of poor people. Catholic Worker co-founder Peter Maurin once wrote, "In our own day the poor are no longer fed, clothed and sheltered at a personal sacrifice, but at the expense of the taxpayers. And...the pagans say about the Christians 'See how they pass the buck.'" It is as wrong for us to lobby for government programs for the poor while failing to make room for them in our own lives as it is for us to ignore the systemic causes of misery and injustice.

But saving existing programs can only keep a bad situation from getting worse, and providing services to the poor can only meet immediate needs and holds the danger of paternalism. As the other Catholic Worker co-founder, Dorothy Day, said years ago, "Our problems stem from our acceptance of this dirty, rotten system."

The political options cannot continue to be only those symbolized by Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Christians must somehow join with others to find a way to turn this country away from a social order whose gods are economic growth, national security, and private profit and toward one which recognizes God's image in each person.

The problem is one of power. As long as people who are poor have no power to be heard they will continue to be exploited, abused, and ignored. We must begin, with low-income people themselves, to forge a new political option that can give them a voice, some leverage in the decisions that, affect their lives. Then perhaps we can begin to work for a society where a decent job, the necessities of life, and human dignity will be considered fundamental rights.

Danny Collum was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.