This country has always assumed, either openly or just beneath the surface, that people are poor because they are worthless and worthless because they are poor. But at no time in the last 50 years has this assumption been as blatantly and popularly expressed as it is now in the Reagan budget.
Our preparation for this month's issue on the budget and the poor has been very depressing work. It is hard to look at page after page of numbers and know that each figure represents a hungry child, a homeless family, or the death of a young person's hope. But it is harder still to realize how easily the Reagan plan has been accepted by the American people. Poor people have very few allies and even fewer friends in this country today. It has never been more important that Christians heed their biblical mandate to make the cause of the poor their own.
In light of our Christian responsibility toward the poor we wanted this issue of our magazine not only to inform and analyze but to include some suggestions of political responses Christians can make to the Reagan budget. We have done some of that, but frankly it was hard to get excited about it. In the present environment the best political efforts likely won't work, and even if they do, they will only keep a very bad situation from getting too much worse.
Some people think that possibly the Reagan plan will create such economic chaos in the next few years that people will be ready to accept a program of radical change. But any possible radical alternatives are in an embryonic stage at best. More probably, the failure of Reagan's economics will only pave the way for something worse. Standing with the poor is going to be a very unpopular position in the days ahead.
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