The Tribune 06.09.05

On college campuses across the nation, graduating classes of 2005 heard distinguished commence­ment speakers address a litany of topics to inspire and motivate the younger generation. The commence­ment speech at William & Mary Law School, delivered by former U.S. Senator and vice presidential candidate John Edwards, reminded me of another speech by President Lyndon Johnson over 40 years ago that focused my generation on a problem that plagues America, a problem that has yet to be solved. It saps our national strength and harms generations of children. It persists, yet has a changing face. It is the problem of poverty in America.

President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 declared an “unconditional War on Poverty” and entreated my generation to “not rest until this war is won.” Forty years later, Edwards called on today’s graduates to put poverty back on the national agenda.

Johnson’s arsenal of programs in his War on Poverty included Head Start, Food Stamps, Medi­care, Medicaid, Job Corps, Federal College Loans, Work Study, Community Action Agencies and the American Service Corps, all designed to give people a “hand-up rather than a handout” through job training, education, and job opportunity. The harvest of jobs from his administration reduced the poverty rate from 22% in 1959 to 11% in 1973.

Today, over 36 million Americans live below the federal poverty line, most of them in families with income from one or more full time jobs. These are the working poor. For millions of Americans, work and poverty go hand in hand. Today’s poor are working full time but are unable to provide the basic necessities for their families. Yet, there is no national agenda to help them. No president calling for war on poverty or congress raising the minimum wage. No guarantees of health care or child care for working parents. Instead, we have a Congress that has declared war on the poor by passing a federal budget that shrinks or shuts down anti-poverty programs and deepens the federal deficit to the point that Social Security and Medicare will eventually lose their vitality.

We have just scratched the surface in our under­standing of poverty in America. Even the statistics grossly underreport the numbers of poor.

The federal poverty index, devised in the mid 1960’s, takes the cost of a minimum healthy food budget and multiplies it by three, on the assumption that food expenditures represent about a third of a family budget. But a national project supported by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Normal Foundation, paints a truer picture. In my next article, I will compare the federal guidelines used to determine the number of poor people in America with the actual, documented costs of supporting a family. The results will unsettle and anger any member of our community who believes that America is (or should be) the land of equal opportunity and social justice