[Mb-civic] Storm warning - Robert Kuttner - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Storm warning

By Robert Kuttner  |  September 17, 2005

ONE THING we learned from Hurricane Katrina is that America still has a 
lot of poor people, who are disproportionately black, and mostly 
invisible to the affluent and to the media. Behind the glitzy stage set 
of the quaint New Orleans tourist economy was a grindingly poor city.

Most poor people work for a living, just like most middle class people 
do. They are the people who the Rev. Jesse Jackson famously said ''take 
the early bus," and take care of other people's young children and aging 
parents, sometimes at cost to their own families.

In this decade, the working poor have not done well. The Labor 
Department reports that wages of nonmanagement workers have lagged 
behind inflation, and low-income workers in particular.

President Bush, on the defensive, has announced a new program of 
rebuilding. It's a reminder that circumstances sometimes require even 
conservatives to recognize the indispensibility of government. But look 
a little deeper. Bush's approach doesn't really address the poverty we 
have witnessed.

While many students of poverty in America blame depressed incomes on low 
wages, unaffordable health insurance, inadequate childcare, and the lack 
of opportunities for good jobs that stay put, leading conservative 
intellectuals blame poverty on character defects.

This is an argument as old as the English Poor Law of 1601. If only the 
poor were more provident, they would scrimp, save, and join the middle 
class. In this view, social programs are just handouts that spoil the poor.

Bush, interestingly, doesn't reject all social programs. One of his 
major social programs, intended to remedy ''character defects," is a 
program that puts the federal government squarely in the business of 
promoting marriage.

Another key tenet in the Bush version of a war on poverty is the idea 
that churches and private charity can serve social needs more 
effectively than government.

A third is that the poor can help themselves if only the government 
better promotes entrepreneurship.

Each of these premises is a half-truth at best.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/17/storm_warning/
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