| THE
COMPLACENT assumption behind the tax cut we're now supposed to be enjoying
was that there's nothing left for government to do - no pressing social
problems or unmet human needs.
Welfare reform has
been declared a universal success, with more than 60 percent of former
recipients making their own way in the job market. The official poverty rate
has reached a comfortingly low 12 percent. So let the federal government, or
what's left of it, focus on Star Wars, was our president's happy thought: No
one needs the federal largesse more than the wealthy taxpayers who are
currently raking in their five-and six-figure rebates.
But a report issued on
July 24 by the Washington D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute should
puncture these presidential delusions. Entitled "Hardships in
America," it shows that 29 percent of families with young children do
not earn enough to live at any acceptable level of comfort and security.
The EPI researchers
got to this appallingly high number by calculating the basic - make that
very basic - budget a family needs to live on. This budget includes health
insurance, childcare costs and telephone, but no meals out, vacations,
movies, cigarettes, beer or other indulgences. So for nearly a third of
American families, things the more affluent take for granted - such as
Internet access, video rentals and occasional cab rides - are almost
impossible luxuries.
But they get by, don't
they? Not exactly. Of the families who earned less than the
"basic" budget, which amounts to $33,511 for a family of four,
over 70 percent worried about food, sometimes missed rent payments, and had
to rely on an emergency room for their medical care. Nearly 30 percent
reported facing far more dire hardships - having to miss meals, forgoing
needed medical care, being evicted from their housing.
In a selfish way, I'm
relieved by all this statistical bad news: At least it shows that the
conditions I faced while researching my recent book were not due entirely to
my own bad luck or incompetence. I spent a total of three months, in three
different cities, attempting to support myself on the wages I could earn as
an entry-level worker - as a waitress, a hotel housekeeper, a maid with a
housecleaning service, a nursing-home aide and a Wal-Mart floor clerk. I
could not make ends meet, not with one job anyway. I averaged $7 an hour, an
amount that fell tragically short of my bare-bones expenses - gas, food and,
above all, rent.
My co-workers had
various strategies for coping. Many of them, of course, shared expenses with
another breadwinner - a husband, boyfriend or grown child.
A surprisingly high
number worked more than one job - typically an 8-hour shift followed by a
6-hour one - an arrangement that is utterly destructive to family life as
well as health and stamina.
Most skipped the
company's health insurance, simply because they couldn't afford to pay the
employee contribution, which was often more than $100 a month. Possibly some
of them received government help in the form of Food Stamps or the Earned
Income Tax Credit, although I never once heard these programs mentioned.
But some of my
co-workers were clearly not coping. I worked alongside people who turned out
to be homeless, although in the peculiar hierarchy of poverty, they didn't
consider themselves homeless as long as they had a van or a car to sleep in.
Others were not getting enough to eat, and not, as I first imagined, because
they were dieting. Lunch, in low-wage America, can mean a small-size bag of
Doritos or a few hot-dog rolls.
What my experience
shows anecdotally, and the EPI's "Hardships in America" report
shows far more systematically, is that we've been fooling ourselves with the
official poverty level, now pegged at $17,463 for a family of four.
That number is still
calculated by the archaic method of taking the bare-bones cost of food for a
family of a given size and multiplying this number by three. Yet food is
relatively inflation-proof, at least compared to housing costs: Rents,
especially, have gone through the roof. I found a half-size trailer renting
for $625 a month, a room in a genuinely creepy residential motel for $250 a
week. But the government persists in believing that low rents are available
for the poor.
Our leaders are unable
to see the true extent of economic misery in America. They're used to
thinking of poverty as a consequence of unemployment.
Hence, for example,
the optimistic assumption that welfare recipients would be lifted out of
poverty once they were hustled into the workforce. But the relatively
high-paying, unionized blue-collar jobs that brought an earlier generation
into the middle class have been de-industrialized out of existence.
What's left are the
service and retail jobs I found in my foray into the workforce - and a new
world of relentless toil, rewarded by poverty-level wages.
If the consequences of
this economic shift are almost invisible from Pennsylvania Avenue, they are
painfully evident to hard-pressed charities.
According to the
hunger-relief organization America's Second Harvest, food banks all over the
country are seeing "a torrent of need which [they] cannot meet,"
and the U.S. Conference of Mayors reports that 67 percent of the adults
requesting emergency food aid are now working people with jobs.
Almost everyone - 94
percent of Americans, according to a 2000 poll conducted by Jobs for the
Future, a Boston-based employment research firm - agrees that "people
who work full-time should be able to earn enough to keep their families out
of poverty." When that proposition no longer holds true, then the
social contract, at least as I always understood it, is no longer in force.
And it is hard to imagine a more serious abrogation of "America's core
moral values" than that.
We have a choice:
Either raise all wages to a "living wage" level or greatly expand
the government programs that make life a little easier for low-wage families
- food stamps, health insurance, childcare subsidies, the Earned Income Tax
Credit, and - yes - welfare for families whose breadwinners must stay home
as care-givers for the very young, the elderly or the chronically ill.
Ideally, we should do both. At 4.5 percent unemployment, most Americans who
can work have jobs. Now, it's the system that isn't working.
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