[Mb-civic] Discovering Poverty (Again) - Robert J. Samuelson - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Discovering Poverty (Again)

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, September 21, 2005; Page A23

We Americans are now supposedly discovering poverty for at least the 
fourth time since World War II. The first occurred in 1962, when Michael 
Harrington's classic "The Other America" appeared. To a nation generally 
dazzled by its newfound suburban prosperity, Harrington described the 
grim realities of West Virginia shanties and inner-city slums. Then 
there was Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty" and later what was often 
described, rightly or wrongly, as Ronald Reagan's war against the poor. 
Now Hurricane Katrina has purportedly raised America's consciousness 
once again.

The horrifying images -- mostly of black people stranded on rooftops or 
abandoned at the Superdome -- are forcing Americans to face the 
"enduring problems of poverty, race and class that have escaped their 
attention," said a Newsweek cover story. Columnist Thomas Oliphant of 
the Boston Globe, appearing on PBS, put it this way: "I think what 
happened almost spiritually in America over the last couple of weeks is 
that those scenes that we had to witness on television reawakened us to 
the enormity of poverty everywhere."

It's unclear whether most Americans are as oblivious to the problems of 
poverty, class and race as these journalistic pronouncements presume. 
But what is clear is that the leap from Katrina to broad generalizations 
about poverty involves considerable simplification.

One myth is that we haven't made any progress. Superficially, this seems 
believable. The government's poverty rate, released just as Katrina 
struck, was 12.7 percent in 2004. That's the proportion of people living 
beneath the official poverty line, about $19,300 for a family of four. 
The current poverty rate is up from its recent low (11.3 percent in 
2000) and similar to many earlier years (13 percent in 1980 and 12.6 
percent in 1970).

But the overall poverty rate is misleading. True, poverty has been stuck 
for non-Hispanic whites, though it's fairly low. Since the late 1970s, 
it's generally fluctuated between 8 percent and 9 percent, depending on 
the economy. But poverty among blacks -- though still appallingly high 
-- has declined sharply. In 2004 it was 24.7 percent, down from 33.1 
percent in 1993, though up from 22.5 percent in 2000. As recently as 
1983, it was 35.7 percent.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/20/AR2005092001412.html?nav=hcmodule
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