The poor this Christmas:

...No state in the continental U.S...

...eligibility for help is down...

...Together with the growing lines at soup kitchens and emergency food pantries, they are a kind of early warning system that some-thing in our society is going very badly wrong...

...Oil-rich Texas provides a mother and two children with $ 118 a month to t all of their expenses...

...And there were signs of a healthy body politic: extremism was generally rejected...

...Between 1980 and 1981 alone, there was a 7.5 percent increase in the.number of people found in households with incomes below the official government "poverty line...

...Millions of people - denied an opportunity to sup-port themselves and their families, denied a means of shelter-ing and warming and feeding their families - feel written off, abandoned by those of us who are seen as having some voice in the decisions being made...

...Fourteen states provide a combination of and food stamps that only brings poor people two-thirds i way to the poverty line...

...For as terrible as the anecdotal horror stories and the dread-ful numbers is a subtler, far less tangible consequence worth thinking about...

...And judged by actions in the last two years, Con-gress and the president have decided that more poor people will go without help...

...Despite the growing poverty ranks, fewer people qualify for any kind of government assis-tance . A rising poverty population may be explained by gener-ally bad economic conditions, but whether and who gets help is a direct function of decisions made by Congress and the president...

...They are among the growing number of families so desperate that they are asking family service agencies and welfare offices to place their children temporarily in foster care - because they have no means of taking care of them...

...Looking ahead to 1983, three facts are critical: poverty is up...

...For i growing ranks of the poor, that means less help when needed...

...Alarm bells should be going off in all the churches and living rooms of people who profess to care, alarm bells set off by the real and growing signs of crisis and despair...

...bi families up to the poverty line even when food-stamp ber are included...

...As a direct result of policies urged by the president and accepted by the Congress, some help is just no longer available: 700,000 children lost their eligibility for Medicaid...

...So, for a start, roughly 17 million of the poor get no cash aid at all...

...That assumes that two times the cost of an emergency diet will pay the rent and gas and other basic living expenses...

...Both are found disproportionately among the ranks of the poor, and for both the problem of poverty is growing...

...They may qualify for food stamps, but food stamps can't be used to pay for rent or heat or medicine or even basic things like soap and toilet paper...

...Too young for social security, not "vested" in any kind of pension plan, not dis-abled, and not eligible for welfare, they soon exhaust any savings and find themselves, ashamed and terrified, wonder-ing how they will survive until reduced social security benefits become available at age 62...

...The rate at which people find themselves living in poverty is higher than it has been since 1967, and the number in poor households is higher now than it has been since 1965...

...Limitations on the help available ar also a function of deliberate choices urged by the president an adopted by the Congress...

...Qualifying for help doesn' take poor people very far...

...But between searching for the box of ornaments that you know you put in a safe place (and so can't find), and changing your mind (again) about how much food you need to have on hand, there are some other thoughts deserving your attention The basic facts about the election are true, and useful to keep in mind...

...They understand that they must be involved in matters of military spending and tax reform if the national budget is to continue to reflect a concern for social justice...

...More commonly, thanks to inflation and increases, welfare checks erode in value...

...about 10 million do not even get food stamps...

...Thirty-two million Americans live in poverty, and another nearly 12 million have incomes just marginally above the poverty line...

...One holiday gift is within our power to grant: a new resolve to flex our rediscovered political muscles on behalf of a fairer budget process that moves the debate to where the money is - a bloated military and a tax system that redistributes income to the rich - and away from more reduc-tions in the roughly nine percent of the federal budget that contains some help for people who are poor.et that contains some help for people who are poor...

...People with incomes above those amounts are not poor enough to be counted in the official statistics, and not poor enough to qualify for any benefits that are limited to the officially poor...

...There is a social dynamic to what is going on, a social dynamic made up of reversing the earlier gains of sex and age and racial equality, a social dynamic that follows when large numbers of people see themselves and their neighbors and relatives cut off from any reasonable possibility of decent survival...

...Just 13 percent of the white elderly are poor, compared with nearly 40 percent of the black elderly...

...voters reflected concern for international matters (e.g...

...Long-term unemployed workers in twenty-seven states no longer get unemployment benefits...

...That works out to a maximum of 700 per person per meal for people with absolutely no other income...

...GIVEN THE FACTS, it is no wonder that the lines in emergency food outlets grow with every passing week, that more and more families depend on soup kitchens to feed their children, that the infant mortality rate is going up in states like Michigan, and that fear and anxiety are high and rising fast in recession-stricken neighborhoods all over America...

...We may not be able to control the state of the economy, but we and our elected representatives in Congress can and do control whether people in crisis will eat, whether the recession will continue to leave one-fifth of the nation "ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed...

...about 1 million people lost eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children...

...All across the country people are responding to the fact that poverty and hunger are large and growing problems once again, and to the realization that private char-ity, however fine, is not enough...

...Unemployed workers who must depend on food stamps get a federal guarantee of hunger...

...About 900,000 people lost eligibility for Food Stamps...

...Another specially ineligible population are adults who hap-pen not to be disabled or poor and who happen not to have any children...

...But, as they quickly learn, "ain't no-body hiring a 60-year-old man in the middle of a recession...

...They turn up in the statistics as "employable adults...

...old voting patterns had re-emerged...

...and the candidates that spent the most money did not necessarily win...

...A minority child growing up in a household with more than two children has a fifty-fifty chance (or better) of growing up poor...

...five in the Senate...

...But where poor people and the programs they depend on are concerned, a different set of facts is equally or more important...

...Roughly' percent of last year's budget cuts and 20 percent of this yea came from programs that poor people depend upon...

...They fall between virtually all the cracks...

...They are paying a price for budget cuts taken disproportion-ately from programs that poor people depend on, and for them the price is meted out in vital statistics with curve lines going in the wrong direction...

...All in all, by mid-November there was a sense of new begin-nings in the air that seemed particularly appropriate for holiday times...

...And even these figures are a bit deceptive because large portions of the officially poor have incomes substantially below the poverty line, and many have little or no cash income at all...

...For poor people, the view at the other end of the Christmas candles and the holiday songs is sobering...

...They can be found in growing numbers in soup kitchens and emergency shelters, men and women who've worked all their lives in factories or day labor jobs and now, aged 55, or 58, or bu, arc victims of the recession and of welfare eligibility rules estab-lished in a time of lower unemployment...

...Like good luck, some groups seem to get more than their fair share of poverty...

...property taxes...

...But having said all this, there is nonetheless good reason for some optimism...

...No matter how involved the voters, no matter how eager and new the Con-gress, no matter how chastened the extremists . . . the simple fact of a nearly $200 billion deficit dominates everything else...

...1.5 million fewer poor children get a lunch at school...

...Thanks to changes adopted by Congress, families dependent on food stamps get the value of an emergency diet priced at last June' s prices, minus 1 percent...

...Just as with poverty generally, some groups fare less well than others when it comes to getting help...

...150,000 working poor families lost eligibility for subsidized child care...

...Those who get help, get less...

...Those aren't good odds, and they're getting worse...

...Eligibility for help is down...

...There is one unintended "benefit" of the basis for the poverty count - the basis for the poverty line does make it a crude surrogate for a' 'hunger count.'' Incomes low enough to qualify for poverty are incomes certain to leave people at risk of hunger...

...By poverty line standards then, a family of three is poor with an income below $7,760, and an elderly couple is poor with an income below $4,680...

...They are among the families living in automobiles, abandoned buildings, in state parks and-under bridges...

...Last year and this the choice of tt Reagan administration and a majority of the Congress was f budget savings at the expenses of people in crisis...

...Unfortunately, the official measures of poverty are con-servative...

...There are more poor people, but they are less likely to get help from government sources, and private sources are just noi able to fill the gap...

...and those who do get help, get less help...

...THERE ARE DETAILS in this picture as well...

...a nuclear freeze) as well as local ones (e.g...

...A few examples will make the point...

...For poor people, the size of that deficit translates into a continuing overarching pressure for additional reductions in federal spending...

...A few comparisons will make the point: About 7.5 percent of families headed by a white man are poor, compared with 53 percent of families headed by a black or Hispanic woman...

...Roughly 100 of the 900 Community Health Centers will close this year...

...Ultimately, nothing that happened in November will change the size of the deficit that looms for 1983 - a staggering $185 billion - and that one fact more than any other will shape the legislative year ahead...

...The broad outlines are easy enough to grasp: fewer than half the people with incomes below the poverty line qualify for any kind of cash income assistance, and the largest of the in-kind programs - food stamps - only reaches about two-thirds of America's poor...

...Those numbers have a message...

...890 school districts have cut back on their special education programs...

...Poverty is up...

...Those who do get into the welfare system get benefits rarely go up...

...two stand out: families headed by women, and minorities...

...Those lucky enough to have Social Security or unemployment benefits or some part-time work, get less...

...For two years in a row, the number of the poor and incidence of poverty in America are up...

...eighty-six new faces would be seen in Congress (eighty-one in the House of Repre-sentatives...

...Families with two parents - no matter how poor, no matter how desperate or needy the children - can get no cash welfare or Medicaid in twenty-nine states...

...Disabled people are having a much harder time getting and keeping any form of assistance at all...

...There is no new money for assisted housing - despite a critical housing shortage...

...Next year just as surely as last year and the year before, programs that poor people depend on will be politically vulnerable when the Congress looks for ways to pare the deficit...

...They are joining together in loose coalitions that cut across the narrow issue lines of the recent past...

...Never intended as a measure of what individual families heed to live on, but only as a consistent standard against which progress could reliably be measured from year to year, the poverty line counts people as poor if their house-hold income is less than three times the cost of a short-term, emergency diet...

...The official poverty line adopted in 1965, with some changes, remains the basis for the poverty calculation today...

...Poor people who qualify for Medicaid now get less less coverage, provided by a shrinking number of healt at a decreasing number of health facilities...

...The average food-stamp benefit works out to 440 a meal...