A Poorhouse Divided

...At the same time, affluence put Americans into a generous, self-confident mood...

...This solution is not only enormously costly to the Treasury...

...A lives on welfare...

...But it is separated or divided into two economies...

...She is not eligible for food stamps, and to rent space equivalent to that which the welfare recipient gets for $99 she pays something in the vicinity of $400...

...If their stove tops weren't clean enough or if their sexual conduct was improper, they could, at a social worker's word, be tossed out of their housing project or cut off the welfare rolls...

...This thought seemed especially plausible in the booming cities of the Northeast and Midwest, where the poor were disproportionately likely to be recent immigrants and the well-to-do were typically old-stock Yankees...

...If the eligibility threshold is raised to include Ms...

...It's theoretically possible, of course, that such a campaign of regeneration could occur without the use of state power at all...

...Give them more, and they would immediately cease to be poor—without state supervision, without bossy social workers, and without any suggestion that other people knew better how they ought to lead their lives...

...Lifting the burden of government regulation from the necks of the poor and stricter policing of the places in which they live ought to be an ambitious enough program for any conservative...

...But profound peace still reigns on the poverty front, and the poor remain stuck in the same old paradigm as ever...

...The crowning Great Society anti-poverty device, the Negative Income Tax, eliminated all bureaucracy and moralism from welfare...

...People don't work—and take welfare if they can get it—because the smallest wage they will accept exceeds the wage that their labor is worth to an employer...

...Once the money was in their hands, everything else—housing, business opportunities, economic clout—would follow, just as political power for the formerly disenfranchised had ineluctably followed the enactment of the Voting Rights Act...

...Neither the gunman nor the victims were white and nobody was killed, so the mass shooting only made page B1, below the fold...

...But there is another economy—a second economy that is similar in respects to the Eastern European or Third World 'socialist' economy . . . and it predominates in the pockets of poverty throughout urban and rural America...

...Paradoxically, though, the Americans who most felt a new, arbitrary power intheir lives after 1940 were not bankers and brokers, but welfare recipients...

...Cut taxes, sell off public housing to the tenants, and break up the public school system, and the poor will still lounge on street corners, illiterate, idle, addicted, and violent...

...James Q. Wilson believes that the moral tone of American society improved between 1830 and the Civil War, and gives credit not to governments but to the new "Sunday schools, public schools, temperance movements, religious revivals, YMCAs, [and] the Children's Aid Society . . ." To be sure, even in the nineteenth century reformers spent at least as much of their time lobbying for state action —prohibition of liquor, laws against vice, interception of lewd postcards and contraceptive advertisements sent by mail—as they did founding libraries...

...But at least New Deal welfare programs seem not to have gotten in the way...

...B in the program, then Ms...

...An even bigger one would be protecting them from congressional pickpockets along the way...

...But then you would start to notice that other people, dangerous people, had those rights too, and that the institutions on which you most depended were crumbling under the pressure...

...The transfer of economic resources would be overseen not by professionals from Washington or Albany or Sacramento, but by the poor themselves, through local community action groups —with, perhaps, a government-paid facilitator or two...

...The rehabilitation of community cannot begin until some degree of fundamental order and basic stability has been established," Bennett told the National Newspaper Association last March...

...he Bennett school—call its adherents the "culturalists" to distinguish them from Kemp's economistic conservatives—looks at things more gloomily...

...it has the perverse side effect of swelling the number of people who are in some way dependent on government handouts for their livelihood...

...She receives $4,908 in cash annually, as well as $260 a month in food stamps...

...Creating an ethos is difficult, maybe impossible...

...If the differences between Kempites and Bennettites were merely intellectual, they could perhaps be fudged...

...Consider the impact of one of Kemp's favorite reforms, privatizing public housing, on two single mothers, both living in Washington, D.C., with two children...

...And, so long as they cannot make up their minds, they are vulnerable to the sort of fratricide that has so often rent the Democratic party...

...To refute the case for an interventionist welfare bureaucracy, the Great Society adopted a variant of the economistic explanation of poverty: the poor were poor because_ they lacked money...

...What's needed is what Bennett doesn't hesitate to call "moral reform...

...Farm price supports cost the average poor family not only in taxes but at the supermarket as well...

...W e all know how it came out...

...One economy—our mainstream economy—is democratic capitalist, market-oriented, entrepreneurial, and incentivized for working families whether in labor or management...

...Though the negative tax never became law, the right of welfare recipients to do as they pleased without answering to a social worker was vastly enhanced throughout the 1960s and 1970s...

...However much they may have learned from the errors of the past, conservative culturalists share the original sin of the New Deal social workers: the desire to use the state to regenerate the poor...

...Paul, "I believe we are going to have to be prepared more frequently to remove children from their homes and send them to other settings...

...They like and dislike the same things as their richer fellow citizens, share the same values, and react the same way to incentives and disincentives...

...And between 1940 and 1965, the proportion of Americans living under the poverty line dropped by two-thirds, from about 35 percent (Roosevelt's "one-third of a nation") to just under 13 percent, slightly below today's figure...

...What they lack is the capacity to make the right ones...

...If we wish to address the problems of family disruption, welfare dependency, crime in the streets, educational inadequacy, or even public finance properly understood," Wilson wrote in the Public Interest, "the government, by the mere fact that it defines these states of affairs as problems, acknowledges that human character is, in some degree, defective and that it intends to alter it...

...It's seldom the case that someone is left without work because there is no job at all available to him...

...After food and rent, she is left with $3,720 a year in discretionary income...

...City-dwellers came to associate poverty with jabbering foreign tongues and alien ways...

...It was an easy jump to the conclusion that Americanizing the poor would in itself depauperize them...

...But if Bennett and Wilson are right, then Kemp's economic nostrums are mere tinkering...

...Such habits of thought did not impinge very much on the beneficiaries of the New Deal's emergency measures—like public works—or of its social insurance programs...

...Alumni of the movement—Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, and Harry Hopkins among them—imported its basic assumptions into the federal and state welfare programs created or vastly enlarged in the 1930s and 1940s...

...The Federal Trade Commission estimates that barriers to the import of foreign clothes, textiles, and shoes—barriers enthusiastically backed, by the way, by the founder of the Conservative Opportunity Society, Newt Gingrich—cost the poorest 20 percent of American families some 8 percent of their disposable income...

...Between 1961, the year of Mapp v. Ohio, and 1965, the year of Miranda, the court struck at the ability of localities to detect, arrest, and convict criminals...

...If, on top of everything else, Ms...

...The statistics on crime, illegitimacy, and substance abuse in the early 1950s look positively Kansan...

...A conservative war on poverty—that was Jack Kemp's promise when he was sworn in as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development two years ago...

...Bigger spenders, such as Kemp, seem actually to want to use subsidies to enrich the rewards of labor for those at the bottom of the income heap...

...Conservatives have stuck themselves with a choice between the Kempites' assumptions—whether they be starry-eyed or politically calculating about the cause of poverty—and the Bennettites' grim conclusions about its solution...

...I don't care if I see a soldier on every corner," an Oakland woman told the Wall Street Journal last year, "as long as I know my child will be able to get to school and back home safely...

...They lack the attitudes and skills necessary to keep a job, run a business, or hold together a family...

...The culturalists stress that America's poor don't lack for choices...

...R epublicans are chipping their teeth on the same nutshell that sent Democrats to the orthodontist: the inability to decide what kind of a problem poverty is...

...Midge Decter told a Heritage Foundation symposium in 1984, "The one disagreement that I think I have with George Gilder [author of the economistic Wealth and Poverty] is the idea that if there were no welfare programs, [teenage mothers] wouldn't be having babies...

...amending laws is easy...

...There, in a sentence, is much of the appeal of the economistic school...

...The Kempites are right, say the Bennettites, that the poor are poor because they make bad choices...

...Poverty exists in rich America precisely because some people do not react to incentives and disincentives in the way that everybody else does...

...Offering additional incentives to the poor to enter middle class society can have perverse effects...

...The "power" that the "empowerers" want to give the poor is choice—the same choice that everyone else has—in the confidence that the poor are no more likely to choose wrong than anyone else is...

...And the federal government's use of the surplus in the Social Security trust fund to finance general spending means that much of the cost of those boondoggles is being paid for by taxes on earnings of less than $53,400...

...The students and their neighbors would—the theory went—learn from one another and work together for social reform...

...David Frum A POORHOUSE DIVIDED Conservatives can be the champions of the poor, but they're of two minds on how to go about it: offer economic incentives, or impose the mores of middle-class America...

...They see crime the Republican way: as a problem that can be solved, if it can be solved at all, by police and judges, jailers and executioners...

...As I write, my morning newspaper tells me of ten people who were shot when a man tried to kill his girlfriend on a Bronx street...

...The urban poor of the 1950s did conform to middle-class expectations much more closely than the urban poor of the 1990s do, or than those of the 1900s did...

...Fittingly, the negative tax was designed by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, and sent to Congress by President Nixon...

...cans who are poor are basically the same as everybody else...

...This economy has barriers to productive human and social activity and a virtual absence of economic incentive and rewards . . ." Fortunately, he concluded, "good policy can lead to results...

...But in America, the teaching went strictly one way...

...Parents do not always know best . . ." Although the adherents of the two schools write for the same magazines and vote for the same presidential candidates, their views are incompatible...

...Student loans, commuter-rail subsidies, and grants to the arts all disproportionately benefit the well-off...

...One of the arguments for the liberal War on Poverty was that it would dispose of the federal government's seemingly chronic budget surpluses...

...And since many poor people show no signs of reforming on their own, the middle-class majority must forcibly inculcate those values and attitudes into them...

...The implications of culturalism are radical, and the culturalists do not flinch from them...

...When it was coined in England in the 1880s, the term referred to a settlement by educated people among the poor: rich university students would move into a poor neighborhood...

...If Kemp is right that people like Kimi Gray—the Washington welfare mother and tenant organizer he calls "my hero"—are representative of the urban 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 poor, and that the poor need only to have their incentives restructured for them to cease being poor, then the culturalist program is nothing better than impertinent interference in the private lives of people perfectly capable of taking care of themselves...

...Republican conservatives think they know whom to blame for the failure of the Bush Administration to fulfill the promise of bold action against poverty: the detested budget director, Richard Darman...

...The Kempites have had no better success than the culturalists in solving the big problems they inherited from their liberal counterparts...

...What is needed is not a new government program, but a new ethos —one in which these little girls will be encouraged to keep their knees together until they grow up and fmd husbands...

...But the differ-ence between a politician who hopes to win votes among the poor and one who hopes to win votes among those dismayed by the poor is not so fudgeable...

...It promises that Congress could lick poverty in a legislative session or two, because all that needs to change are laws...

...The 1980s boom, by contrast, reduced poverty in America by just one percentage point, to some 13 percent by 1990...

...Just as the New Deal dream of kindly bureaucrats gently directing the poor into majority society had turned into what Yale professor Charles Reich called a "new serfdom," the Great Society dream that poor people would empower themselves turned into promiscuous check-writing by the federal government...

...C. is included, then Ms...

...After taxes and rent (and assuming she spends the same $260 a month on food as the government provides Ms...

...So Kemp and his school prefer to speak of poverty as a problem somehow external to the characters of the poor themselves, one which the poor can overcome on their own—with, naturally, a little help from a Republican Congress...

...The dilemma can be traced back to the Progressive Era...

...This New Deal culturalism would seem at first glance to have worked...

...Everyone who fell below the poverty line would, via checks from the IRS, be boosted THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991 17 above it...

...Worse, it carries a whiff of white-middle-class self-approbation...

...C, who earns $18,000, is going to be aggrieved...

...This is the thesis of the most persuasive intellectual among the culturalists, UCLA's James Q. Wilson...

...Even if better incentives would draw the poor into productive activity, devising those incentives would be complicated and expensive...

...The result was the settlement house...

...She pays $99 a month —$1,188 a year—for a two-bedroom apartment...

...By retracing the fatal path which brought liberals into it: overconfidence about the power of government to do good...

...In December, two of the champions of the Republican right, Kemp and former education secretary and drug czar William Bennett, jointly endorsed the New Paradigm at the Republican governors' convention in North Carolina...

...Goldberg ruled that local welfare authorities could not remove people from the rolls without a formal hearing beforehand...

...The views are irreconcilable—and perhaps untenable...

...B, by contrast, holds a job at a warehouse...

...First, the self-organization the Johnson Administration promoted turned out to be not the pooling of family and community resources into shops and businesses, but political pressure for government handouts...

...But the Bennettites disagree that` economic incentives will suffice to correct the behavior of the poor...

...If the poor are to escape poverty, or at least live in less squalor and danger, they must absorb the attitudes and values that enabled so many other Americans to ascend into the middleclass...

...But the poor don't share the New York Times's stoic indifference to the carnage around them...

...It must have been exhilarating to tell the social worker to go to hell when she asked whether you were sharing your bed with anyone, to snap your fingers at the police when they hassled you for loitering, to know that the schoolteacher could not whack your kids whenever he felt like it, to throw a party in your apartment without worrying that you might lose your home if the music got too loud...

...The more people it hoisted out of poverty, the more the great postwar economic takeoff made whatever poverty remained look anomalous and even un-American...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1991...

...And the poorer you are, the more the violence touches you...

...The toilsome research of culturalist academics, from Oscar Lewis and Edward Banfield onward, into the pathologies and distortions that keep people poor could be obviated by the painless magic of the marketplace: enterprise zones, tax cuts, privatization of public housing...

...A), she is left with $4,549 a year in discretionary income—$829 more than the woman who takes handouts...

...Then, in 1969, it handed down Goldberg v. Kelly, the decision that Justice Brennan says he is proudest of...

...But the nonworking poor, the people who would remain poor when the Depression lifted, bore the full weight of the settlement house legacy...

...It's hard to remember now, but the Great Society of the 1960s originated as an anti-statist critique of the New Deal...

...o how do conservatives, economistic or cultural, clamber out of this swamp...

...The handouts that government dispenses to the poor do not remotely compensate for the costs government imposes on them by its services to grubby interest groups...

...The school for which Kemp speaks argues that the 13 percent of AmeriDavid Frum is an assistant features editor at the Wall Street Journal...

...Empowerment" of the poor under a "New Paradigm"—that is the promise of the brainier White House aides today...

...Of course, it was the great postwar economic growth, and not New Deal welfarism, that propelled all these people off the welfare rolls...

...Making it safe for poor people to get to the food store and back would be no small achievement...

...This mainstream rewards work, investment, saving, and productivity...

...Chester Finn, a former assistant secretary of education when Bennett was secretary, declared in an April speech in St...

...Calibrating social benefits so that they will elicit exactly the desired response and no other from the target population is the sort of project the late B. F. Skinner might assign himself...

...That self-approbation may well be justified, but it has to be anathema to a politician who is, like Kemp, trying to build a conservative constituency among blacks...

...She earns $13,100 a year...

...In every place where the state met poor people, it found itself hobbled by complex new rules, and the poor outfitted with expansive new rights...

...But while the incentives and disincentives presented to most Americans lead them toward work and self-respect, the temptations the welfare state dandles in front of the poor lure them toward idleness, ignorance, and irresponsibility...

...But the party of Calvin Coolidge...

...They are instead agreeing with one of the most effective popularizers of culturalist ideas, George F. Will, that "statecraft is soulcraft" —that remodeling citizens' consciousnesses is indeed a legitimate task of the state...

...Fudging intellectual differences in order to build political coalitions is, after all, what politicians do for a living...

...They aren't having babies on purpose exactly, they have just utterly given up control of their own destinies...

...By reformulating welfare programs, amending the tax code, subsidizing intact families instead of broken ones, privatizingpublic housing, and introducing more choice into education, "productive human effort can be promoted, behavior can be modified or altered...

...America's cities are more dangerous than those of any other industrial democracy...

...Well-heeled opponents of the New Deal complained bitterly about its snooping and its meddlesomeness...

...A were to get ownership of her apartment at a discount and Ms...

...And the two men whose approaches to poverty are most radically incompatible are, curiously, those two momentary comrades-in-arms, Kemp and Bennett...

...America is not divided immutably into two static classes," Kemp said in a June speech to Heritage...

...But the fundamental reason why conservatives can't seem to act on a common anti-poverty program is that conservative thinking about poverty is divided into two schools, schools so incompatible that nothing but the universal hatred for Darman could keep their adherents in the same room for long...

...This is the thesis of Charles Murray's Losing Ground and of the domestic policy researchers at the Heritage Foundation...

...Few culturalists seem inclined even to try to resist...

...Although two-thirds of America's 32 million poor people are white and more than half of America's blacks are not poor, criticism of the culture of the poor is almost universally interpreted as criticism of the culture of blacks...

...The more libertarian of the economistic conservatives —Charles Murray, and Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation, to name two —therefore suggest that a new antipoverty program should dismantle the disincentives to low-wage work built into anti-poverty programs...

...B did not, the Ms...

...When a family is in a condition of melt-down, our priority must be to help the children...

...But it's not true that government can do nothing for the poor: what it could do is make poverty in America less awful...

...The roaring economy of the years before the First World War had propelled so many Americans into comfort that, for the first time, benevolent people could entertain the idea that poverty was somehow abnormal...

...She owes no net federal income tax—in fact, she's entitled to a $760 credit—but she does pay $1,002 in Social Security taxes, plus $389 in District of Columbia taxes...

...Culturalism, on the other hand, is very strong medicine...

...Bs of the world are going to feel like suckers...

...The forces that cause poverty can be reversed...

...Poverty exists in America precisely because some people do not react to incentives in the way that everybody else does...

...And so on, all the way up to David Rockefeller...

...The discretionary power that the New Deal had so insouciantly vested in social workers was ripped away...

...Social Security pensioners, trade union members, and TVA customers were left free to enjoy the fruits of the New Deal in any way they liked, but the non-working poor were scrutinized by the welfare authorities as never before...

...Work effort can be unleashed...

...Almost everything that modern government does is paid for by higher taxes on—or higher prices for—the poorest people in the country...

...Third, while the Great Society was showering money on the poor, the Supreme Court was with childlike glee smashing to bits traditional methods of maintaining law and order...

...If Ms...

...D, at $25,000, will be left out...

...The Great Society went wrong for three major reasons...

...Soon after, the due process revolution seized schools, housing projects, prisons...

...Clever economists say that these effects can be corrected by phasing benefits out and phasing taxes in very slowly along the income slope...

...And today, hollering for the government whenever a social problem pops up has become irresistible to conservatives and liberals alike...

...Second, the Great Society failed to anticipate the perverse side-effects of handing money out to people who have done nothing to earn it...

...The Democrats' war on poverty was going to be as hostile to bureaucracy as a congressman on the campaign trail...

...They form an "underclass" trapped in a "culture of poverty...

...To the settlement house can be traced the New Deal's faith in social work and its willingness to entrust broad discretionary power to social workers, its presumption that the problem of poverty was essentially a problem of assimilation, its unspoken prejudice that some groups were more assimilable than others, and finally its zeal to rip down slums and move their inhabitants into housing projects...