Editorials

...If the press insists on reporting facts like these, it's no wonder that Mr...

...Such a view, he warns, raises "important questions not only about the current economic policies that are being pursued but also about the long-term status of the American economy...

...In Dangerous Currents, a detailed critique of current economic theory, Lester C. Thurow shows how economists have consistently defined the sticky reality of unemployment out of existence...

...Side by side on the front page of one day's New York Times, for example, were two stories, one from Atlanta, one from Washington...

...This asymmetry has led to a bit of untested political lore: that it is not the absolute amount of unemployment which frightens the vast majority of people but whether or not the rate of unemployment is on the rise...

...Reagan is, the White House says, "perplexed" and "deeply concerned" about reports that hunger is widespread in this country...

...Hogwash indeed...

...It is bad enough that the official rate of over nine percent more than doubles what in the sixties was conservatively considered an unacceptable degree of unemployment...

...How many hungry children does that add up to...

...It is the message of the United States Catholic Conference's Labor Day statement, issued by Bishop Mark J. Hurley, chairman of the conference's Committee on Social Development and World Peace...

...Will the more fortunate majority resign themselves to this kind of human waste...

...Most of this loss would have been borne by households with gross incomes below the poverty line, which was $9,862 for a family of four last year...

...If that bit of political savvy holds true, there is a real danger Americans will grow complacent about what remains, even as economic recovery at last gets underway, an unprecedented rate of joblessness...

...Reagan miss the fact that 34.4 million people are now below the poverty line, 15 percent of the population and the highest number in the last seventeen years...

...It is one of the messages of the labor movement's Solidarity Day III parades on Labor Day...

...We are sure we haven't seen the last of the efforts to create a new Reagan image, though...

...Sometimes good reporting makes nonsense of the White House efforts...

...If the rate is going down, or even holding steady, they relax, and judge their economic circumstances by the lesser but always directly experienced matter of inflation...

...That we must not is one of the messages of the August 27 march on Washington commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr.'s call to the nation two decades ago...

...We are lucky things are not worse...

...Reagan and his spokesmen insist the media are biased against them...

...The piece from Atlanta reported a speech by Mr...

...Given the Reagan track record on selecting the big majority of his Central American commission, it just might...

...Under the president's budget proposals for fiscal 1984, 62 percent of all families that use food stamps would have had their benefits cut...

...Work is of supreme importance," Bishop Hurley reminds us in repeating the key thoughts of the pope's encyclical On Human Labor, "precisely because it is through labor that human beings realize their humanity.'' What then are we to make of what Hurley describes as the growing assumption "that high rates of unemployment are a necessary element of our modern economy and that full employment is not a realistic goal...

...The effort in that direction that most intrigues us at the moment focuses on the issue of hunger in America...

...Probably they won't be devised if we simply stick with all the tried-and-true dogmas that have got us where we are...

...The economy may recover, but too many of the people behind those statistics will not...

...And certainly they won't be devised if we ignore the problem altogether - which the marchers, among others, are rightly determined to prevent...

...Solutions for persistent high unemployment will not be easy to come by...

...Let's hope it does not consist entirely of people just as perplexed about the subject as Mr...

...Right next to that article was a report from Washington, this one detailing still more Reagan administration plans to cut back government programs that promote school desegregation and educational opportunities for women...

...As the Washington Post noted editorially, the president has good reason to be "deeply concerned," but why should he be "perplexed...

...Reagan in which he strongly defended his policies on education, minorities, and women's rights, calling criticism "hogwash" and asserting that his administration had achieved an unparalleled record in these areas...

...Efforts to reshape his image into one of a man of compassion go on apace...

...We'd like to see Secretary of Agriculture Block and his family live on that for a year...

...Unemployment, even in a depression, hits only a minority, but its impact is frequently disastrous...

...There is probably no harm in this...

...Food stamps costs have increased, which is largely due to increased food costs and the fact that people who have lost income because of Reagan cuts in welfare and other programs are entitled to more food stamps...

...Reagan has consistently attacked the nation's food programs ever since he took office...

...What we are concerned about is the makeup of the commission...

...It is worse that the economic consensus seems to be that unemployment will not fall below eight percent even at the height of the recovery...

...There are, as usual, ways of evading the problem...

...a good report by a study commission might wake people up - although a good case can be made that the need is clear enough already and that what is needed now is vigorous action...

...In technical terms, Thurow demonstrates what the popes have been preaching in moral terms: labor is not just another commodity that can be bought and sold by the laws applying to coal or pork bellies...

...Crushed hopes, self-reproach, strained and broken marriages, alcoholism, mental collapse, child abuse, suicide - the gamut of costs runs from the sapping of spirit and morale to the most dramatic incidents of crime and destruction...

...Theories and policies that believe it is are destined to go awry, both morally and practically...

...And beyond those figures, of course, are the millions of additional Americans who have abandoned the search for work altogether or who want - and need - full-time employment but have settled for part-time jobs...

...But a serious study can do no harm and might do some good, even if it only educated the administration...

...Everyone from the mayors of America's big cities to the dedicated soup kitchen workers around the country report that hunger is widespread and serious, and that hunger would be even worse if Congress had acquiesced in all of Mr...

...Reagan...

...One can emphasize the number of new jobs our economy has produced in the last decade, conveniently forgetting how many of them, even in the high-technology area, are low-paying and with little security...

...In any case, the president says he is perplexed, and he is therefore appointing a study group to probe the hunger situation...

...As it was, last year 2700 schools had to drop out of the school lunch program, most of them because of new Reagan-inspired rules...

...If the rate is going up, then a large number of workers (who are, after all, still employed) fear that they might be next, with all the terrible effects that joblessness can mean...

...HUNGER PAINS If President Reagan is not off and running hard for a second term you sure could have fooled us...

...Ron Bricker, the unemployed steelworker who got national TV attention when he handed President Reagan his resume during the president's tour of a Pittsburgh training center, quickly obtained a "hi-tech" job with White House help - it paid less than he received from unemployment compensation and half his previous salary...

...Reagan's food-slashing proposals...

...Did Mr...

...He has fought inflation by unemployment, and Reaganomics gave us the worst recession since 1929...