Confronting Poverty, edited by Sheldon H Danziger, Gary D Sandefur, Daniel H Weinberg:
Feffer, John
NO END IN SIGHT CONFRONTING POVERTY Prescriptions for Change Edited by Sheldon H. Danziger, Gary D. Sandefur, and Daniel H. Weinberg Harvard University Press, $49.95/$19.95, 529 pp. John...
...Co-editor of the influential Fighting Poverty (1986) and the more recent Uneven Tides (1993), Danziger has assembled a group of like-minded academics who advocate a mix of hard-nosed and soft-hearted policies that fall somewhere between the New Deal and the New Democrats...
...Their advocates must develop political strategies on their behalf, for fine words will not translate into effective legislation...
...In the meantime, however, America's war on poverty will continue to churn out victims and policy proposals in dizzying proportions...
...Lawrence Bobo and Ryan Smith, in an essay on perceptions of poverty, effectively dismiss the popular misconception that Reagan-Bush-ism tilted the electorate away from the welfare state...
...Being eclectic, however, the collection often rises above the conventional wisdom of the center...
...And the United States remains an embarrassment among industrialized nations...
...Despite "solutions" from across the political spectrum, poverty has both increased steadily and intensified in its severity since the early 1970s...
...No one believes any more that a rising tide of economic growth will lift all boats...
...Use the tax system, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which gradually substitutes work for welfare...
...Confronting Poverty, meanwhile, was prepared just as Bill Clinton entered the White House, with some of the essays even commenting on the new administration's first year...
...They still support government programs, but acknowledge their inadequacy...
...John Feller In its war on poverty, America is sunk in a quagmire much deeper than anything Vietnam ever offered...
...The victims have been countless, and no monument memorializes their suffering...
...Battle-weary but still prolific, America's poverty wonks continue to produce their proposals for reversing poverty's advantage...
...Social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare, Gary Burtless writes, are more redis-tributive than they are often given credit for and do not lavish money on the non-poor...
...And they continue to maintain that programs should be targeted to particular constituencies rather than applied universally...
...Although promising much in the way of welfare reform, candidate Clinton never truly addressed poverty questions...
...Nor did he shed much light on the topic at his much-hyped economic conference in December 1992...
...Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Hugh Heclo points out, does not simply pay the able-bodied not to work: 70 percent of recipients are children and at most 3 percent of recipients are adults who could hold down a job...
...With their most recent collection of essays, Confronting Poverty, Danziger and company address their issue from a number of angles-welfare, the underclass, health care, employment, education, single mothers, urban policy, race, and immigration...
...Confronting Poverty reads even better when the authors look up from the statistics to address larger questions...
...Danziger and colleagues haven't changed the general tenor of their prescriptions since their last major collection...
...Even the more centrist suggestions that captivated Clinton's supporters in the Democratic Leadership Council-such as welfare cut-offs and enterprise zones- were not seriously debated while Congress was still in Democratic hands...
...To appeal to this new administration, the contributors to Confronting Poverty make the ritual appeals for realism and pragmatism, and then aim for the center of the policy spectrum...
...Where the new volume differs the most is in the political context...
...The poor have gotten poorer, blacker, younger, less economically mobile, less competitive in the job market, less able to pay for health care...
...One author dismisses national programs for job creation and health care as too expensive and structurally unsound...
...In other words, Clinton gave America a half-baked policy session, neglected to inspire a movement for his programs, and inevitably backed right into a new Republican congressional majority that wants to put its own people first...
...Prophetic words...
...Calibrate carefully so that benefits do not diminish incentives, programs remain cost-effective, statistical improvements can be registered...
...Not surprisingly, given the topic, the overall contents are sobering...
...President Clinton, meanwhile, can take credit only for an expansion of the EITC, an unquestionable improvement but nothing revolutionary...
...The tide is weak and the boats leaky, as James Tobin remarks in his contribution...
...Fighting Poverty came out during Ronald Reagan's calculated stigmatization of the poor...
...And this implies a motive force more like a red-blooded political movement than a policy seminar...
...The landscapes-burned-out buildings, desperate homeless-can be terrifyingly similar...
...Education vouchers, according to a model developed by Charles Manski, will neither positively nor negatively affect the poorest students...
...The poor have no power, he reminds us...
...No peace beckons just around the corner, no dignified retreats are possible...
...They still prefer employment strategies to solely means-tested benefits...
...While not radical, these factual assertions run counter to the Democratic party's current obsession with squeezing social insurance programs, applying market principles to education, and kicking people off welfare...
...As the contributors summarize, not much has improved over the last decade since the publication of Fighting Poverty...
...Europe has its Bosnia, America its own inner cities...
...One of the most persistent of these strategists is Sheldon Danziger...
...And Hugh Heclo, in perhaps the book's most provocative chapter, supplies the all-important context to the debate...
...Soon, perhaps, more inspired leadership will again find its way to Washington...
...From premature babies to the elderly, the rest of the industrialized world is better able to keep its citizens out of poverty, whether through more equitable wage structures or more generous government programs...
...The insights in this collection are often keen, the statistical information revealing, and the writing bearable for an academic effort...
...Heclo concludes that "Clinton's skill and interest in dealing with complex policy issues may be a toxic aptitude unless the larger political case can be made for doing such things...
...In this new terrain, Confronting Poverty reads like yesterday's battle plan...
...All other campaign promises-from an increased minimum wage to an expanded network of community development banks-have been left unrealized...
...Target the benefits, most of the authors advise-it's easier to sell the program, get it off the ground, and monitor its effects...
Vol. 122 • June 1995 • No. 12
