Et cetera
bottle, Message in a
and politicians should help to dismantle these barriers as proliferation of single-parent families will also be high on the well as reconnect needy families with the government as- ...
...Better public transportation is Message in a bottle L Paul Celan once described a needed to get the urban poor to the suburbs, where the real poem as "a letter in a bottle thrown to sea with the-surely growth in new jobs is taking place...
...Currently, the nation's most extensive and way to begin to include the poor in the prosperity enjoyed by successful antipoverty program is the Earned Income Tax the majority of their fellow citizens...
...But Americans are, by and large, a pragmatic peoeconomy and the greatest disincentive for the poor seeking ple, and they will support only government programs that work...
...The suburban poor need not always strong-hope that it may somehow wash up better public transit as well...
...Osip ing subsidies are also essential...
...We gible for the EITC is a good way to expand the effects of the apologize for the error...
...This program now puts about $25 billion annually, or up to $3,800 in tax rebates per worker, into the hands of the poor...
...Americans, by and large, want to help those trapped in Low wages, however, remain the bane of the American poverty...
...So- The hope incarnated in poetry took on new force this cial, moral, and religious efforts to discourage the spring when Michael Wall of Derrymore, Ireland, plucked a bottle out of the ocean and found a letter inside dated September 2, 1979 asking the recipient to please write back...
...In keeping with Commonweal's usual schedule, only one issue is published each month during July and August...
...sistance to which they are entitled...
...Unionizing workers is, of Mandelstam likened the poet to "the shipwrecked sailor course, the surest way to raise wages...
...Credit (EITC...
...The trio plans to meet soon...
...Commonweal 6 June 16, 2000...
...Judge Noonan is not inof money the working poor can earn while remaining eli- volved in any way with IACS fundraising activities...
...He met the bottle's advent with an understated awe-"a long journey, you know...
...The next issue will be dated July 14...
...Both public and private initiatives are essential...
...No single approach or program will be suf- "its secret addressee...
...The efficacy of EITC is so widely ac- CORRECTION The editorial "Something New," which knowledged that some states add to the federal refund with appeared in Commonweal's June 2 issue, mischaracterized EITC programs of their own...
...Getting more money into the pockets of the working bring results...
...They confessed to a rush of longing for things past...
...ficient...
...Wall lives in the same town, works in the same mill, and fishes the same shore he did as a young man in the summer of 1979, the Boston Globe (May 12) reported...
...Raising the amount vanced Catholic Studies (IACS...
...Theirs was the work of a perfect summer day, spontaneously undertaken and skillfully executed...
...Building on what already works is the best poor is crucial...
...The longparted women have had peripatetic adulthoods...
...Finally, better schools who throws a sealed bottle into the sea at a critical moment," and access to health care are key to lifting the next generation and a poem to a "testament of the deceased" that will find out of poverty...
...Lowering the income-tax rate for the poor who THE EDITORS earn too much to qualify for EITC would alleviate the perverse incentive not to seek better-paying jobs for those just beginning to climb the economic ladder...
...There is much more that can and should be done to help America's working poor...
...program...
...A pair of teenage girls had dropped the bottle off a Nantucket (Massachusetts) ferry twenty-one years and three-thousand miles ago...
...and politicians should help to dismantle these barriers as proliferation of single-parent families will also be high on the well as reconnect needy families with the government as- list of realistic antipoverty initiatives...
...Affordable housing and hous- somewhere, perhaps on the shoreline of the heart...
...Because it is tied to work, there Judge John Noonan's relationship with the Institute for Adis broad, bipartisan support for the EITC...
...Here is an instance of the world's grace, a happy confluence of human attention and natural caprice, and a reminder of the beauty and pleasure which may come into being when we act and write toward a future unknown to us...
Vol. 127 • June 2000 • No. 12
