Recalculating poverty
Marciniak, Ed
.................................:.: ~_~-_-G~z- -~===-. .................... Ed Marciniak RECALCULATING POVERTY More than dollars & cents he time has come to de-emphasize the...
...Were our antipoverty priorities dovetailed to each of these groups, it would be much easier to determine how effective a program had been...
...Scandalously, most of these projects not only accommodate the urban poor but also perpetuate an underclass of second- and third-generation residents...
...A forty-two-yearold great-grandmother who has always lived in Chicago's Cabrini-Green project came to my attention last year...
...We also know, but seldom admit, that these programs are sinfully underfunded...
...Some will remain the more or less permanent poor...
...Using that dollar measure, years later, in 1997, the U.S...
...9 The mentally-ill poor now hidden in jails or illegally in nursing homes and public housing for the elderly...
...What have been the most accessible escalators out of poverty...
...families overwhelmed by the staggering cost of illness or accident...
...Second, the fiscal indicator alone fails to explain why some people have such low incomes, as well as how they might be escorted from the mean streets into the urban mainstream...
...Hundreds of thousands of them were once ejected from state health institutions and dumped unmercifully on city streets under the dubious rubric of "community care...
...Courses may also be taken for credit or audit as a summer sabbatical...
...society lies not between the rich and the poor or between blacks and whites, but between those who have hope and those who have given up...
...Summer 2000 terms begin June 12 and July 10...
...Illinois had thirty thousand state beds in the 1960s, down to eighty-eight hundred in 1999...
...Census Bureau would designate a family of four, for instance, to be in "poverty" if its annual cash income before taxes fell below $16,400...
...9 The value of Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies, school lunches, scholarship and other noncash benefits...
...In three ways...
...9 The idlers, those without the self-discipline to hold a regular job, and others who have never really sought employment...
...households spent $14,607 on the average during 1995...
...The deepest division in U.S...
...9 The temporary poor...
...They are represented by households whose breadwinner was laid off from work...
...They include the urban vagabonds who rebel against a shelter's requirements for sobriety and cleanliness...
...Ed Marciniak RECALCULATING POVERTY More than dollars & cents he time has come to de-emphasize the statistical definition of poverty as obsolete, flawed, and mischievous...
...But many others can be helped to find the ladder on which they can clamber out of poverty...
...The Census Bureau's dollar-based generality has tended to gloss over the inadequacy of various public policies and programs designed to lift people out of poverty...
...9 The working poor...
...On the other hand, a noneconomic portrait of poverty would focus attention and remediation on various groupings of the honest-to-God poor, such as the following: 9 The residents of the nation's large public housing projects...
...Furthermore, prisons and jails in this country do not have enough treatment programs for the tens of thousands of substance abusers who are inmates...
...Unless they come from a family of means or marry into one, they have little chance of ever becoming self-supporting, although their descendants may...
...shuttle services that bring public housing residents to suburban jobs...
...R E G H T 0 N U N I V E R S I T '~ A MASTER'S DEGREE IN CHRISTIAN SHRITUALITY AND/OR A CERTIFICATE IN SPIRITUAL DIRECTION IN JUST THREE SUMMERS...
...Among them would be the homeless removed last year from the sidewalks of Chicago's Lower Wacker Drive, where they Commonweal | 0 January28, 2000 had lived in cardboard boxes, under blankets, or in some other makeshift shelter...
...and homes visited by tragedy, divorce, or the death of a working parent, for example...
...Money, undoubtedly, will ease the woes of some poor households but will avoid confronting the root causes of poverty among people viewed as poor...
...And finally, third, our preoccupation with the poor as the nation's penniless has had unintended consequences...
...Were there enough centers, many more addicts would then get the tough love they need to survive and thrive in the human mainstream...
...at the same time the Census Bureau reported that the average annual income among these same households was only $8,350...
...Shelters and soup kitchens are needed, but what other means can be developed to convoy the lowest-income households into the urban commonwealth, while at the same time inculcating a sense of achievement in having done so...
...But not long after, the poor fell into the hands of the economists who in the early 1960s concocted an "official poverty level," quantified and based on household size...
...One-Half Tuition All Christian Spirituality students receive Consider joining us for a special tuition rate of $212 per credit an 8 Day lgnatian Retreat hour- one-half of regular tuition...
...tn Chicago, for example, most of the inpatient and outpatient centers have long waiting lists...
...That is one reason why the New York City Police Department responded to thirtysixthousand "emotionally disturbed person" calls in 1998, and why the Chicago Tribune last August highlighted the "fact that the Cook County Jail has become the largest mental institution in Illinois...
...a certificate, one 4-week term for three summers...
...Congressman's estimate) Washington spent since 1969 to shrink poverty has not proved more successful...
...Ed Marciniak is president of the Institute of Urban Life at Loyola University Chicago...
...9 Family assets, such as the ownership of a home and other holdings, like stocks, bonds, or money in the bank...
...It sidetracked, until recently, any urgent scrutiny of a government program, such as the large high-rise public housing projects...
...Looking across the board at all federal programs, how else can we explain that the $5 trillion (one U.S...
...A Master's Degree requires two 4-week terms for just three summers...
...Nationwide in the 1960s, there were more than half a million hospital beds for mentally ill patients...
...Should public and private agencies expect a beneficiary to begin using them...
...More than 40 percent of those the Census Bureau classified in "poverty" in 1995 owned their own homes, 70 percent owned an automobile, 66 percent had air conditioning, and 90 percent enjoyed a color television...
...Such a conclusion certainly dramatized the pervasiveness of poverty in our champagne economy...
...9 The hard-core users, many of whom may be motivated and able to kick their cocaine or alcohol habit by undergoing treatment at a detox center or halfway house but cannot do so...
...today, fewer than seventy thousand...
...shelters that not only give beds to the homeless but also a motive to get out of them...
...9 The large population of unwed teen-age mothers who prolong their poverty into the next generation...
...A household headed by an unwed teen-age mother is a more reliable indicator of poverty than the "official poverty level...
...9 The more or less permanent poor...
...households and misrepresented the nature and extent of poverty across the United States...
...The multigeneration denizens of public housing can readily be compared to Karl Marx's lumpenproletariat...
...a high school environment that encourages postponement of sexual activity until marriage...
...The resulting paradox: According to the Department of Labor, those in the bottom fifth of U.S...
...As we enter the new millennium, our public and private strategies have begun to change...
...June 1-June lO, 2000 Phone: (402) 280-2424 9 Toll Free: 1-800-637-4279 Fax: (402) 280-2423 9 E-Marl: univcol@creighton.edu Website: http://www.creighton.edu/SummerSessions/html/csp.html CREIGHTON @| UNIVERSITY Christian Spirituality Program Creighton University Summer Sessions 2000 Box A, 2500 California Plaza, Omaha, NE 68178 ". R E I G H T 0 N U N I V E R S I T Commonweal | | January28, 2000...
...First, by not taking into account the following: 9 The unreported cash income generated in the underground economy through domestic employment, gratuities, drug deals, prostitution, illegal gambling, etc...
...That arithmetical portrait of poverty, however, simultaneously underestimated the real income of U.S...
...We already know that many antipoverty initiatives, private and public, have proved successful: raising the minimum wage, especially for the employees of government contractors...
...His poor were not so much the moneyless as they were the wards of social workers, welfare agencies, mental hospitals, and religious institutions...
...A more accurate and realistic "official poverty level" would be welcome...
...prisons and jails that humanely transfer the mentally ill and drug abusers to clinics and treatment centers which then provide oversight, regular medicines, and/or housing...
...9 The uncounted urban poor, nontaxpayers without a telephone or address, many of whom are homeless...
...They are, for example, the down-and-outers addicted to drugs or alcohol...
...Except for the working poor, guaranteeing more dollars may temporarily ease their troubles but will not alleviate the underlying causes of their poverty...
...pointed out more than thirty years ago: "What is unique about female-headed households is that all of them, regardless of race, display a seemingly endemic incapacity to foster social mobility comparable to husband-wife and male-headed families...
...ej/~ow entering its 26th summer, the Christian Spirituality Program of Creighton University in Omaha is a pioneer in its field with more than 600 graduates...
...Given the quicksilver character of poverty, each grouping of the poor will require a unique way to leave its poverty behind...
...These nine groupings, not absolutely distinct from one another, account for most of the nation's poor...
...They include, for example, the physically disabled, the senile, and the chronically ill...
...Identifying the poor of the United States by their income dollars, it should be noted, is a relatively recent enterprise...
...In the Great Depression era, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt named the poor as those "ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished...
...and many other programs...
...Then looking at all low-income people, the Census Bureau concluded that 35.6 million Americans lived in "poverty...
...In such families, the breadwinner does not earn a living wage...
...As Senator Daniel P. Moynihan (D-N.Y...
...Less priority, for example, is now being given to ascertaining why some people failed to shed their poverty and more emphasis is put on why others among the poor succeeded in joining the mainstream...
...These are the mainstream poor, those most easily discovered by an income-based index, which, at times, can be useful...
Vol. 127 • January 2000 • No. 2
