WILLFUL SHORTSIGHTEDNESS ON POVERTY
Harrington, Michael
The White House euphoria over the drop in the poverty rate to 14.4 percent in 1984 is deeply disturbing. In celebrating a statistical "triumph," President Reagan and his staff have obscured a...
...It muddies our understanding as well...
...The most dynamic recovery in 30 years, as the president calls it, has an unemployment rate that, in the antediluvian age of a decade ago, would have been associated with a deep recession...
...Reagan's view, the superiority of free enterprise— blindly ignores the fact that the poverty rate is now higher than it has been in any year since 1965, with the exception of 1982 and 1983...
...And that is true even though the event is hardly a surprise...
...How does one deal with such scandalous numbers...
...Every expert predicted the 1984 decline in poverty because real economic growth of almost 6 percent in that year would inevitably help some people at the bottom of the ladder...
...This new callousness, however, does not simply corrupt our values...
...There is growing evidence that economic growth in the '80s is much less effective in eliminating poverty than it was in the '60s, that the reshaping of the occupational structure, the technological revolution, and the internationalization of the economy are creating an environment in which poverty is all the more tenacious...
...Reprinted by permission...
...The Administration simply redefined tax expenditures to make them go down on paper even as they went up in real life...
...But the Administration's simplistic and ideological response to the new numbers—they prove, in Mr...
...By law, the Treasury is required to itemize those deductions in a "tax expenditure budget...
...New York Times, Op-Ed page, September 9, 1985...
...Another example...
...For instance, unemployment went from a recession high of almost 11 percent in 1982 to 7.3 percent in October 1984...
...In 1981, the Congriosional Budget Office tells us, the Reagan tax cuts increased the disposable income of households with over $80,000 a year by $8,930 and decreased that of households with less than $10,000 a year by $440...
...America was turned into a fairer society by a crafty stroke of the pen...
...That reactionary governmental redistribution of income was partly the result of deductions that discriminated in favor of the rich and against the poor...
...In recent years, shoddy interpretations of statistics have regularly provided a basis for moral indifference and political complacency...
...In the 1984 election campaign, this trend was cited as a measure of the Administration's economic success, and one was constantly reminded of the millions of jobs generated by the recovery...
...But there is no comment on the fact that we have "advanced" to poverty levels we reached 20 years ago...
...So 8.5 million people out of work—and millions driven from the labor market who are forced to take part-time jobs—are just a fact of social life these days...
...And now there is the jubilation that there were only 33.7 million poor people in 1984—which is higher than the number of the poor in 1964, when President Johnson declared his war on poverty...
...This willful shortsightedness is not new...
...A oneyear improvement, from 1983 to 1984, is said to vindicate our economic policies...
...And that is a threat, not simply to the poor but to all of us, an important fact that the current ignorant celebration utterly obscures...
...Any reduction in the number of the poor is, of course, a reason to rejoice...
...Copyright c 1985 by the New York Times Company...
...Few remembered that John F. Kennedy targeted a 3 percent unemployment rate, or that the Republican party was savaged by the electorate in the Congressional elections of 1970 because joblessness had soared to 4.8 percent...
...In celebrating a statistical "triumph," President Reagan and his staff have obscured a larger injustice...
Vol. 33 • January 1986 • No. 1
