Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. THE JOHNSON TOUCH In his recent article, "The Johnson Touch" (NL,...
...New York City John Thompson...
...The problem, of course, is the almost inevitable backlash when the extent of overselling becomes obvious, often leading the press and some legislators to swing to the opposite extreme of denying any validity to the oversold measures...
...If prices rise steadily, incomes must rise steadily to keep up...
...But a quart of milk in those depression days cost about a nickle...
...Kristol suggests that our minimum standards will by then have risen so much higher...
...He does not dig out the fact that a great many of these "homes" are sub-standard and as bad or worse than urban slums...
...Kristol tends also to exaggerate the range of the different income standards for poverty currently used...
...Kristol's statement that 45 per cent of families with incomes between $2,000-$3,000 own their own homes, and that 14 per cent of the families with incomes under $3,000 in a given year purchased new cars that year...
...Yet as Robert R. Nathan stated before the Joint Economic Committee: "As the [President's] Economic Report points out, this is not the correct formulation of the goal...
...One who travels through the country will quickly perceive that millions of the homes so owned are substandard shacks...
...Now what else can this mean but that anyone able to buy a new car isn't too bad off...
...But none of this is important because Kristors point is simple: There are the worthy poor and the unworthy poor...
...you can double the pay check and have no more in the shopping bag...
...Leon H. Keyserling I was not surprised to see Irving Kristol bury that nasty rumor about poverty in America, since he had dealt with unemployment with equal efficiency in an earlier issue...
...The word means something...
...In 1932 I earned about $1,500 (1932 dollars) and was—within limits—decently fed, clothed and housed...
...Seriously, Mr...
...But "our puritan ethos" will prevent this...
...Instead, we have determined the number living in poverty by objective standards bearing upon the number falling far below the income required to purchase even the minimum needed for a health and decency budget set by all serious analysts of this problem...
...Washington, B.C...
...but, whatever 1962 dollars are (were), I suspect that inflation will have had something to do with it...
...We won't have any trouble settling this argument because the poor are becoming more numerous...
...I myself know many Protestant clergymen who find it financially difficult to send their children to college—and a college education is a "must" for a clergyman's offspring...
...A recent NBC Today program devoted two hours to two kinds of poverty—that found in New York City and that in Appalachia...
...He uses two raw statistics to demolish the myth of poverty...
...No genuine puritan could object to this goal...
...A man who starves or freezes to death because he cannot afford food or shelter is poor in an absolute sense...
...But most important, he must know that a great many of these so-called homeowners are old people who made the purchase at an earlier time when they had higher earning power...
...In making his case he is extremely careful never to say that $3,000 is an adequate income for a family, but this is precisely his point...
...And, furthermore, they should be immune to the unrelenting indoctrination which teaches the value of satisfying our wants and neglecting our needs...
...The only statistical trickery that is visible is his own...
...Kristol's statement on poverty will indeed be welcomed by the John Birchers and the AMA spokesmen against Medicare for the aged...
...This is intended to convince us that $3,000 is not bad at all for a family, since we are expected to use the Kristol logic in assuming that these homes are located in Scarsdale or Beverly Hills...
...Could it be that the Radical Right is correct, and that those of us who are concerned about racial discrimination, depressed areas, declining industries and our inadequate manpower retraining program are wrong...
...Kristol's pomposity, statistical cleverness, in sensitivity and selective ignorance have become unbearable...
...Among these families, the vast majority cannot afford the cost of adequate medical care, millions cannot' afford the cost of decent housing, and a great many are malnutritioned and suffer from other basic needs, even though they drive a car...
...He also fails to mention the techniques used to get the poor to buy cars...
...It is particularly distressing in view of the tens of billions of dollars worth of goods and services that could be produced and made available to fight poverty if only our idle manpower and idle plants were fully utilized...
...So why all the noise...
...By 1980, $3,000 may well be unable to buy what $1,500 bought in 1932...
...THE JOHNSON TOUCH In his recent article, "The Johnson Touch" (NL, February 17), Robert Lekachman castigated the Council of Economic Advisers for "its confidence in tax reduction as the sovereign cure-all of the age...
...And what is so surprising about mortgagefree homes that older couples who are now living on a pittance of savings and Social Security have been paying off for 20 or 30 years...
...Surely even he knows (or perhaps he was then too young to remember it now) that $3,000 of real income in 1929 wasn't bad at all...
...When Roosevelt called one third of the nation "ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed," he did not mean merely that they were the bottom 33 per cent in these respects...
...Kristol notes that a mere $13 billion a year would be needed for distribution to the poor, perhaps in the form of a "negative income tax" as advocated by Professor Milton Friedman...
...This is because the Administration is using Census Bureau data which cover only money income, while I use the data of the Office of Business Economics of the Department of Commerce which also cover non-money income...
...He cites a finding that 45 per cent of families earning less than $3,000 own their own homes, and two-thirds are mortgage free...
...That's an interesting way to achieve affluence, isn't it...
...the same may well happen with the tax bill, putting the possibility of rational economic policy even further out of reach in the future than it has usually been in the past...
...But Irving Kristol's article in the same issue, "The Lower Fifth," while it correctly concludes with somewhat the same criticism as the Lekachman article, tends to underplay seriously the size and nature of the poverty problem in the United States...
...First, poverty can be, if not an absolute concept, at least one that approaches the absolute as a limit...
...These were, to be sure, brutally deflated prices, which injured growers and processers, but they point up a moral about purchasing power...
...BALANCHINE Albert Goldman, in his recent article on George Balanchine ("Homage to Mr...
...Until we really try to solve our unemployment problems and correct income distribution, we will find more and more poor people...
...Walter R. Storey While the general logic of Irving Kristol's "The Lower Fifth" strikes me as irrefutable, I should like to call attention to two points in his argument at which disagreement seems possible...
...But neither I nor others have determined the number of poor living in poverty by the number in the lowest income fifth...
...Sidney Koretz In the next issue Irving Kristol will comment on the points raised above and on other aspects of the question of poverty in America —Ed...
...Just this has demonstrably occurred with the Alliance for Progress...
...There is no point in discussing Marxist semantics about "an oppressed social class," but there are many categories of povertystricken people in affluent America...
...Our standard of living has risen, and some poor families can afford TV sets or automobiles, but they are poor because they cannot purchase the basic necessities and comforts of life...
...And the fact that only one family in every seven with incomes under $3,000 bought a new car indicates clearly that the average age of the cars owned by this income group was quite high, and the car might be a necessity to get to work rather than expendable...
...The information Kristol so carefully neglects to supply is just how many of these cars are repossessed...
...in 1936, indicating considerable progress...
...Bridgeport, Conn Milton Millhauser Irving Kristol's piece on "The Lower Fifth" may very well become a classic illustration of the ancient adage about statisticians and liars...
...And, of course, the poor should manage their money better or else why are they poor...
...The other undigested statistic Kristol treasures reeks of the most ancient anti-poor prejudice...
...Kristol seems rather derisive of the finding by me and others that about one-fifth of our people live in poverty, his argument being that there will always be a lowest income fifth no matter how much all incomes, including those at the bottom, go up...
...Or perhaps Kristol is bothered by an alternative solution —taking it off the top and giving it to the bottom in really big blobs...
...Since Kristol claims to have read Herman Miller's book, he might have reported, for example, that "if families were counted by the husband's income only, the number of families with incomes over $10,000 would be cut almost in half...
...This has undoubtedly happened with the present tax bill...
...At the present moment Congress is priming the national economic pump by "restoring" purchasing power to the employed and investing segment of the economy—an economy which is enjoying a period of unprecedented prosperity but losing jobs rapidly...
...Of the thousand or so shacks in one settlement I counted four aerials...
...Does that make them affluent...
...These are conditions which are medically dangerous, and against which our economy (as compared with, say, the medieval) has the remedy in abundance...
...This reminds me of my American friend in Puerto Rico who complained about all the TV sets in the slums...
...In any event, the number of these families buying new cars each year may indicate that we need more education and better values with respect to the distribution of family spending, but has nothing to do with whether these families are poor...
...I prefer Herbert Hoover's statement of August 11, 1928: "We shall soon with the help of God be within sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation...
...He meant that' they literally went hungry and suffered from malnutrition, that they were cold in winter and had no toilets...
...There are some 25 million household units below that figure, comprising over 40 per cent of families and 85 per cent of individual units...
...Kearny, N.J...
...Washington, D.C Ben B. Seligman Irving Kristol made some good points in his article on poverty, but I wish the last paragraph about a "rhetorical war against poverty" had been omitted...
...This happens now to come to ohe-fifth which is...
...It seems a fair guess that some prices (and some profits) will rise as more money in the same hands competes for goods and investments, while the unemployed will, by and large, continue to feel the pinch...
...This emphasizes precisely the point he wishes to depreciate—that standards and levels of living do shift and that families with incomes of $5,000 today have a rather rough time making ends meet...
...Secondly, why will $3,000 in 1962 dollars buy so little (we suppose) in 1980...
...There are many working people who cannot afford to rent the so-called "middle-income" apartments which are available in our big cities...
...Kristol would drive off the turnpikes the next time he takes a trip (assuming he ever gets out of New York these days) he would discover that poverty is more than the rhetoric of politics...
...We will then have the mixture as before: color television, automation, and hunger...
...While the Administration is now saying that multiple-person families with incomes below $3,000 live in poverty, while I use $4,000, the alternatives result in about the same one-fifth of the population and about the same people...
...Washington, D.C...
...a loaf of bread cost a dime for a while, then dropped to a nickle too...
...it is even more true for foreign aid in general, and the Alliance for Progress in particular...
...Both are somewhat over a quarter today...
...His talent for toying with national problems is, indeed, impressive...
...It was prophecy when Hoover said it: we are within sight of the day when poverty will indeed be banished from the richest nation in the world...
...The real problem is not bad economic analysis on the part of the Council, as he seems to imply, but the feature of the American political process by which particular economic measures are inevitably so oversold that they do indeed begin to look like panaceas...
...To suffer from them, therefore, is to be poor...
...The Johnson sleight of hand program fools no one...
...His treatment of poverty as something very relative and unreal is more reflective of his own bias than of reality...
...much lower than the one-third indicated loosely as being in poverty by F.D.R...
...Benedict Martorana Irving Kristol has surely lost his sense of social reality when he asserts, "The poor in America are not an oppressed social class but a statistical segment...
...Certainly, recipients of public assistance or persons depending solely on unemployment compensation cannot afford adequate housing, clothing and food...
...From where Kristol views the world, it would seem we are worried about underprivileged people who do not exist...
...New York City Richard Bird Department of Economics Columbia University POVERTY IN THE U.S...
...After reminding us that "a concern with the distribution of wealth is not exactly the same thing as a concern with poverty," he forgets this when he ends on the note that "there will always be a lower fifth...
...by this he can only mean that he does not recognize an "emotion" in himself when viewing them...
...It does not occur to Kristol that thousands of these so-called "homes" are located in depressed, stagnating, and dying areas and can be had for just a few thousand dollars...
...While I agree with much of Lekachman's criticism of the Johnson economic program, I think this remark misses the target...
...It should be sufficient refutation, without raising the question of what is or is not "curious" in the relation of the sexes, or of Goldman's rather shocking personal references, to state that one other viewer believes Balanchine's dances cause him to feel emotions he can only call very strong, which I so state...
...He makes the error of assuming that home ownership can be equated with adequate housing...
...If a family receiving $3,000 a year or less is not poor, as Kristol claims, then why doesn't he and his family try living on $60 a week for a month...
...He reports that 14 per cent of those families earning $3000 bought new cars in 1960...
...This will require a massive investment in education, health, housing, urban rehabilitation, and area redevelopment, and relentless programs to end the many discriminations that fence in the poor, keeping them in their poverty...
...Perhaps...
...B.," NL, March 2), can offer for the validity of his general and sly disfavor only the statement that Balanchine's dances lack "emotion...
...Robert Lekachman's article, "The Johnson Touch" (NL, February 17), states excellently the weakness in the current anti-poverty program and the generally inadequate and regressive nature of our national economic policies directed toward higher economic growth and lower unemployment...
...If Mr...
...the distinction between home ownership and rental housing is not the distinction between decent housing and indecent housing...
...Since when does a decrepit auto held together with baling wire make an itinerant farm worker affluent...
...According to the Census of 1960, about one family in every six in metropolitan areas who lived in their own "homes" lived nonetheless in' unsound housing...
...If good legislation can only be achieved by such ballyhoo, there might be nothing wrong with this procedure...
...There is also the possibility of drawing the wrong conclusion from Mr...
...Philadelphia, Pa...
...He must know, too, that they are now watching their homes deteriorate because maintenance is impossible on $3,000 a year...
...Of course, somebody is at the bottom in any statistical distribution, but the objective is to shift the whole pattern upward so that those at the bottom can live a bit more easily...
...The goal is to break through the vicious cycle of low living standards, low education, low productivity, and impoverishment that causes poverty to persist from generation to generation in this rich country...
...I deny this is mere rhetoric...
...To testify in favor of Herbert Hoover's vision we had Robert R. Nathan on January 29 before the Joint Economic Committee: "Our poverty is nothing less than a national scandal...
...The rest of us refrain from making frivolous purchases, don't we...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 6
