ON POLITICAL BOOKS Homeless in Hot Tubs
DeParle, Jason
ON POLITICAL BOOKS Homeless in Hot Tubs by Jason DeParle Want to wipe out poverty? Give a conservative a calculator. Kitty Kelley needn't fear the competition, but a little-known paperback...
...And half of the nation's female-headed families live in poverty...
...Washington needs conservative analysts to keep its liberal analysts honest, and vice versa...
...Mississippi yearning One thing that makes this game possible is that few Washington poverty experts spend any time with poor people, who are almost always more complicated and compelling than the theories about them...
...In 1973, 16 percent of those blacks who finished high school had earnings defined as low (less than $12,000 in 1987 figures...
...This is no accident...
...Put aside for a moment the cacophonous questions of blame—who's doing his part and who isn't—and listen to what we know about the kinds of lives that American children are inheriting...
...Wendel Thompson, the Energy Department official who managed the study, said this is statistical malpractice—"we don't think you can make any estimate at all from our survey...
...Fair enough—when the table shows that the top 1 percent of American families more than doubled their real incomes between 1977 and 1988, it overestimates how much they really gained on some of those stock transactions...
...But what really isn't in dispute is that the gap between the rich and poor has grown...
...Armey says that it is the foundation "for the whole fairness debate that the left wing of American politics tries to use...
...Earlier this year, on a trip through the Mississippi Delta, I met a 34-year-old woman named Betty Briggs, whose fifth child, C. L., had just died of pneumonia at the age of six months—another tick on the infant mortality count...
...It is easy to summon from the chaos of Betty's life ample evidence for the behavioral theory of infant mortality...
...And those are just the figures on income...
...Do they really think that poverty in America is the creation of some sneaky liberal statistician...
...Real after-tax income for the middle fifth dropped 7 percent...
...because she failed to keep him away from her own mother when she contracted pneumonia, exposing him to the contagion that killed him...
...But who can read that chart and not worry that, by whichever number chosen, something in this country has gone awfully sour...
...Some people might think that leaves the glass 99.8 percent empty...
...subtract the amount of taxes they pay, and the number rises...
...But then again, the table counts only the stocks that got cashed in...
...Count as income the value of noncash benefits like subsidized housing, and the number of poor people falls...
...It took two visits before she let on that she hides her only remembrances of C. L. five dim Polaroids of his crib-sized casket—inside a hollowed-out compartment in a stereo receiver, beneath a potted plant, so that she won't be tempted to look at them...
...The Green Book offers five wildly varying ways to count the number of homeless children in America...
...Heritage then devised a formula for extrapolating for all poor families...
...By 1987, 37 percent of black high school graduates were earning that little...
...Here's a surprising figure: While the percentage of whites and hispanics who neither finish high school nor pass an equivalency exam has stayed stagnant for the past 20 years, the percentage of blacks without a high school education has dropped by half...
...While the Green Book covers an endless number of topics—from food stamps to homelessness, Medicare to child care—what angers its critics are the tables that show increasing inequality in the distribution of American income...
...Every time I look at the pictures, I cry...
...Studies of the concentration of all accumulated wealth show much greater disparities, with the top 1 percent of the population owning between 20 and 30 percent of the nation's net assets...
...Depending on the years chosen, the growth in inequality can look smaller or larger...
...That the homeless people they step over on the way to work slink off at night to Montgomery County jacuzzis...
...If data existed to measure the increased value of "unrealized capital gains"—the stocks, cars, vacation homes, artworks, and jewels that are still in portfolios—the rich would look even richer...
...Betty herself is a sweet and passive woman who was born with a crossed eye and has lost about half her teeth...
...The book suggests that you ought to be, since 65 percent of those on welfare at any time will stay there for at least eight years...
...Even more to the point, the incomes of the richest 1 percent more than doubled even when capital gains are left out altogether...
...She smiles at strangers but says little...
...I think most analysts would agree that there's an increase in inequality," said Marvin Kosters, the head of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank with little interest in fomenting class conflict...
...What's next—a study showing how infant mortality reduces family food costs...
...In the past, the book was of interest mainly to a select group of squinchy-eyed policy analysts who combed its bar charts and shrunken type looking for revelations...
...by 1989, the figure had fallen to 14 percent...
...The poorest fifth of American families lost 13 percent, the book says...
...Ironically, although it's being tagged as a liberal tool, the Green Book offers plenty of information that suggests conservatives have been right to worry about the behavioral components of poverty...
...The Heritage study ended by likening the Census Bureau's report to a Soviet-style disinformation campaign...
...Concerned that welfare is a trap...
...Choose whatever measure you want and you'll come up with a different figure...
...The baby may have died because he was born prematurely after Betty's father shot at 'her during an argument, causing her to flee and fall...
...that pushed Betty from school after sixth grade...
...Green achers Now, as always, there is a debate about who bears the blame for poverty—the poor or the rest of us...
...Jason DeParle is a reporter for The New York Times...
...This, in fact, is often the case, though it will offer little solace to the infants or to the mothers...
...In some periods, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer...
...Indeed, the Census Bureau offers 27 experimental measures of poverty in addition to its official one, showing poverty rates as low as 7.6 percent or as high as 20.3 percent...
...One source of Washington's see-no-evil thinking is the Heritage Foundation, which despite making some serious contributions to Kemp's cause, both through ideas and personnel, also delights in studies meant to debunk such alleged liberal shibboleths as the shortage of low-income housing...
...There are those of us who think there ain't too much to do," was the way one domestic policy consultant to the White House explained it to me not long ago...
...But you'll also come up with poverty—and no shortage of it...
...It entered my mind that God might want to punish me for something I didn't do right...
...In 1970, 28 percent of blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 failed to get degrees...
...Heritage does have a point if it wants to argue that any measure of poverty is subjective...
...By the mid-eighties, Canada had cut its child poverty rate a notch, to 9 percent, while the American rate ballooned to more than 20 percent...
...After bottoming out in 1969, child poverty rates have soared...
...A skeptical researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank with liberal leanings, decided to investigate...
...This is the kind of government-by-phony-anecdote stuff that Ronald Reagan used to feed on, the social policy equivalent of the argument that smog comes from trees...
...When the Census Bureau reported last fall that 13 percent of the population, or 32 million Americans, fell below the poverty line, Heritage responded with a "backgrounder" scoffing at the figure and arguing that 22,000 of those so-called poor people actually owned heated swimming pools or jacuzzis—an assertion that Robert Rector, one of the paper's authors, then repeated on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal...
...What's more, as university professors increasingly consult it as a reference, he says, its "Marxist, class-conflict" perspective will filter down to American youth and build "a lot of misinformation into our young people's understanding of their own nation...
...Heritage prefers to argue that it's 0.2 percent full...
...Four of the six items he cites are merely typos, hardly surprising in a volume this large...
...The Green Book shows that a full quarter of white children— and a stunning 64 percent of black children— are being born to single mothers...
...Richard Armey, a Texas Republican with a doctorate in economics, they argue that it's a cooked book—a collection of phony statistics ginned up by Democratic staff members to paint a misleading portrait of inequality in America and justify the twin goals of Big Government and High Taxes...
...Democrats played the "fairness issue" with great success during last fall's budget debates, scuttling Republican proposals by portraying them as sop-the-poor measures...
...The 1991 Green Book* is a 1,641-page compendium of social welfare statistics put together by staff members of the House Ways and Means Committee—the 11th annual volume, and the largest to date...
...Worried about family disintegration...
...But what do those students who've stuck it out and stayed in school have to show for it...
...Heritage Study Says Housing Shortage is Washington Fiction," the press release said...
...And the Ways and Means aide who churned out those analyses during the budget debate, Wendell Primus, happens to be the Green Book's primary author...
...because Betty chain-smoked hand-rolled King Albert cigarettes throughout her pregnancy...
...The answer, of course, is often both, and in social policy circles there's been much recent talk about a new consensus of mutual obligation: that the poor deserve more help and that society has a right to set certain standards of effort...
...That is, if George Herbert Walker Bush bought $1,000 worth of stock in 1977 and sold it for $1,500 in 1990, the budget office, using IRS data, would count that as a gain of $500 when in fact it's really a $657 loss...
...And even though Armey argues that all the seemingly innocent mistakes "shoot to the Left," two of the four don't exaggerate inequality, they understate it...
...Led by Rep...
...With as many charts and graphs as the Green Book contains, it's not hard to find a statistical nit to pick...
...Along with Republican Senators William Roth and Connie Mack, Armey has sent out a "Green Book Correction Quiz," designed to show the flaws in the Democratic stats...
...It now contains a subculture of clever policy analysts who excel at explaining away the plentiful evidence of meanness in American life...
...1991 Green Book: Background Material and Data on Programs Within the Jurisdiction of the Committee on Ways and Means...
...Kitty Kelley needn't fear the competition, but a little-known paperback has just hit the Washington market with a dramatic real-life story...
...But go ahead and take the Heritage number at face value, and it still only amounts to 0.2 percent of the poverty population...
...His more substantive argument is that, relying on data from the Congressional Budget Office, the Green Book exaggerates inequality by failing to account for inflation when figuring capital gains...
...Read the Green Book as a novel and you have Les Miserables —a story of the rich growing richer and the poor succumbing to all manner of woes...
...Currently, some Washington experts argue that America's infant mortality problem isn't really as bad as it seems because it's largely an "underclass problem"— one driven not by the lack of available care but by the behavior of mothers who drink, take drugs, or otherwise contribute to their own neglect...
...Their wages and salaries rose by 120 percent from 1977 to 1988, while those of the other nine-tenths of American society actually fell by 3.5 percent...
...When she gets up at night to use the bathroom, she is more maternal than awake, and she looks toward his room to see if he's all right...
...What's interesting about this year's volume is that it has drawn a counterattack from several conservatives in Congress, who first tried to stop the book's publication and then sent out mock warning labels calling the book "hazardous to economic health...
...But what may be more disturbing is the story the book tells about average Americans who are doing the right things, like working and staying in school, and slipping nonetheless...
...that killed 5 of her 12 siblings in their infancy...
...The researcher, Ed Lazere, found that Heritage produced the 22,000 figure by taking an Energy Department survey that had found four such households in a survey of 1,000...
...Armey has a point when he argues that the data on inequality can be easily jiggered for partisan reasons...
...Feint by numbers Washington values cleverness more than wisdom...
...And in the past 10 years the number of families with someone working three-quarters time or more, but still remaining in poverty, grew 46 percent...
...After some of these debunking studies, one begins to wonder what kind of world these analysts are living in...
...Rector said he used a formula that can correct for the tiny sample size and argued there's a 98 percent probability that the 22,000 figure is correct...
...Oddly enough, this brand of "what problem...
...Leave aside for a moment the question of liberal solutions—what the book does is show that the nation has a lot of work left to do to make the words "and justice for all" anything more than a vacant slogan...
...Calling the book a "database for demagogues," Rep...
...Of course, it's possible, too, to set the drama of C. L.'s death on the larger stage of mean Mississippi history, since the inheritance of several centuries' unadorned subjugation played as large a role as the virus—the sharecropper life that sent Betty's mother moving from shack to shack...
...Government Printing Office, $34...
...In others, the rich got richer and the poor also got richer—though much more slowly...
...But the energy now being invested in explaining away the suffering of a nation of Americans like Betty Briggs would be better spent on finding ways to ease it...
...But what's finally striking about the volume is how solid a case it makes for the old liberal concerns about equality and opportunity...
...I feel like dying myself," she says, staring at the floor...
...politics is thriving alongside its exact opposite—Jack Kemp's version of bleeding-heart conservatism, which, whatever else may be said of it, cannot be accused of pretending poverty away...
...It's not just the bottom fifth of American society that lost ground from 1977 to 1988...
...Increasingly little—less, in many instances, than the dropouts who preceded them a generation ago but who had steel mills and assembly lines to fall back on...
...A decade ago, the United States and Canada were vaguely comparable in this regard-10 percent of Canadian children were poor, while 15 percent of American children were...
Vol. 23 • July 1991 • No. 7
