So Rich, So Poor: Why It's so Hard to End Poverty in America

By Peter Edelman

“A competent, thorough assessment from a veteran expert in the field.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
Income disparities in our wealthy nation are wider than at any point since the Great Depression. The structure of today’s economy has stultified wage growth for half of America’s workers—with even worse results at the bottom and for people of color—while bestowing billions on the few at the very top.
 
In this “accessible and inspiring analysis”, lifelong anti-poverty advocate Peter Edelman assesses how the United States can have such an outsized number of unemployed and working poor despite important policy gains. He delves into what is happening to the people behind the statistics and takes a particular look at young people of color, for whom the possibility of productive lives is too often lost on the way to adulthood (Angela Glover Blackwell).
 
For anyone who wants to understand one of the critical issues of twenty-first century America, So Rich, So Poor is “engaging and informative” (William Julius Wilson) and “powerful and eloquent” (Wade Henderson).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781595589576

Peter Edelman

Peter Edelman is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Public Policy and the faculty director of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown University Law Center. Edelman was a top advisor to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and served in President Bill Clinton’s administration. He is the author of So Rich, So Poor (The New Press) and lives in Washington, D.C.

Book preview

ACCLAIM FOR

So Rich, So Poor

A strongly argued, morally energetic effort, buttressed by abundant economic and political documentary information.

—Robert Coles, professor emeritus, Harvard University

We will be an immeasurably better, more just country if we take to heart the indispensible counsel Peter Edelman—among the most important and smartest protagonists in the national debate about poverty for over forty years—offers here.

—Deepak Bhargava, executive director, Center for Community Change

If you are a layperson, the book is a chance to absorb more than you probably ever realized is at the heart of the fight against poverty; if you are someone who has long been involved in the fight against poverty, I have little doubt you will find new ideas, angles, or inspiration in these pages. This is a man who has devoted a lifetime to fighting poverty and is passing along what he’s learned. It’s a gift, frankly.

—Greg Kaufmann, The Nation

Few Americans know more about poverty policy than Edelman.

—Chicago Reader

Powerful and eloquent—should be required reading for anyone who cares about the future of our nation.

—Wade Henderson, president and CEO, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Bobby believed that, ‘as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.’ Much has changed in forty-five years, but as Peter eloquently reminds us, far too many Americans remain trapped in the web of economic injustice. His compassionate and singular voice awakens our conscience and calls us to action.

—Ethel Kennedy

Peter Edelman’s long experience in Washington gives him a unique historical perspective that provides important insights for policy makers and socially conscious citizens today.

—Henry A. Waxman, member of the U.S. House of Representatives

An interesting and important antidote to discussions of poverty policy that ignore the history of the past fifty years.

—Robert Greenstein, founder and president, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

An insightful exploration into our nation’s tragic crisis of poverty and income inequality, with a framework for developing solutions. A ‘must’ read for anyone organizing for a more just and fair society.

—Mary Kay Henry, president, Service Employees International Union

This timely book is must reading for students, faculty, and professionals in the fields of political science, economics, public policy, and public finance. Essential.

—Choice

SAM HOLLENSHEAD

Peter Edelman is a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. A top adviser to Senator Robert F. Kennedy from 1964 to 1968, he went on to serve in senior positions in President Bill Clinton’s administration, from which he resigned in protest after Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform legislation.

ALSO BY PETER EDELMAN

Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men (with Harry J. Holzer and Paul Offner)

Searching for America’s Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope

Adolescence and Poverty (co-edited with Joyce Ladner)

SO RICH, SO POOR

WHY IT’S SO HARD TO END

POVERTY IN AMERICA

Peter Edelman

NEW YORK

LONDON

© 2012, 2013 by Peter Edelman

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form,

without written permission from the publisher.

Requests for permission to reproduce selections

from this book should be mailed to:

Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street,

New York, NY 10013.

First published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2012

This paperback edition published by The New Press, 2013

Distributed by Perseus Distribution

ISBN 978-1-59558-957-6 (e-book)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Edelman, Peter B.

So rich, so poor : why it’s so hard to end poverty in America / Peter Edelman.

p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1.Poverty—United States.2.United States—Social conditions—21st century.3.United States—Social policy—21st century.4.Poor—Government policy—United States.I.Title.

HC110.P6E34 2012

339.4’60973—dc232011052784

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Composition by dix!

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For Ellika, Zoe, Levi, and Elijah

CONTENTS

Introduction to the Paperback Edition

1. A Snapshot of Our Current Mess

2. What We Have Accomplished

3. Why Are We Stuck?

4. Jobs: The Economy and Public Policy Go South (for Most of Us)

5. Deep Poverty: A Gigantic Hole in the Safety Net

6. Concentrated Poverty: The Abandoned

7. Young People: Improving the Odds

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

I started writing this book in early 2011. I write now in the spring of 2013, just a little more than two years later. A great deal has happened, headlined by the reelection of Barack Obama for a second term that many thought would not come to pass. Helped as it may have been by Mitt Romney’s unerring capacity to offend, the president’s reelection seemed to be a transcendent moment, a triumph for the belief that we can and do move forward. But this is a weird time. So far, four more years have turned out not to be the harbinger of a new American political spring but rather just a vote to keep the country from slipping backward. The question now is not how to move forward but mainly how to hold on to what we have, especially for the millions of people in economic distress whose situation is at risk of deteriorating even further.

My subject here is poverty and inequality. For the short-term prospects of the have-nots in our country, the election had a double significance. President Obama won and Governor Romney lost. I suppose that one way to feel better about the current dismal state of things is to consider what it would be like if Romney had won the election. And the second-term President Obama at least sounds more like what we expected the first time around. The first-term Obama may have led us to historic accomplishments—topped by the Affordable Care Act and the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—but, especially after the disastrous midterm election of 2010, he didn’t sound much like the man who proclaimed the audacity of hope. By contrast, in his inaugural address the second-term Obama talked about poverty and proposed raising the minimum wage, a new initiative on child care and child development, and a new (and fully inclusive) Race to the Top for science and technology education.

On the other hand, we remain stuck in a place not much different from where we were in 2011. The president may have won the election, but the Republicans can still demand hurtful budget cuts and policy changes as their price for not running the country into the ground. And the Republicans’ disproportionate leverage is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Their widespread electoral successes in 2010 enabled them to gerrymander legislatures and congressional districts in numerous states and consequently make it very difficult to regain power. Even though the Democrats won the House of Representatives in the national popular vote, that body remains in Republican hands, and the Tea Party still holds an outsize influence. This deadlock underscores the imperative for a long-term political effort with the perseverance to translate the impending new demographic majority of minorities into governmental power.

Serious progress on poverty and a decent living for the millions of workers who live from paycheck to paycheck depend on this political effort. Of course a strong economy is the most powerful weapon to get people working and earning more money, but public policy has a lot to do with that, and even more with the way in which the income generated by the economy is spread around. As of 2000, we had done a fair job of minimizing the damage stemming from becoming a low-wage nation. The rich were definitely getting richer and had been since the early 1970s, but when Bill Clinton left office poverty was about the same as it had been in 1973, when it had hit an all-time low (since we started counting) of 11.1 percent.

But then poverty went up—by 6 million people before the recession started and 9 million more after that. President Obama’s Recovery Act kept 5 million or more people from dropping into poverty, and at the depth of the recession our various public policies, including Social Security and other programs, were keeping 40 million people out of poverty. But we still have 46 million people in poverty and 106 million with incomes below twice the poverty line (an income of less than $38,000 for a family of three).

What’s worse, Governor Romney could actually think and say out loud that 47 percent of our people are takers, and the right wing has once again mounted a constant barrage of attacks on the poor and the near-poor after a period of comparative quiet that began when the 1996 welfare law was enacted. During the recent presidential campaign, the Romney campaign continued to run an anti-welfare ad long after fact checkers in the mainstream media had widely pronounced it to be false. Why? Because it polled well.

So things are worse for tens of millions of people for whom the recession is far from over, and the Republicans find nonetheless that it is good politics to attack welfare, meaning not the now-tiny program of cash assistance for mothers and children but programs like food stamps that help large numbers of people.

We need a different politics—and not just for the 100-plus million people in tough economic straits. The people in the top 1 percent had an 11 percent increase in their income from 2009 through 2011 (during the recession, in case you didn’t notice), while the other 99 percent had an average decrease of 0.4 percent.

I’ve been at this a long time.

I had the privilege of working for Robert Kennedy in the U.S. Senate nearly half a century ago. He was a man who—arguably unlike anybody at that level since—was deeply committed to doing something very serious about poverty in this country and the intersection of poverty and race. I had the opportunity to travel the country with him and to learn as he learned: by listening and talking to people and witnessing their struggles.

We met children suffering from extreme hunger in Mississippi and farmworkers fighting for a decent wage and the right to organize in the San Joaquin Valley of California. We worked with people pursuing community economic empowerment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of New York City and saw the enduring poverty of former coal miners striving against feudal local politics in eastern Kentucky. We encountered Native American children who had been shipped to white-run boarding schools thousands of miles from their homes and migrant farmworkers living in abandoned buses in upstate New York. I learned much more about what it’s like to be poor than I could have ever learned from books.

The purpose of this book is to look at why it has turned out to be so hard to end American poverty and how we might do better. I don’t write with any feeling of futility. Of course anyone who cares would wish that we had made more of a dent. But as I’ll explain in more detail, we’ve accomplished a lot. The idea that nothing works is a canard. The policy gains outweigh the policy losses by a considerable measure even with the recent deterioration of the situation. The problem is that the policy gains have been nullified by economic trends that eroded the earnings of millions while vastly enriching a super-elite whose wealth and income have reached unprecedented levels.

America and poverty are words that should not appear in the same sentence. We are the wealthiest country in the world. That we should have poverty at all is oxymoronic. That we have the highest child poverty rate in the industrialized world is downright shameful.

It’s not because we aren’t a generous nation. Americans volunteer time and donate dollars enthusiastically. They help at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. They mentor and tutor low-income children. They fund scholarships, and on and on. We have a nonprofit sector that is unparalleled in the world. But this is not enough.

I thought the Great Recession might renew our commitment. I thought that poverty striking millions who had assumed they were economically secure might enlist their involvement in bringing about a politics of responsiveness and empathy that would include the already poor as well as the newly impoverished. It certainly seemed that way at the beginning of the Obama administration.

President Obama’s stimulus legislation made a surprisingly large investment not only in extended and enlarged unemployment compensation and other help for the newly unemployed but also in measures offering significant support to those who were struggling before the recession began.

Yet even as he took positive action, Obama made little use of the word poverty. I was disappointed that he seldom said the p word, and his emphasis on the middle class with infrequent reference to those at the bottom annoyed me. Ironically, it was Governor Romney who brought up poverty in the campaign, although he did so to attack the poor (and then some) and the supposed failure of the programs we have to help them. (Never mind that the two attacks are internally inconsistent.)

Our president stands in the bully pulpit, and more than anyone, he has the power to educate and lead us toward the full inclusion of every single individual in our national community. Our national leadership must engage the nation in a straightforward discussion of American poverty. Discarding the life possibilities of one in every five children makes a mockery of our claim that we offer opportunity to all. Nor is explicit reference to poverty enough. The discussion has to be placed in a broader framework of economic inequality and social immobility, and poverty must be an explicit part of it.

Unfortunately, things turned sour quite quickly in Obama’s first term. The attitude of much of the public hardened even toward the victims of the recession, let alone the longer-term poor. Deficit hawks proclaimed the need for immediate austerity or risk fiscal Armageddon and found a ready audience. The already poor, briefly lifted up for positive action in the wake of Obama’s victory, were reassigned to their role as a punching bag for Fox News.

And with the terrible budget agreement struck to get the debt ceiling increased in the summer of 2011, the disastrous condition of state and local treasuries, and the prospect that recovery from the recession will take a long time, the poor face the worst of what looks like a long siege for a large segment of our population. Job prospects remain dismal. The Republican refusal to consider further revenue increases portends deeper and deeper cuts at the federal level in programs for the poor. And struggling state and local governments are still cutting programs that would reduce the negative impact on the poor—some with evident enthusiasm.

We have become more and more entrenched in what Paul Krugman calls a two-speed world. We are a society of dichotomies: of gated communities and ghastly ghettos, of yachts and people who don’t even have a life raft, of private jets and children whose wings are clipped early, long before they could even consider flying. We need a more honest and candid discussion of these disparities, and we need it sooner rather than later.

It has always been hard to galvanize broad support for public policy directed at reducing poverty. Too many Americans are skeptical about public policy to help the poor, especially as they view the poor in their mind’s eye. Beginning with the Bible and continuing through the Elizabethan poor laws, throughout history there has been an instinctive belief among some that the poor have no one to blame but themselves. A special version of this illusion exists in the United States, the Horatio Alger myth that one makes it (or doesn’t) on one’s own. The pioneer spirit and rugged individualism—values to be admired on the whole—contribute to the American version of the blame the poor story.

We need to be clear that public policy has indeed made a huge difference in the lives of poor people, beginning with the New Deal. Starting with the Social Security Act of 1935, continuing with the burst of activity in the 1960s, and on from there, we actually have made great progress—in steps sometimes not noticed by the general public that are often done incrementally and in fits and starts when an opportunity presents itself, yet progress that is vital for those who benefit. That we already have multiple policies and programs that are effective in reducing poverty is a major point of this book.

We enacted Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and many health indicators for low-income people did improve. We enacted food stamps, and the near-starvation conditions we saw in some parts of the country were ameliorated. We enacted the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, and the incomes of low-wage workers with children have climbed. We enacted Pell grants, and millions of people can afford college who otherwise could not possibly attend. We enacted Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and the income floor rose for elderly and disabled people whose earnings from work didn’t provide enough social security. And there is much more—housing vouchers, Head Start, child care assistance, and legal services for the poor, to name a few. The Obama administration and Congress added a possible 16 million people to Medicaid, appropriated billions to improve the education of low-income children, and spent a surprising amount on the least well off—more than $150 billion—in the Recovery Act.

To suggest dismissively—as so many conservatives do—that we waged a war on poverty, and poverty won simply because there is still poverty is like saying the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts failed because there is still pollution.

I make four major points in this book about what has happened and what we still need to do. At the end of the 1960s, when poverty had been cut almost in half in just a decade, there was every reason to believe further progress was in store. Instead, the path to the present has been full of surprises. I can certainly say for myself that I did not expect events to take shape as they did.

So my first major point is that we have to understand why, despite the achievements of the New Deal, the Great Society, and onward, we still have so much poverty. Three forces—all unforeseen in large measure forty years ago—account for what has happened. Most important is the fundamental change that occurred in the American economy. Good-paying jobs went overseas and gave way to automation, and low-wage work became ubiquitous. Millions of people are worse off now than their parents were, and even more millions are on a