Economic Development

By Mark Levinson

Vol. 1, No. 3, 1978, p. 24

The debate over Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) is one of the perennial attractions of the Georgia legislature. Each year, when all the other issues have been settled, when every legislator’s pet project is safely funded, AFDC remains, the subject for posturing and polemics, last-minute pleas and a final, anticlimactic vote. When they cut up the budgetary pie in Georgia, the slice that’s left over goes for AFDC.

AFDC is the program commonly called “welfare.” Though it started over 40 years ago as one of several New Deal programs to provide income to the poor, AFDC alone has come to bear the stigma of a “welfare” program. Common preconceptions of shiftless welfare mothers having babies and driving Cadillacs have come to obscure the fact that the principal beneficiaries of AFDC are children, children who are deprived of parental care because of the absence or disability of one or both parents. Over one in eight children in the United States today is receiving AFDC benefits.

It has in so many other things, the South has lagged well behind the rest of the nation in AFDC benefit levels. Of the 12 Southern states, only Virginia pays AFDC benefits above the national average. The rest are on the bottom of the ladder, from Kentucky, where the maximum benefit for a family of four was $220 a month in 1977, to Mississippi, where the same family could get $60. In Georgia, the most a family of four can receive is $148 a month.

But the annual debate in the Georgia General Assembly deals with more than just the amount of AFDC benefits. The conservative leadership of the House of Representatives, led by Appropriations Committee Chairman Joe Frank Harris, has made a practice of inserting restrictions into the state budget each year which keep the AFDC appropriation, in the same budget, from being spent in its entirety. Thus, legislators seeking more money for AFDC recipients are forced to seek technical changes in the language of the appropriations bill in addition to a larger appropriation.

In 1975, AFDC had grown to take up 7.6 percent of Georgia’s state budget; over $138 million was apppropriated for AFDC. But in that year, fiscal crisis struck. Sales and income tax receipts dropped drastically due to the recession, and Gov. George Busbee called the General Assembly into special session to cut the budget. Teachers’ pay raises and property tax relief got the ax. So did AFDC. Over $10 million was cut from the welfare budget. The percentage of the state’s own estimate of need which was actually paid to recipients dropped from 71 percent to 62 percent, cutting the maximum grant for a family of four from $161 to $141 per month.

What followed reads like a comedy of errors. In addition to the percentage limitation, the legislature had decreed that in no case could the average benefit per recipient exceed $32 per month. When the percentage of need paid was lowered, thousands of people receiving tiny benefits (and thus remaining eligible for Medicaid) were cut from the rolls. Without their $1 and $2 per month payments dragging down the average, it rose above $32. Since this was illegal, another cut in benefits had to be made. Again, thousands of beneficiaries with low payments were cut from the rolls, raising the average again. The process repeated itself one more time before state officials were able to bring it to a halt. By the time the dust cleared, over 100,000 people had been cut from the rolls in a six-month period, including almost all the “working poor.”

The intervening three years have been spent defensively, in a successful attempt to ward off further cuts in AFDC. Much of that modest success has been due to the efforts of Francis Pauley, an indefatigable 76-year-old former HEW worker who spends her retirement working for the Georgia Poverty Rights Organization. For four years, Pauley has stumped the state, meeting with church and civic groups, legal services clients’ councils and local activists from Rome to Brunswick. During the legislative session from January to March, she spends much of her time at the Capitol, lobbying legislators and challenging anti-AFDC pronouncements by the leadership.

Pauley’s work has had a cumulative effect. Today, while misunderstanding is still widespread, AFDC is clearly on the political agenda in Georgia. New groups, such as a ministerial organization called Christians Against Hunger in Georgia, have formed as concern about the low level of AFDC benefits has spread far beyond the activist community. Groups in every part of the state are organizing to contact their legislators about AFDC. A statewide public information campaign is underway to counteract common public misconceptions about AFDC. So far, the signs are positive. The state Board of Human Resources has recommended a 30 percent AFDC increase in its budget for 1980, and the increase has survived the first round of budget cuts proposed by Busbee.

One of the difficulties with AFDC in Georgia is that it is, to a large extent, a racial issue. Five out of six AFDC recipients are Black, so in counties with a small Black voting population, a vote against AFDC is a safe vote. Some rural representatives from areas with large Black populations have become solid supporters of AFDC; in turn, Black voters have kept administration floor leader Rep. Roy Lambert (D-Madison) and veteran Sen. Culver Kidd (D-Milledgeville) in office.

Each year, a few more votes are added to the small core of pro-AFDC legislators. But the proAFDC faction is still a minority. If there’s one thing that has become clear in Georgia, it is that legislation to benefit poor people will not come about through reliance on the conscience of legislators. In 1978, the name of the game is organization.

Marc Levinson, former news editor of Creative Loafing/The Atlantan is the coordinator of the Public Assistance Coalition in Atlanta and writes frequently for Atlanta Magazine.

SOUTHERN WOMEN

By Staff

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 27-28

Women are now in the majority of college students in the South, according to an analysis by the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) of preliminary statistics of last fall’s collegiate enrollment.

The SREB analysis also notes that, although there were significant declines in the number of full-time students attending Southern institutions, they were offset by continued increases in part-time enrollment, which was up 5.6 percent in the South.

Thus, enrollment in higher education remained essentially unchanged in the fall of 1978 over levels in the previous year, both in the South and the nation. Except for 1975, when there was a 10 percent increase in enrollment nationwide, the college population has not grown as dramatically in the 1970s as in the 1960s.

In 1978, the total headcount enrollment in the South increased only about one-half of one percent of about 2,950,000 students. Nationally, enrollment declined by 60,000 students, or less than I percent, out of a total headcount enrollment of more than 11 million.

The increase in part-time study in 1978 was not enough to counter the decline in full-time students, when the enrollment figures were converted to full-time-equivalent (FTE) terms which generally serve as the basis on which public institutions receive state funding. When viewed from a full-time-equivalent student perspective, both the nation and the South registered enrollment declines in 1978 – of 1.8 and 1 percent, respectively.

The small changes noted at the national and regional levels mask considerable fluctuation among the states and among kinds of institutions. In the South, changes in total enrollment in the public sector (which accounts for 85 percent of all enrollment) ranged from a 4.7 percent increase in Virginia (one of the most significant in the nation) to a decline of 4.5 percent in West Virginia. Nine of the 14 SREB states experienced declines or minimal increase (1 percent or less).

Fluctuations in enrollment were noted in the two-year college sector, where the student population dropped by nearly 20 percent in West Virginia and 10 percent in Kentucky. Substantial declines in two-year college enrollment were also noted in Arkansas, Georgia, and Louisiana. By contrast, significant enrollment growth continued in the two-year institutions in Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Enrollment in private colleges and universities showed little change nationwide. In the South, eight of 14 states experienced declines, and six showed increases.

A drop in the number of male students enrolling full-time accounts for changes in many states. For example, public institutions in the South registered a 4 percent decline in full-time male enrollment in 1978, compared to 1977 levels. But this decline was balanced by significant increases in the enrollment of women, especially of those attending part-time.

For the first time since World War 11, women made up a majority of the enrollment in colleges and universities, with 50.1 percent of the headcount total in the South. In the fall of 1978, women accounted for more than half of the collegiate populations in nine SREB state.

E.F. Schietinger, SREB director of research, said the increase in proportions of women enrolled in the South can be attributed to the decline in the number of male students enrolling full-time, as well as to significant increases in the participation of women, especially those attending college.

Contrary to the trends in total enrollment, the number of first-time students showed small increases, both in the nation and the region, with gains of 1.8 and 1 percent, respectively.

While enrollment projections indicated that declines in the future can be expected because of the shrinking size of the college-age population, such demographic change does not account for this year’s losses, according to James R. Mingle, SREB research associate. He said some of the factors influencing lower rates of attendance in fall 1978 probably include:

1) students choosing jobs over further education in 1978, a year of relatively high employment;

---

Page 28

(2) increased federal audits of student aid applications, demanding documentation of a student’s financial background, which seems to have discouraged some students from enrolling and delayed others in receiving replies to their aid requests.

Dr. Mingle noted that year-to-year fluctuations in enrollment can be expected for the next few years, and said it is possible that a slowdown in the economy, coupled with another large pool of high school graduates anticipated in 1979, could produce increases again next fall.

“But, in the long term, as the size of the traditional college-age population begins to decline, both in the nation and the South, enrollment declines may be expected,” he observed.

While there will be fluctuations between 1978 and 1986, SREB’s projections of headcount enrollment in the South for 1986 show the same level of enrollment as in 1978. But, when the 1986 figure is projected on a full-time-equivalent basis, enrollment in the South may drop by as much as four percent between 1978 and 1986. This difference of more than 100,000 full-time-equivalent students is significant to the revenue and workload prospects of higher education. If an institution loses one full-time student, it needs to attract nearly three part-time students to recoup revenue losses.

Facing the Universal Imperatives

By Ray Marshall

Vol. 1, No. 7, 1979, pp. 16-18

[Introduction]

The world that we live in has changed; is changing, dangerous and uncertain – and I think that if you take a look at the concerns of the Southern Regional Council and some of the universal imperatives that impinge on those concerns, you can see that the main thing that will characterize the work of the Council, as it endures, is not that things will get easier- but they will get different. It’ll be a different environment, but it will be equally treacherous.

There are universal imperatives that, I think, are fairly obvious to people, if you think about them. One of the universal imperatives that we experienced since 1944 has been industrialization and economic development. That’s caused most of the changes.

One of the universal imperatives that we’ll face probably in the future is discrimination. We haven’t solved that problem by a long shot. What’s happened to discrimination is its forms have changed. And different people are now involved.

What the Black civil rights movement started has caught fire, and other groups are now demanding equality – and that will be a continuing process. Women will continue to demand equality. Hispanics will continue to demand equality; the handicapped, the elderly; people who are discriminated against for anything, unrelated to their merit, will be caught up in that movement – and have been caught up in it. And they will see the value, the power of the moral example that the Black civil rights movement launched.

Another concern that the Council will have to grapple with in the future, I think, is a whole range of international concerns. I think these are very important, and they’re usually overlooked. But these international concerns increasingly impinge upon our ability to get civil rights, and our ability to improve the conditions of people in the society who desperately need help.

Just to mention some of these things indicates the significance of them. The whole human rights movement is very important throughout the world, and it’s not divisible; you caimnot talk about human rights in other countries, and ignore them here. Just as Van Woodward put it so well, the institutionalization of racism around the turn of the century had strong international origins. We could not go forth and fight the White man’s burden in the world and not be infested with the same kind of racism here.

I think it also works in reverse. The origins of a lot of the civil rights movement – particularly employment originated with international concerns. A. Phillip Randolph’s first march on Washington was directly as a result of a war that we were in to make the world safe for democracy, at a time when Blacks couldn’t work in the plants, making the guns to fight the war.

The anomaly and inconsistency of that had a compelling force. I think the problem that Southern Regional Council will have to deal with is immigration. The problem of illegal immigration, particularly, will have a significant bearing on the ability to improve the conditions of lowincome people, workers generally, and to get civil rights.

I believe that because we don’t legalize the flow of peo

---

Page 17

ple in our work force, we are building for ourselves another monumental civil rights struggle in the future. The dynamics of that struggle will be very similar to the dynamics of the struggle that we went through in the fifties and sixties, as we will have some of the same causes.

The first generation of immigrants will endure second class status; their children will not – and you can almost count on it. And if we don’t prepare for that, to assimilate people into our society with full legal rights, then we’re going to build a serious problem for ourselves.

One of the areas of greatest concern that I have about the future is our ability to have a just and humane society by providing a decent standard of living for people; a decent job, in a relatively stable economy.

Now I believe that we can do that. I believe that the means of doing that are within our grasp. But I think it’s going to require a lot of dedication, a lot of intelligencc and a lot of hard work.

I believe that we’ve established the framework for that in the passage of the HumphreyHawkins bill, that many of you helped us get, which commits the government to the achievement of full employment by 1983.

We have been trying to do a lot in the last couple of years to move us in that direction, and I think it’s imperative that we continue to move in that direction. We should not let the talk about the budget obscure the fact that the government has for too long done too much for those who need it least, and not enough for those who need it most.

What we are trying to do with our programs is to see that that happens; that we concentrate our resources on people who need it most, in spite of the budget constraints we face.

For example, the amount of job money in the CETA system that we devote to the disadvantaged has increased, both absolutely and relatively. In 1976, we spent $3 billion on the disadvantaged; in the 1980 budget, we’ll spend $9 billion. In 1976, 63 percent of the participants in the system were classified as disadvantaged. In 1980, 94 percent will be classified as disadvantaged.

The point of that, to me, is that even though we do

---

Page 18

have problems with inflation and budget constraints, it does not mean we cannot continue to help those who need help. It seems to me, we need to really concentrate our efforts on seeing that that happens. We need to work to reduce the disparity in unemployment rates, as well as to reduce the overall level of unemployment rates. And we can reduce that disparity by concentrating our resources on the problem of Black youth, for example, and young people generally, and by concentrating our resources on places with the highest rates of unemployment. We must do everything we can to provide job opportunities for the people in urban areas and depressed rural areas.

Another universal imperative we will face that will make it difficult for us to help those who need help most, and to continue the civil rights struggle, is inflation. Inflation is a very serious problem. It is a particularly serious problem for low-income people, and minorities. And the reason for that is very simple – the cost of living for low income people increases much faster than the cost of living for higher income people.

When you get into inflation, you tend to buy down. You quit eating sirloin and start eating hamburger. You quit eating hamburger and start eating beans. And many people quit eating beans and start eating pet food. And that is happening, as inflation inflicts damage on the poor – the very people who can least afford to bear the brunt of inflation.

Inflation is serious because it also threatens our democratic institutions. Nothing threatens antidemocratic forces as much as inflation. It strengthens support for government, and for using government to help people who need help. Inflation frequently tends to bring out the worst in people, and tends to generate a selfish attitude that causes people to turn inward, rather than being concerned about other people.

A curious thing to me about inflation is that the wealthy do the most complaining about it, and the poor do the most suffering from it. I never could quite capture the reason for it, but I read a quote recently from one of my economist friends, John Kenneth Galbraith, who said that in this light against inflation, we have to be sure we distribute the burden of fighting inflation, according to one’s ability to fight it, which means do everything we can to see to it that the people who pay for it are those who have the higher incomes and who are in the best position to deal with the problem.

Somebody asked Galbraith, “But won’t the wealthy object?” “Yes, quite a lot,” he said and gave this quote:

“You must remember that social tranquility at all times and in all countries, is always advanced by the cries of anguish of the affluent. They have a much deeper sense of personal injustice than the poor, and a far greater capacity for indignation. And when the poor hear the primal screams of the well-to-do, they imagine that the fortunate are really suffering, and become more contented with their own lives. Good statesmanship has always required not only the comforting of the afflicted, but the afflicting of the comfortable.”

Well, I think that Galbraith, in his own way, put it very well – that in the fight against inflation, there will be strong forces to try and shift the burden for the fight to the poor; the low-income people. It seems to me that a goal of this organization should be to see that this doesn’t happen.

We’ve been trying to insure that it doesn’t happen in the Administration, by seeing that the inflation fight is equitable. That’s the reason we had a low-wage exemption; the reason we ruled out the alternative of allowing inflation to be controlled by having a recession, or having a depression – and try to maintain a level of unemployment while we deal with problems of inflation.

We tried to do it in our effort to get a real wage insurance provision in the Congress – so that wrong about our ability to control inflation, there will be some insurance, particularly for lowincome people, who will suffer the most from inflation.

Finally, we resisted the cries by people who argue that we ought to deal with inflation by not increasing the minimum wage, about rolling it back, or by doing away with prevailing wage legislation that tends to help those who do not have a power in this society to improve their own conditions.

I think that we have to continue to recognize that efforts will be made to roll back the minimum wage, to have a youth differential on the minimum wage, to eliminate it all together, and if we do that, then we will transfer the fight to the people who can least afford it.

Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall is a former director of the Task Force on Southern Rural Development sponsored by SRC.

The Threat of Hunger and Ill-Health

By Ray Wheeler

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 5-8

The existence of hunger and malnutrition among the poor and occurring throughout the United States has been established beyond debate. It seems likely also beyond argument that the expansion of the Federal Food Assistance Programs has significantly altered the face of hunger in our country. We know, however, that there continues to be many people in our nation who are malnourished and who do not have the food or the health care necessary to restore themselves to health and full productivity.

The number of persons in poverty began to increase in 1970 and has not declined since then. There is reason to believe that the real incidence of poverty is higher than the poverty statistics would indicate.Whether the real poverty count is 25 million or more likely 30 million Americans, the incredible fact remains that we have in this country an enormous number of people living at or below the federally defined poverty level and, by definition, they cannot afford to purchase a minimally adequate diet unless they receive assistance.

During the past twelve years I have taken part in surveys of hunger and malnutrition and remember well the conditions and people who faced a blighted future without much hope and assistance. In the spring of 1967 shortly after a Senate Subcommittee, led by Joseph Clark and Robert Kennedy first brought hunger to the attention of the American people, I was one of a group of physicians who went as a team to study the health and living conditions of children of the poor. Here is what we found:

“Wherever we went and wherever we looked, whether it was the rural South, Appalachia, or an urban ghetto, we saw children in significant numbers who were hungry and sick, children for whom hunger was a daily fact of life and sickness in many forms, an inevitability. Many of these children were weak and in pain; their lives were being shortened; they were, in fact, visibly and predictably, losing their energy, their spirit and their health. They were suffering from hunger and disease, and directly or indirectly, many were dying.”

Wherever we went the impact was the same. We saw countless families with large numbers of children isolated from the mainstream of American culture and opportunity, possessing none of the protections of health, life and job that other Americans take for granted as rights of citizenship.

What we saw on those trips and the conclusions we drew have been documented and substantiated over and over again. As a result, unprecedented publicity, surveys, reports, TV documentaries, Presidential messages, a select committee of the U.S. Senate on Nutrition and Human Needs, and even two White House conferences, occurred. The nation was shocked and in the years that followed Congress, responding to public pressures and public needs, enacted more than a dozen food aid laws and now appropriates more than 9 billion dollars annually to feed the poor.

There can be little doubt that this generous outpouring of money for food and medical care by our government and by concerned citizens over the past ten years has saved many lives and relieves great suffering. The statistics speak eloquently to this point.

There has been a decline in infant mortality of 33 percent from 1965 to 1975 with even more rapid decline in deaths of infants during the first month of life. Infant deaths from diarrhea, influenza, pneumonia, and immaturity, in any related directly to poverty and malnutrition, have declined 50 percent or more. These reductions in mortality have occurred more rapidly among Blacks and American Indians and in the ten states with the highest incidence of poverty and malnutrition.

The observations of the 1977 Medical Team sponsored by the Field Foundation support the accuracy of this information. From May to September, 1977, six teams of doctors fanned out across the country, carefully retracing steps many of us had taken ten years earlier into the worst poverty in America. “We went again into the delta of Mississippi, the tenements of the Bronx, the isolated mountain hollows of Appalachian Kentucky, the coastal regions of South Carolina and the migrant work camps of Central Florida. Our first and overwhelming impression was that there are far fewer grossly malnourished people in this country today than there were ten years ago.”

When one visits the Head Start centers and examines the children, even cursorily, there can be little doubt that significant change has occurred since 1967. The children of the poor were healthy in appearance, lively and responsive in their interactions with each other and with their teachers. Nowhere did I see the gross evidence of malnutrition, the omnipresent evidence of acute respiratory illness, and the evidence of apathy and weakness that we saw in 1967. The teachers I questioned reported very few problems with illness among the children during the entire year.

The problem is not now primarily one of overt hunger and malnutrition, although unquestionably these conditions have not been eliminated. It is not possible to find so easily the bloated bellies, the shriveled infants, the gross evidences of vitamin and protein deficiencies in children that we identified in the late sixties.

Instead, my colleagues and I observed more subtle manifestations of malnutrition, especially among the poor in those areas where food-aid systems are functioning inadequately and are not reaching those who need help.

Undernutrition often masquerades as other kinds of problems. Many of these children already malnourished at birth, are born prematurely because malnutrition in the mother is the most common cause of prematurity and prematurity is directly linked to early infant mortality, birth defects and mental retardation.

Many undernourished infants die shortly after birth, killed by their unusual susceptibility to infections which are ordinarily benign in the well nourished child. Those children surviving infancy are more frequently ill, likely to be anemic and undersized for age, and they do less well in school than their counterparts in more affluent families.

They become slow learners, who wind up living in poverty and producing children who grow up in the vicious cycle which condemns them to lifetimes of marginal function.

---

Page 7

Their lives are characterized by behavioral disturbances, physical disability, high rates of failure in school and low levels of employability.

The social and economic consequences of this tragic sequence of events are enormous and devastating to the children and to the society in which they grow up. By not feeding children adequately, we may be negating our efforts to educate them and we are undoubtedly creating problems for the future.

It is important to understand that the effects of inadequate food, bad housing and poor medical care are not confined to the poor but directly determine the strength and vitality of our society, the amount of wealth and produce, and the incomes we enjoy. More than 10 years ago the Office of the Budget calculated that for every dollar we failed to spend feeding hungry people, it costs our government over three dollars in payment of sickness care, lower productivity, so-called “handouts” to the disabled. I suspect that the figures are equally or even more applicable today. As Robert Claiborne wrote recently “A balance sheet of the dollar costs of poverty versus dollar cost of ending it might well show that even in purely economic terms, humanity is the best policy.”

I know that the health status of Southern people remains the worst in the nation, far below national averages in most of the parameters we use to judge health. But, I also know that the remedy for this situation lies not in more doctors, nurses, and hospitals. It lies in a rearrangement of the priorities of our society so that public policy addresses human needs.

While much has been said and written about the economic resurgence of the South since 1945 and especially in the decades of the 60s and 70s, we are not as prosperous as we appear. We are still behind significantly (17 percent) in per capita income. A large proportion of the nation’s poor live in the South. We have 25 percent of the population of the U.S. and 40 percent of its poor. Sixty percent of the nation’s rural poor live in the South and one in five Southerners is poor, double the national rate. Both our industrial wages and our per child expenditures for education are the lowest in the nation.

Our position at the bottom of the ladder is equally solid when we examine health statistics as one would expect for health care and economic development are integrally related.

General death rates are 22 percent higher in the rural South than in the nation. The life expectancy of migrant farmers is 49 years, 23 years less than the national average. Infant mortality rates are higher than the national average for Black and White Southerners as are the rates for premature births, but in the rural South Blacks have 65 percent higher rates than their White neighbors.

The existing institutions for the delivery of medical care, no matter how they are restructured or paid for, may be irrelevant to the central health issue. All things considered, even acknowledging the remarkable benefits from recent advances in medical science and technology, the health services of the twentieth century that have been most influential for improving health have had to do with sanitation, water supply, and food distribution. The main reason we enjoy longer and healthier lives than our ancestors is not that we possess more effective ways of treating our sicknesses, though in many cases we do. We are more healthy and longer living because we get sick less often thanks to prevention of infectious disease, the provision of pure water and sanitary sewage disposal systems, and the greater availability of food.

Perhaps the most important public health measure in our history has been the gradual evolution of a society in which people – most people – are living better. There is more money for food, family sizes are smaller, work hours are shorter and work less exhausting.

Associated with these advances have been major advances in the processing, storage, and distribution of food. These overall benefits have done more to reduce morbidity and

---

Page 8

mortality rates and to extend life expectancy than perhaps any other societal endeavor including those directly related to coping with illness. It is likely that the greatest promise for improved health for most populations, including the South’s, in the foreseeable future continues to be related to the possibilities for improved nutrition.

There are many initiatives that might improve nutrition. They include the regulation of a advertising, improvement of housing, and public education about diet and nutrition. None of these will be effective in the absence of an effort to increase the availability of food. Local and privately initiated efforts of this kind are desirable and praiseworthy, but success on a meaningful scale demands a public policy dedicated to a more equitable distribution of food to poor people and to particularly vulnerable groups such as pregnant women, children, and the elderly. Hunger is the problem; food is the remedy.

An important first step in making available food assistance to all who needed it when, in 1974, Congress extended the Food Stamp Program to cover all those eligible for help in the entire U.S. Other programs have been added and liberalized. They have made a significant difference in the nutritional and health status of people they have reached. We can document decreases in illnesses, in infant and maternal deaths, and in the incidence of iron deficiency and anemia. Carefully controlled studies in a poor population have revealed that a 15 percent increase in dietary energy during pregnancy and the early months of infancy produced larger children who demonstrated improved learning ability over a population who had not received dietary supplement. The children evidenced improved growth, increased head circumference, and a decreased incidence of nutritional anemia. These are important measures of improved health.

Unfortunately, none of the existing food programs, either singly or together, has proved sufficient to deal with the problem of hunger. ‘Me programs are administratively clumsy, often demean people, and have never reached more than 60 percent of the people in need of help. Due to bureaucratic ineptness, hostility to the programs by local political leadership, and the lack of will on the part of the U.S.D.A. to see that the programs serve all who are eligible, – participation in these programs is actually decreasing all over the nation during a time when food prices are rising and the need for the program is greater than ever. What is needed is a system that will deliver food in adequate amounts to people who need it. I know of no proposal that will accomplish that objective short of a full employment program that guarantees a job with adequate pay to every person who wants to work and this must be supplemented by financial assistance at a realistic and humane level to those who, for a variety of reasons, cannot work and do not have money to buy enough food.

In the absence of a national policy of full employment, the new Food Stamp law, now being implemented, represents an unparalleled opportunity to assure an adequate diet for all needy Americans. There is no necessity for apology or defensiveness, for the program does more to lengthen and strengthen the lives of disadvantaged Americans than any other noncategorical social program. It is virtually the only government aid offered to the working poor.

This is a matter of self-interest. The social costs of 30 million poor and near poor in our midst are enormous, primarily in terms of the loss of human potential, lost forever to malnutrition and secondarily, in terms of operating expenses wasted in the support of battalions of caretakers.

But there is another side to this coin. In this overfed country, it is almost foolish to ask whether hunger has serious consequences. Surely, even a negative answer would not lead us to conclude that it is all right for people to remain unnecessarily hungry. The reason for feeding disadvantaged children and their families in the richest country the world has ever know is because they are hungry.

Arnold Toynbee once said “I do not believe the greatest threat to our civilization is from bombs or guided missiles. I don’t think our civilization will die that way. I think it will die when we no longer care.”

My assumption is that we do care and my hope is that we shall find the wisdom and the will to eliminate poverty from this nation and there will no longer exist the necessity for a food stamp program.

Raymond Wheeler is a physician in Charlotte, N.C. and past president of the Southern Regional Council.

Economic Development

By Harold Moon

Vol. 2, No. 2., 1979, pp. 23

More than half of the 11 Southern states are ranked among the worst in the nation in administering fair and equitable taxes according to a recent report of a public employee’s organization.

Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana and Kentucky are ranked 51st, 50th, 48th, 47th, 46th, and 43rd, respectively. Closely following the ten worst states were South Carolina (40th), Florida (33rd) and Virginia (32nd). Only Georgia (13th) and North Carolina (15th) were near the top ten states.

All 50 states including the District of Columbia were ranked in five specific areas of taxation; sales, personal income, business, property and general administration. The ranking measured from 1 (best) to 51st (worst) in a recent published report by the Coalition of America Public Employees entitled Tax Equity in the Fifty States co-authored by Diane Fuchs and Steve A. Rabin.

Louisiana was included among the best in the administration of sales tax, considered the most regressive form of tax. Forty-five percent of the Southern states, however, were ranked among the worse in the sales tax structures.

In personal income tax, the most equitable form of taxation, 27 percent of the Southern states fell into the worst states category.

On an annual basis states have collectively been losing more than $3 billion a year due to poor and uneven taxation of businesses who have cleverly avoided paying an equitable proportion of taxes annually. The uneven taxation of businesses has resulted in individual states placing higher taxes on personal income, property and sales taxes.

Though property tax is a main source of local, not state revenue, and, for the most part, is levied and administered on a local level, the assessing of full property value is sometimes not achieved on an equitable basis. Also, intangible forms of “property” such as stocks, bonds, money on deposit, and securities escape full assessment of value and, thereby, provide loopholes for the wealthy and a “burden on homeowners and renters.” Thirty-six percent of the Southern states have closely monitored and featured legislation to curb abuse in the property tax spectrum: Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, and Kentucky were tied for the ninth position. The top ten is rounded out by Oregon, Wisconsin, Michigan, Maryland, Iowa and California. Forty-five percent of the Southern states ranked in the bottom tier: Louisiana (51st), Montana, Wyoming, Alabama (48th), Texas (46th), Mississippi (46th), Idaho, North Dakota, Delaware and Tennessee (42nd).

Better administration by states of existing tax laws in individual states could lead to eliminating the need for “additional taxes or higher rates”. The close monitoring of “how much is ‘spent’ each year” on tax breaks is one conceivable remedy. Another suggested in the survey, would be for states to cooperate on a joint effort to enforce and administer a multistate tax law where states jointly audit businesses and individuals who must pay taxes in different states. The study estimates that each state would pick up $31 in added tax revenue for every one dollar spent in extra expense.

Economic Development

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 2, No. 3, 1979, pp. 27

While the South continues to show signs of rapid economic activity, the rate of unemployment in the region, which has not been an historically severe problem as in other regions, is suggesting that economic problems are or may be ahead for Southern workers.

Although unemployment in most 11 Southern states dropped in the last years, the decline has not always been as great as in the rest of the country. While the rate of unemployment nationally dropped from 6.3 percent to 5.8 percent for the one-year period ending July 3 1, 1979, the decline in Georgia was only from 5.8 percent. In Arkansas the unemployment rate dropped only from 6.1 percent in July 1978, to 5.7 percent one year later.

The most serious indications are that four Southern states Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee – continue to show unemployment rates well above the national average (see map above). For example, Louisiana’s unemployment rate was 6.7 percent in July and in Alabama the 7.9 percent unemployment rate was an increase over the July 1978 percentage of 7.2 percent.

The unemployment pattern in the South loosely resembles the situation in the northeast and northcentral states, when the unemployment figures in most states surround the national average with a substantial number above the average ranging from 6.5 percent to 8.40 percent. Only two states west of the Mississippi River, however, had unemployment rates in July 1979 above 6.5 percent. One was a Southern state, Louisiana, and the other was Oregon. Throughout the Midwest, unemployment rates in July were less than 4.5 percent.

Since July of this year the national jobless rate has been hovering around 6 percent. In August it went above 6 percent and in September it dropped back to 5.8 percent. Recently the October unemployment rate showed a major shift. Likewise, the rates in Southern states appeared to have maintained generally the same pattern that existed in July.

Historically, unemployment rates in Southern states have been below the national average. Explanations for the heightened rates of unemployment often follow very much the same rationale for national unemployment. The Southern economy, like the nation’s, is suffering from its fair share of layoffs and reduced production.

There may be some historically unique factors to the Southern pattern, however. U.S. Bureau of Census estimates the region is gaining substantially in population. Combined with a national trend of increased labor market participation by women and youth, the increased number of workers may be reflected in the unemployment rates of the South. Also, migration within the region from rural to urban locations may also be a contributing factor since the work skills of the rural place are not easily transferrable in urban settings.

Some economists are also suggesting that the South’s regional economy remains largely undiversified with heavy emphasis on low wage service industries and manufacturing. Hence, with frequent turnovers of employment in these two industries, the South’s rates of unemployment is higher than in the past.

By whatever combination, these factors may be rendering an even greater problem of unemployment for the South than the Department of Labor statistics indicate. In September the National Commission on Unemployment Statistics reported that the government’s method of counting the unemployed and the definition of the “unemployed” may be substantially undercounting the actual number of people who are seeking jobs but unable to find them.

In any event, the economic growth of the South with its increases in population has not automatically reduced low levels of unemployment. While the South may still lead the nation in rapid economic growth and number of jobs available, the benefits of the boom have not yet been seen by Southerners in the unemployment lines.

Too Poor for Food Stamps

By Staff

Vol. 2, No. 4, 1980, pp. 3-4

Almost eight million poor Americans did not have ample food during this holiday season because of barriers and restrictions in the federal food stamp program. In a study, entitled “Too Poor for Food Stamps”, the Southern Regional Council found that despite the changes in the federal law in 1977 giving the poor greater access to food stamps, about 3 1 percent of all the poor throughout the country still do not receive stamps. In the South, the figure is closer to 40 percent.

“Almost a majority of the poor who aren’t receiving food stamps live in the South,” says Steve Suitts, SRC executive director. “In the South more than anywhere else in the nation, the risks of hunger and malnutrition are daily facts of life for many poor families.”

The SRC report shows, however, that the 1977 changes in the food stamp law have helped to enlarge the number of poor recipients. Before the changes were implemented, only 49 percent of all poor Southerners received food stamps. Now more than 60 percent are receiving stamps.

The major change in the program passed by Congress in late 1977 and implemented in the beginning of 1979 was the end of the “purchase requirement” – whereby recipients had to pay money to receive stamps. Other revisions not implemented yet include reducing administrative barriers and physical barriers such as the location of food stamp offices and the days and times in which stamps are issued.

Congressional committees in Washington considered the renewal of the food stamp program in December. Judy Currie, SRC staff member, says that Congress should realize that “the intent of the Food Stamp Act of 1977 – to serve those poor people who were being denied food by unnecessary barriers – is being achieved. Yet the program has not accomplished its goal of making a minimum diet accessible to all needy Americans.”

Cutting federal expenditures is often cited as the reason for Congressional opposition to changes that increase the cost of the food stamp program, which in 1980 may reach $8 billion. Yet, the SRC report

---

Page 4

notes that such an expense to provide the poor with a minimum diet “should not deter us from understanding its importance compared to the goal of more nuclear submarines or more government buildings.” Noting that only about one percent of the entire federal budget is spent on the food stamp program, Suitts. says that the effects of good nutrition can save the nation billions of dollars now lost from reduced productivity and medical costs.

By studying available information the report estimates that the average annual income of families joining the food stamp program recently is roughly between $3,500 $5,000. Most of the new participants in the South are not welfare recipients. Only one in 20 of the new participants in the South already received public assistance.

“Our study shows that food stamps, which may well mean survival for many, are now being opened to the working poor, families whose fathers are structurally unemployed, and middleaged workers too young for Social Security but too old to obtain decent jobs,” Suitts stated. Of the approximate 1.2 million people in the South who came onto the food stamp program for the first time in 1979, more than 1.0 million were the working poor and those not receiving public assistance.

“With the new changes in the food stamp program the percentage of participating Southerners who are public assistance households dropped by almost five percent,” says Currie. Approximately 23 percent of all Southerners in the food stamp program are receiving welfare payments (not including Social Security recipients), while outside the South almost 62 percent are on the welfare roles. (See the chart).

Other findings in the report show that the new food stamp recipients in the South come from largely rural areas and from those states where past participation has been low. The new participants are more likely to be elderly and from small families than those already receiving stamps.

Concluding that changes in the way the food stamp program is administered “give poor people a real chance to have an adequate die.t,” the report recommends that the ceiling on expenditures in the food stamp program be removed and that other administrative and physical barriers be reduced by further changes. The report also suggests that food stamp recipients be allowed to receive larger deductions for medical expenses so that parents “will not be forced to choose between food and health care for their children.”

A copy of the report “Too Poor for Food Stamps” can be obtained for $3.00 by writing to the Southern Regional Council, 75 Marietta Street, Atlanta, Georgia 30303.

Survival Week Protests Budget Cuts

By anis Sharp Powell

Vol. 2, No. 7, 1980, p. 4

“No cuts in poor people’s programs” was the message being sent to Congress and the nation by the poor people and labor, civil rights, tenants and religious organizations involved in planning Survival Week.

Over 150 organizations in nine Southern states organized and endorsed Survival Week, a series of activities that took place May 1-11 to protest Carter’s efforts to “balance the budget” and “fight inflation” at the expense of poor people’s needs for jobs, housing, medical care, food and education.

The cuts threaten to close Black colleges, cripple health care for the young and elderly, and hundreds of thousands of families will face hunger, malnutrition, and starvation when the cuts eliminate the food stamp program. Organizers of Survival Week state that “Carter wants to spend $4 billion less on poor people so he can spend $4 billion more on guns and bullets.” They feel that the federal government is trying to trade the need for medical care and a decent income for two submarines and a bomber.

A spirited rally by the Atlanta Welfare Rights Organization on May 9 set the stage for a series of weekend demonstrations centered in Georgia. As a crowd of 300 rallied at the Richard B. Russell federal building to chants that “hungry people will steal, hungry people will kill” plans were being made for people all over to go to a rally in Americus, Georgia and march to Plains— Jimmy Carter’s home town. Two hundred marchers carried “Say No to Carter’s Budget Cuts” banners and other placards while chanting “Don’t want no Carter, no Carter; don’t want no Klan, no Klan; just want some justice, jobs and land” through the south Georgia countryside.

Mother’s Day marked the final demonstration for Survival Week. One thousand protestors, representing the South’s poor and hungry, marched in Atlanta on Sunday, in what the Committee for Survival called a “March for Bread and Justice.” The march followed the route of Martin Luther King’s funeral procession by Morehouse College where Rosalyn Carter was giving a commencement address to a freedom rally in University Park at the Atlanta University Center. The loudest chant of “Jimmy Carter has got to go” was heard as demonstrators passed by Morehouse.

Students staged a separate demonstration to protest the First Lady’s presence at the Black men’s college. They claimed her presence was a ploy to obtain the votes of Black and poor people by displaying her “concern for their welfare and respect for their educational institutions.” Four persons were arrested for criminal trespass and failure to disperse as they protested in front of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Chapel on the campus.

Congress meanwhile was moving toward averting the cutoff but many fear it will not move fast enough. Protestors also stress that simply reinstating the current allotment will not be sufficient. With the current rate of inflation, without an increase, the poor will have a 25 percent “budget cut” based on what they are receiving now.

The Measure of Poverty

By Pablo Einsenberg

Vol. 2, No. 7, 1980, pp. 5-6

When Lyndon Johnson proclaimed his unconditional War on Poverty in 1964, no one knew precisely the number or even the definition of “poor.” As a result, the Council of Economic Advisors quickly sought to designate the poverty population and concluded among other things that in 1961 a family of two or more making under $3,000 a year had been in official poverty.

An estimated food budget was the basis for determining the poverty index for different families. Based on 1955 surveys by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Council found that food expenditures accounted for one-third of a low-income family’s total budget. With that evidence, the cost of the 1961 “economy food plan” was multiplied by three, yielding a total amount needed by that family to meet all costs. This figure became the official poverty line.

Questions about the adequacy of the food plan were raised early. Even the author of the formula wrote in 1965 “with this plan, adequate nutrition is obtainable, but in practice, nearly half the families spending so little fell far short of adequacy. Of families spending at this rate in 1965, more than 40 percent have diet providing less than two-thirds of their requirements.”

In 1969 the model took on further administrative status when the Bureau of the Budget designated the index as the official government measure of poverty. From that point on all federal programs were required to use this official measuring system in determining eligibility and funding in many key legislative efforts to combat poverty.

Under the official measure, the current poverty index figures for families of various sizes are divided between farm and nonfarm.

Family Size	Nonfarm	Farm
1	$3,400	$2,910
2	4,500	3,840
3	5,600	4,770
4	6,700	5,700
5	7,800	6,630
6	8,900	7,560

In order to place the figures in context, one can look at the $6,700 a year allowed for an urban family of four. Officially speaking, such a family is not poor, although their income is under $130 a week, out of which all costs are supposed to come.

Suppose such a family lives in a small apartment or home. Even at a low temperature setting; the fuel bill could easily be $700 or more for the year. Rent (actual home ownership is unlikely) might be guessed at a conservative $150 a month, or $1,800 a year. The total of $2,500 for home and heat alone leaves $4,300 for all other costs. Food, clothing, medical care, transportation, and everything else are to be covered with scarcely $20 a week for each family member.

Of course, this family may receive food stamps or some other forms of assistance. Nevertheless, under the existing measure it is not officially poor. Yet families with three and four times the income of this hypothetical family of four are today wondering how to make ends meet.

For more rural people the problem becomes even more difficult. The federal government continues to assume that rural living costs are substantially less than urban costs. The 1979 poverty threshold for an urban family of four is inadequate enough at $6,700; a non-urban family of four is supposed to be able to get by on $1,000 less than that before it is included among the official low-income population.

The assumption that rural means cheaper is based on the idea that rural housing is less expensive and that family gardens and farms can help reduce grocery bills. However, the actual cost of basic commodities in rural areas can often be higher than in urban areas. Take as one current example transportation costs. Public transit rarely exists in rural areas. People are forced to drive more and pay more for gas than their urban counterparts.

While many rural people are

---

Page 6

able to maintain gardens, they still must purchase basic needs. Rural stores, lacking the high volume markets which enable cheaper quantity purchasing, often charge more than larger, urban outlets. Additional transportation costs also increase the prices for items ranging from flour to hair brushes.

Extensive research by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and others has shown that variations in the cost of maintaining fixed standards of living are very slight across the country. Nonetheless, the federal poverty line is roughly 15 percent less for rural areas. Is this supposed to mean that rural people should accept a 15 percent lower standard of living?

And while rural life does offer such non-urban virtues as openness, cleaner air, and a lack of rush hours, rural people also often have fewer recreational, social and cultural facilities. Medical care is generally harder to find, if indeed it is available at all. School districts are often underfunded, and jobs and other opportunities for youth are more limited. While some absolute costs may be lower in rural areas, they are more than offset by other factors preventing rural people from enjoying the same overall standard of living as city people.

The official poverty index fails to indicate accurately the extent of both absolute and relative poverty. Estimates are that 10 million more people—about a 40 percent increase—would be added to the poverty population if the measure were based on a diet incorporating more nutritional needs and current spending patterns.

In 1979, for example, the poverty index for a family of four stood at $6,700. The technique used to set that figure assumed that food would represent one-third of the budget or $186 a month. That translates into $1.55 per person per day for food. By any measure, a $1.55 a day per person for food is not adequate or rational.

Not only is the nutritional value of the plan questionable, but the current system for determining the food budget does not take geographic or cultural differences into account. Nor does it consider the changing dietary needs of persons at different stages of life. The elderly often have particular dietary needs that are expensive. Young mothers and growing teenagers certainly require diets that can easily exceed the food cost allowances.

Currently, the poverty level is raised by the increase in the consumer price index; however, the price of food and other basic necessities have increased at a far greater rate for most poor people.

Between 1977 and 1978, the cost of living for all items increased 7.6 percent, Nonetheless, the adjustment in the poverty index reflected the smaller, overall figure.

Since 1969 food has risen 94 percent while the total index has risen 78 percent. Costs for two other basic necessities—housing and energy—have also increased at a faster rate than the general price index. In 1978 as much as one-third of the income of the average poor household may have gone to pay for energy.

From both a numerical and human standpoint, then, poverty in America remains very real and significant. No amount of statistical manipulation can deny the poverty which is listed officially, let alone that which any more rational form or definition would reveal.

Perhaps government officials and others who should be outraged at the extent and persistence of poverty believe the rhetoric that these are conservative times and that programs are more likely to face cut-backs instead of expansion. In and outside of government, many people have lost a sense of the impact of poverty and are unaware of what an official definition of poverty means for poor people. It is hard to believe that after more than 15 years of anti-poverty efforts, we continue to utilize a poverty measure which is so far removed from real costs faced daily by millions of families.

Major reform in the poverty definition is an essential first step in a revitalized effort against poverty. In view of the mood of the times, though, advocates of the poor and near-poor must portray their concerns in ways the general population can appreciate. Poverty, after all, is more than just a moral wrong. It is also a fiscal and physical waste of resources. All society pays for poverty.

By whatever reasonable and realistic measure we may want to use, it is clear that this country has an enormous and not so invisible poor population—one that probably exceeds 25 percent of the entire population. We cannot escape this fact, no matter how hard we try to pretend that such poverty is not there. Widespread poverty means continued misery for the poor themselves and a waste of general human potential for all of us. It stands as a continuing challenge to our democracy.

This article is adapted from a publication of the Center for Community Change, a Washingtonbased organization assisting local community development in low-income urban and rural areas. Pablo Einsenberg is the Center’s president.

The Reagan Impact On the South’s Poor

By Steve Suitts

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, pp. 15-16

More than three decades ago, after the country had climbed up from the Deep Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt said that the South was the “nation’s number one economic problem.” A few years ago. facing a sluggish national economy, the president of Westinghouse declared that the South is now “the number one economic opportunity for business.” The changes have been remarkable. In the last decade the region experienced the most rapid economic activity in its recorded history, and in population and gross income it exceeded the nation’s growth.

Yet, other statistics tell us that Southerners remain the country’s poorest people and the poorest paid workers. Only in Texas among the Southern states does the per capita income equal the national average. In Mississippi, per capita personal income is only 69 percent of the nation’s, and the average Alabamian has only three-fourths of the income of the average American. In the Deep South, industrial jobs pay only about 68 percent of the wages for the same jobs outside the region.

The incomes of Southern families, especially black families, remain very limited. In 1976, in the census South, 25 percent of white families earned less than $8,000, and one in three families earned less than $10.000. Of the nearly three million black families in the same region, 49 percent earned less than $8.000, and more than 60 percent earned less than $10,000. Nearly one in three of all black families in the region were below the poverty level in 1976.

As this distribution of income suggests, the heads of Southern families–and most of them do work–are poorly paid, and black wage earners are disproportionately concentrated in low-paying jobs. Indeed, the gap between the incomes of black and white families in the South remains comparable to that of 30 years ago, when the region had legal segregation. For every dollar the white family earned in 1950 in the nation, the black family earned 51 cents. In the South in 1950, the black family had 56 cents for every dollar available to the white family. By 1975 the income of black families had risen in the region and the nation to 61 percent of white families’ income. But by 1980 black families” income in the South had dropped to nearer 57 percent of white income.

Perhaps most disturbing, black males’ income in 1950 was 58 percent of white males’ income. By 1975 black males’ income had dropped to 57 percent of white male income, and in 1980 it was nearer 55 percent. Really not surprising, the 11 Southern states remain the home of one-third of the nation’s poor and one-half of the nation’s black poor.

Into this era of simultaneously accelerating economic activity and sinking personal reward came Ronald Reagan, who interpreted his victory margin of less than 5 percent as a “mandate” for major changes in the role of the federal government and the allocations of the federal budget. These changes presume the existence of a wasteful, bloated bureaucracy of excessive benefits to a huge lot of undeserving and a small number of deserving, truly needy individuals. The reality is very different.

Though similar contrasts can be shown for housing, Medicaid and employment training, a brief look at food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) shows how Reagan is cutting away our promise to the poor before it began to be truly fulfilled.

---

Page 16

There are wide variations in the level of AFDC benefits for families across the country, although the composition of the family may be the same. For example, before Oct. 1,1981, the maximum monthly benefit to a family of three with no additional income was only $96 in Mississippi and $122 in Tennessee. In New York it has been more than $200.

Even before October 1981, AFDC payments have been received by a relatively small percentage of the South’s population. Less than 7 percent of Mississippi’s population received support from this program, and in no other Southern state was the percentage as high. In Texas, for example, only three percent of the state’s population were recipients of AFDC.

When compared to the number of poor in the South today. these statistics belie the notion that the welfare rolls. before the budget cuts, included many who weren’t needy. The numbers of poor among the total population in most Southern states were three or four times larger than the numbers of those on AFDC. In Alabama, 16.4 percent of the population was poor, while only 4.6 percent received welfare benefits. In Mississippi, the 7 percent of the population on AF DC was dwarfed by the 26 percent of the population in poverty.

These comparisons add up to one important fact about the welfare program that existed before Oct. 1, 1981: many more poor children in the South were in families without AFDC support than with it. In Florida, less than 40 percent of the children in poverty received benefits from the government’s major cash assistance program for the poor. In the 11 Southern states, only 3.5 percent of the population receives cash assistance from AFDC while more than 10 percent of the families within the South had incomes below 75 percent of the poverty level.

In the program which provides food stamps to the poor and the poorly paid, the number of poor who have actually received benefits in the South is considerably below the total poor population of the region. At the beginning of 1980, nearly two out of five poor families in the South did not receive anv food stamps.

Benefits provided under the Food Stamp Program are determined largely by the amount of money needed to obtain an adequate, nutritional diet. A family of three in Arkansas receiving the maximum AFDC payment of $161 before Oct. 1 could have received $160 in food stamps. An AFDC mother in Arkansas probably spent more than $23 of her AFDC payment on food, leaving less than $138 a month for rent, utilities, transportation, clothing, and other essential expenses of herself and two children.

Life with both AFDC benefits and food stamps has been no easy ride for the poor in the South. Combined benefits provided by AFDC and food stamps were extremely low even before cutbacks. Few states provided combined benefits equal to the official poverty level. As of May, 1981, nine states–all in the South–provided combined benefits which were less than 65 percent of the poverty level.

These numbers do not deny that programs aimed at reducing poverty have been at times poorly administered or even ill-conceived. Much of the government’s efforts in the area have probably been ineffective. Nonetheless, the national government’s commitment to ending poverty has not been what it is portrayed to be by this Administration. By no analysis can the programs in the South be shown as overly generous to the unneedy.

Yet the truly needy of the South are being abandoned by the present and anticipated policies of the national government. This Administration has offered nothing that signals an attempt to rethink any misjudgments of the last 15 years in the war against poverty, nor to redirect or reshape the government’s role in helping poor citizens become productive, tax-paying citizens. To date, this Administration offers hardly more than a dedicated, official effort to remove any form of government aid from the poor. While appeals to volunteerism and the magic of the private sector are presented as alternatives, cold facts suggest that the national government has now transformed the war on poverty of 15 years ago to a war on the I poor today. If this effort continues, the South’s poor–both those who now work and those who do not–shall face a future of crippled opportunities and the nation will have surrendered the truest, most selfless element of the American character.

Steve Suitts is the executive director of the Southern Regional Council. This article is adapted from remarks at the Southern Labor Institute in December.