
          Reagan's Way of Eliminating Poverty
          By Suitts, SteveSteve Suitts
          Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 11-12
          
          Last month the Census Bureau confirmed that Southerners remain
closer kin to poverty than anyone else in the country. Southern
states, as of 1980, continue to have the nation's highest rates of
poverty. One in four of all Mississippians, for example, are poor, and
so are nearly half of that state's blacks. In no Southern state was
the extent of black poverty less than twenty-nine percent.
          This news was followed by the general silence of the region's
politicians, as it has been since poverty statistics were first
compiled in the early 1960s. When pressed, some of the white officials
responded like a prideful father whose illegitimate, poorest relation
had just arrived on his doorstep: get them out of sight as soon as
possible and tell the neighbors they aren't related and, no, they
certainly aren't poor.
          Ironically, with the election of a former California governor over
an incumbent President from Georgia, the White House has transformed
Southern traditions into national stateways. It is proposing to
eliminate poverty in this country by removing federal expenses to
combat it by making the poor pay for being poor, by giving poverty
away and by defining poor people out of existence.
          The first step came when the Reagan budget was adopted by Congress
last summer. While expenditures for programs aimed- directly for the
poor constituted less than one in eighteen of the dollars in that
year's federal budget, sixty percent of the entire cuts which the
President asked for and received came out of these programs. The same
pattern--to a lesser extent--will apply in the budget for next
year. On the basis of current proposals, it's likely that thirty
percent of all cuts will come out of these same programs.
          Inspired by the pages of the Congressional Record of
the 1960s, the Reagan Administration's second step is to make the poor
pay hard cash before they become eligible for any government
assistance. Already there are propos-

als in the hopper in Congress and
floating around in concept papers at the White House to initiate the
universal requirement for "co-payments" by the poor. If, for example,
a mother wants a prescription filled under Medicaid for her child, she
will have to put up some money before the government pays the
remainder.
          From its start, the food stamp program was plagued by this notion
that if the poor really want and need something, they ought to put up
some money of their own. Volumes of studies show that such a policy
assures that the very poorest families will be the ones the program
fails to reach. This strategy no doubt reduces the number of
recipients, and allows some Southern senators to argue, as they did
two decades ago, that the poor really aren't poor. Since they don't
participate in the programs, they obviously don't need them.
          The third step being considered is the withdrawal of federal
responsibility to help the poor. The White House's major proposal on
"new federalism" seeks to make the states take on the task of
financing food stamps and the cash assistance program for families
with dependent children (AFDC) while the federal government takes over
Medicaid and the financing of ten or fifteen year bloc grant
programs. This venture to define the relations between state and
federal governments does not propose a shift from the federal to the
state the entire responsibility for paving highways, financing sewer
systems, or fostering agriculture. Rather, new federalism is a
proposal to get rid of the federal responsibility in the two major
programs aimed directly at the poor.
          To finish the job, the White House has shown increased interest in
defining people out of poverty. The Administration's first domestic
advisor held the view that poverty no longer existed in America. and
the President has repeated a weakened version of this sentiment in
several news conferences. The Administration appears eager to give a
cash value to all government services which the poor receive in order
to compute the income of people in deciding if they are poor. By this
method, the number of poor would drop since the value of services a
family received would price them out of poverty. For example, a family
of four living in a housing project with a total income of $6,000
would be assessed about $3,600 (the average rent in Atlanta) for their
five-room apartment. With $9,600 income calculated, the family would
then be ineligible for other government aid, such as medical care,
because the family "makes" more than the $8,700 poverty limit.
          No White House official, however, has proposed to calculate the
cash value of any government service to anyone else for purposes of
paying taxes or deciding if the person is eligible for the program.
          Fifteen years ago efforts to achieve the same results by a south
Alabama state senator helped earn Roland Cooper the nickname of "The
Wily Fox From Wilcox" County. Still in Alabama's law books is one of
Cooper's bills that would permit the governing board in his Blackbelt
county to authorize payments for those on welfare to purchase tickets
to leave the state. If the Reagan Administration's major efforts to
eliminate poverty by making the poor more poor continue to gain
momentum, the schemes of the "Wily Fox" and other past vocal and
silent Southern politicians who fought aid to the black poor may look
increasingly generous by comparison.
        