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CHAPTER 1

A Snapshot of Our Current Mess

Two stories sum up the contrast between the appalling current facts about poverty itself and the equally appalling current facts about the politics of poverty.

The first story is about poverty itself — in particular, the poorest of the poor.

Jason DeParle is a remarkable journalist. He cares deeply about-poverty, which in and of itself is distinctive, and he is smart, creative, and thorough. And he writes for the New York Times, which gives him a twofold advantage: the resources necessary to do big projects and an audience as wide as a print journalist can get.

At some point in 2009, DeParle began to wonder how well the nation's safety net was functioning to ameliorate the impact of the recession, especially food stamps (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP). He knew that the food stamp rolls had skyrocketed during the recession, but he wanted to know more about state and local variations in their availability and the reasons why, going beyond the data the federal government collects from the states. So he contacted each state to ask for its data. He was frequently told the information was confidential; sometimes he had to threaten a freedom-of-information suit. On other occasions, he had to go up the chain of command, go to the legislature, or threaten to do so, but one way or another he did obtain the data. The result was a powerful series illustrated by stories of individuals coping as best they could. He learned even more than he expected.

DeParle was looking for details on the reasons for state-by-state and local variations, but the most important thing he unearthed was truly astonishing. The data included the incomes of applicants, and as of 2009 there were 2 million families, comprising 6 million people, whose only income was from food stamps. If anything, the numbers are even higher as I write this two years later.

How could this be? The answer is in what has happened to welfare, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), as it is now called. The key point is that while there is a legal right to receive food stamps, there is no longer a legal right to obtain welfare. When President Bill Clinton signed TANF into law in 1996, he didn't just end welfare as we knew it. The process that he set in motion brought a virtual end to cash help for low-income families with children in much of the country. When the Great Recession came along, the government safety net for families with children had a huge hole.

So SNAP is the one income assistance program we have that is (almost) universally available based on need. You walk into the office (or, even better, use one of the rapidly expanding avenues to apply for the benefits electronically), and they have to give you the benefits that the law says you are guaranteed. Also, because the federal government pays the full cost of the benefits (but not all of the administrative costs), it's free money for the states (although, even so, state participation rates vary widely, with, for example, as few as half of eligible Californians receiving it).

Of course, food stamps provide an income that is nowhere near enough to live on, because their purpose is only to help alleviate hunger. The benefit for a family of three with no other income is $526 a month, or $6328 annually. That figure is about one-third of a poverty-level income, and even that is a level temporarily enhanced by the Recovery Act. But it is a legally mandated entitlement.

When George W. Bush took office, there were 17.2 million people receiving food stamps, a figure that had decreased every year since 1995. This reduction was because the economy improved through the last half of the decade in a way that reached all the way down to the people at the bottom, and also because cuts in the program that were part of the 1996 welfare law restricted eligibility. By 2007, the number had gone back up to 26.3 million due in part to the steadily deteriorating position of low-income people beginning in 2001 and, very important, a somewhat surprising decision by the Bush administration to sign into law big increases in food-stamp eligibility and benefit levels. President Bush was no friend of the poor in many respects, but he was a much more progressive president on food stamps than President Clinton.

As of May 2011, the program had expanded for thirty-seven consecutive months, with twenty thousand recipients added every day. By the fall of 2011, the figure was close to 46 million; one in seven people, and one in four children, were receiving food stamps. So SNAP has been a powerful antirecessionary force. The SNAP half of the story is the good half.

Now for the other half — the reason why there could be 6 million people with no income other than food stamps. The big story is what's happened to cash assistance. Food stamps went from 26.3 million to 46 million recipients as the recession took hold and persisted. But the needle measuring welfare barely moved. In October 2007, there were 3.9 million mothers and children receiving TANF, down from more than 14 million in the early 1990s. Three years later, with unemployment still in the stratosphere, the number on TANF had only risen slightly, to 4.5 million, even though there were plenty of people who needed help and states had funding to help if they wanted to. When barely 1 percent of the population is getting cash assistance, food stamps are the only source of help for far too many people. Whatever the efficacy of the safety net for the "better off" poor — with the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit (as well as food stamps) as income supplements for people who have income from work — people at the very bottom who have little (if any) work are mainly eligible only for food stamps.

Why is welfare not of any use in a recession and barely relevant in many states even when there is no recession? Two reasons: one, as mentioned, there is no longer a legal entitlement to welfare; and two, the culture in welfare offices across most of the country is one of turning people away. In some places, there is an apparent paradox: a pride in a state or county's outreach efforts to help people obtain food stamps and a simultaneous policy of turning away people who apply for TANF. (On a closer look, the difference is not so paradoxical. States get a bonus for doing outreach on food stamps. By contrast, they receive what amounts to a bonus for keeping people off the TANF rolls. This is because the funding they get from the federal government remains constant regardless of the size of the caseload. The fewer people on the rolls, the more money they have to use for other purposes.)

Food stamps: 26.3 million to 46 million. TANF: 3.9 million to 4.5 million. Striking, to say the least.

The bottom line is that Jason DeParle found that there are 6 million people in our country whose only income is food stamps. Two percent of our people. One in every fifty.

Let us now shift the scene to a hearing room in the House of Representatives on June 1, 2011, to an event styled "A Hearing on Federal Welfare Programs." The body holding the hearing is the Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight, and Government Spending. Chairing the hearing is Representative Jim Jordan, Republican from Ohio, who describes himself on his website as "one of the most conservative members of Congress." The specific focus is a new study from the Government Accountability Office that analyzed duplicative programs in the federal government.

Jordan is the chair of an important subcommittee in the Congress. He has power. His witness, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, is a leading conservative advocate on poverty issues. He has significant public visibility.

Framing the issue, Jordan says, "Since Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty in 1964, Americans have spent $16 trillion on welfare at the state and local level." Actually, no. Not even close. It is true that we have spent a lot of money to alleviate and reduce poverty, and we would have had massively more poverty without those programs. But Jordan does not differentiate among the programs and their accomplishments or failures. To him, they are all just "welfare." (Nor does he acknowledge that welfare itself has actually shrunk by two-thirds since the mid-1990s.)

Jordan's agenda becomes more transparent when he introduces Rector. Jordan opines that, "for all programs across all those agencies, we send the wrong incentives. I've often said that the welfare system particularly says to the single mom out there, don't get married, don't get a job, have more kids and you get more money. And is that a fair assessment of ... these hundred plus programs sending the wrong message ... [?]"

Rector's reply: "All of these programs have an anti-marriage effect." Rector does go on at length, but that first sentence of his reply says it all. Bear in mind that the programs Rector says have an "anti-marriage effect" span everything from a preschooler's Head Start and job retraining for a displaced factory worker to Medicaid for a widow in a nursing home or hospice.

Six million people whose only income is food stamps and 20.5 million in deep poverty. To see the conversation at the hearing as detached from reality is an understatement and then some.

What We Have Accomplished

FOOD STAMPS — A SUCCESS STORY

In April 1967, Robert Kennedy went to Mississippi as part of a series of hearings around the country to build support for the reauthorization of the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 — the war on poverty. Mississippi had the largest Head Start program anywhere. It was widely heralded in the civil rights and antipoverty world, but it was in deep political trouble. The law gave the federal government the power to bypass any governor who refused the federal money and award it directly to nonprofit organizations. That had happened in Mississippi, and the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) was the result — a twenty-one-county program that for a time was the largest employer in the state. Nor was CDGM just big; its leadership and many of its employees were veterans of the civil rights movement. Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. — who had succeeded the better-known Ross Barnett — was furious and enlisted the state's powerful senators to pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson to cut off CDGM's funding. Kennedy went to Mississippi to show support for CDGM.

But the trip turned out to be about something else entirely: children, thousands of them, hungry to a point very near starvation. Why? To put it simply, the white power structure in Mississippi — conscious of what the recently enacted Voting Rights Act of 1965 might do to their hold on the heavily African American state — was trying to drive out as many African Americans as possible. A number of factors had come together. The previous year, Congress had extended the minimum wage to farmworkers. Nationwide, only the largest 1 percent of all the nation's farms and only one-third of all farmworkers were affected, but a disproportionate number of those farms were in Mississippi. At about the same time, machines to pick the cotton had become available, and chemicals to kill the boll weevils instead of going after them by hand had also come into greater use. Consequently, the marginally more expensive farm labor could be dispensed with and those who lived on plantations could be evicted.

Their incomes gone, the families had nowhere to turn. Welfare — though it was a pittance then, as it is now — was totally unavailable to two-parent families, which the affected families overwhelmingly were. Surplus commodities, formerly available pretty easily, were being replaced by the recently enacted food stamps program, then a small-scale initiative that was reaching barely 2 million people nationally but had been put in place widely in most of Mississippi. The surplus commodities were less than palatable — the wheat and bulgur were often maggot-infested and hardly enough to live on — but you could get them by going to a warehouse near the train station and they were free.

In contrast to such access, to obtain food stamps one had to go to an office and apply to welfare functionaries who were hostile to the new program in general and to African American applicants in particular. Even more important, one had to pay for the food stamps, a charge that had a big effect on participation in every place where the change in programs occurred. The fee schedule began at zero income with a charge of $2 per person in the family. People with a zero income — thought by the bureaucrats at the Department of Agriculture in Washington to be a purely hypothetical category — actually did exist in Mississippi.

The result — with no jobs, no welfare, no surplus commodities, and no food stamps — was widespread hunger and severe malnutrition. Kennedy and the other senators were accompanied by Daniel Schorr and his CBS cameras on a trip to the Mississippi Delta to see for themselves children with swollen bellies and running sores on their arms and legs that did not heal — and the entire nation saw that evening what Kennedy had seen earlier that day. (Civil rights lawyer Marian Wright, my future wife whom I had met just three days earlier, served as his guide.)

Kennedy was deeply moved and outraged. His children remember him telling them at dinner the next night that they had to make themselves a part of doing something about this — a rare outburst in a house where the expectation of public service usually went without saying. The very next day, he went to see Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman. I was there when he bluntly told the former Minnesota governor and early backer of his brother John F. Kennedy for president, "Orville, you've got to get some food down there." Freeman responded by changing the requirement that families with no income had to pay for their food stamps, a step that was within his power to take without amending the law. It was a small first step, but symbolically a very large and important one.

Kennedy put relieving hunger at the top of his list. His suggestion led to the Field Foundation (which was founded by the liberal New York branch of the Chicago retailing family and went out of business in 1988) sending a group of physicians to Mississippi to examine hundreds of children and to document the degree of their malnutrition. When their report came back with shocking data on the incidence of exotic diseases like marasmus and kwashiorkor as well as rickets and other indicia of severe malnutrition, he arranged a Senate hearing to which he invited Mississippi's senators, who actually showed up. Senator John Stennis was embarrassed, enough so that he proposed an emergency appropriation of $10 million.

Kennedy also got a friend at CBS to commission a documentary. Completed following his death, it showed a child dying on camera in a San Antonio hospital after being born severely malnourished. Jamie Whitten, the powerful Mississippi congressman who chaired the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, unleashed an investigation of the film to find out whether its stories had been staged. The documentary, shockingly stark, was definitely effective.

Kennedy told me to look into the scope of the problem around the country, and we found out quickly that serious hunger was not confined to Mississippi. He assigned me to work on setting up more trips to help him focus the country's attention on the extent of the problem. We looked at both South Carolina and eastern Kentucky. His friend Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings of South Carolina begged him not to publicize the shortcomings of that state and promised to take leadership on the issue (which he did do after Kennedy died). Kennedy did not go to South Carolina, but he did go to eastern Kentucky, where he was followed by a massive press posse, given that the trip occurred in February 1968, when speculation about whether he would run for president was at a fever pitch. Having advanced the trip carefully before deciding finally to go, we found exactly what we knew we would find: there also was a most serious hunger problem in eastern Kentucky.

We traveled across a stretch of communities, holding hearings in one-room schoolhouses, a high school gymnasium, and a college auditorium, and visited families in their homes, hearing of people's struggles firsthand. The basic problem was that the closing of the coal mines had left thousands with no income from work. Welfare was limited to single-parent families and was a pittance in any case, and food assistance was spotty at best. Many families had left for points north in search of a better life, but that could not be a solution for everyone. Representative Carl Perkins had steered various job-training programs to the region, and the favored few survived by participating in successive trainings. For the most part, though, the feudal sway of the local political barons and their cronies left ordinary people on the outside looking in. As in Mississippi, politics had a great deal to do with the widespread incidence of egregious hunger in Kentucky.

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Excerpted from "So Rich, So Poor"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Peter Edelman.
Excerpted by permission of The New Press.
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