American Dreams (8 page)

All of these reforms are important in their own right, but each is like a single brushstroke. Only when they are combined together do we see what they create: a picture of a growing, striving, thriving America in the twenty-first century.

Imagine the opportunities that will open up for the American people when economic growth creates jobs, lifts wages and restores hope. Imagine the country we can create: A private sector liberated from excessive regulation. Start-ups free to compete on a level playing field with established businesses. An economy reinvigorated by technological innovation and trillions of dollars of new investment. New markets for American products and ideas. Secured Internet freedom and abundant wireless spectrum to boost innovation. The American economy will take off at a historic rate, creating hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs.

This is the exciting opportunity before us. This is the unavoidable challenge that awaits. We no longer have the luxury of wasting time on the failed promises of big government or the divisive rhetoric of class warfare. The world around us is changing quickly, and we have waited for far too long to change with it.

 

T
he war on poverty turned fifty last year in the midst of a changed debate over income and justice in America. When President Lyndon Johnson launched the war in 1964, the issue was the plight of the poor. For many of Johnson's ideological descendants today, the issue is very different. Income inequality—the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us—is sucking up lots of political oxygen these days. The subtext of this debate—and very often the text—is how the rich can be brought down to somehow make our society more equal. What's lost is any discussion of the question that animated President Johnson: How can the poor be lifted up to make our society more prosperous for all?

Down in Plant City, Florida, Christine Miller is focused on other, more practical questions—like making people use her parking spaces. She runs an emergency food bank that served almost twenty-three thousand people last year. Most of her “clients,” as she calls them, are genuinely needy and genuinely appreciative. But there are some who are of a more entitled mind-set. They like to drive up in front of the warehouse and demand their food. So Christine and her staff have had to institute a “park first” policy. It's a small part of their attempt to do more for their clients than just hand out food—and that begins with showing respect for her and her staff.

Christine has been at the Tampa-area food bank for three years, so she has seen a lot. She grows quiet when she talks about a man and his adult daughter who came in when she first started working there. As soon as she saw them, Christine knew something was very wrong. The woman looked dazed and there was stress—and real fear—in the man's face. When his daughter went out to the car to retrieve her purse, it all came spilling out. Just days before, the daughter's husband had shot himself in front of his wife and children. Desperate and in shock, the woman had brought her kids to live with her father. Now they needed help just to put food on the table. So Christine did what she could: She gave them a box with enough food to feed the family for the next four or five days.

The experience haunts Christine because she knew the family needed more—in that case, grief counseling, at a minimum. Most people who come to the food bank need more. Some of their needs are simpler than others. Many don't know that they can ask their bank for forgiveness if they bounce a check, for instance, or that there are alternatives to the exorbitant fees charged by check cashing businesses. One of Christine's first projects at the food bank was to bring in a financial literacy program called Money Smart. For people at or below the poverty level, the program teaches financial basics like maintaining a checking account, the importance of saving and how to repair and/or preserve your credit. The program has made a difference, Christine says, especially for those she struggles most with how to help: the people who genuinely want to lift themselves and their families. One woman who went to her first Money Smart class—a grandmother who had to take in her three teenage grandchildren when their parents were both incarcerated—is now a regular volunteer at the food bank. It is a small victory, but one Christine will take.

Officially, the United Food Bank of Plant City exists to provide emergency rations to people who have signed up for food stamps but aren't yet receiving them. But Christine and her staff always make sure their clients are also signed up for all the other government assistance they are eligible for. In this way, the Plant City food bank exists as a bridge between destitution and the vast bureaucracy of federal programs for the poor.

The war on poverty has resulted in a tangled web of at least ninety-two often overlapping, often duplicative federal programs, including seventeen separate food aid programs, twenty different housing programs and twenty-four programs dedicated to job training.
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In fifty-one years of metaphorical war, some $15 trillion has been spent on these programs, $799 billion in 2012 alone.
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Despite all this, Christine and her staff see only deepening need in eastern Hillsborough County. Their clients are single moms and grandmothers, the newly out of prison and a lot of returning veterans. More and more, she says, the people walking in her doors are the formerly middle class. She and her staff have had to learn that just because someone pulls up in a nice car or lists an address in one of the nicer neighborhoods around Plant City, it doesn't mean they're not in trouble. It can take two years for the bank to foreclose on a home, and in the meantime the occupants could be flat broke. And selling their car isn't an option—chances are it's their lifeline to job interviews and plain old survival. Not to mention that replacing it with trashed credit is next to impossible.

Some former donors have even showed up, now as clients. “When you see them and you hear their stories—‘My husband is out of work, I just found out my daughter's pregnant and I don't know what to do . . .'” Christine's voice trails off. “They don't even know where to go for help because they've never needed it before.”

Christine is on the front lines of what President Johnson called not just a war but an “unconditional war” on poverty. When he made that declaration, 17.3 percent of Americans were poor. Today, the rate is almost unchanged at 15 percent. When you factor in higher costs for things like health care and transportation, the number of men, women and children living in poverty comes to forty-nine million—that's one in six of all Americans.
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Some argue that the war on poverty has been “won,” citing as proof the vast government bureaucracy that has been built to wage it. This assistance has helped many people, and that is no small thing. But our efforts remain incomplete because it has also created a system in which millions of Americans live cushioned but not buoyed by government assistance. Government has succeeded in trapping far too many into poverty as a way of life, and it has not done nearly enough to help Americans escape poverty. A tragic 70 percent of children born into poverty today will never make it to the middle class.
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The uncomfortable truth is that there are now a number of other countries with as much or more opportunity than ours for the poor and middle class. More people in Canada, for instance, go on to surpass the income of their parents than in the United States.
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Fifty-one years later, there is no other word for this than failure.

Christine finds meaning in her work—“I'm definitely right where God wants me,” she says. Still, she sees a void that she struggles to fill every day. Her job is to hand out food, but her clients need so much more. She'd like to help them escape their circumstances, not just survive them. She isn't given to lofty expressions of patriotism, but her concern for her clients comes from the same place that motivates those of us worried about the American Dream. The difficult truth is that America is still the land of opportunity for most, but it is not the land of opportunity for all. If we are to remain an exceptional nation, we need leaders dedicated to finding creative new ways to lift up the poor. Sadly, what we're getting today is the opposite: a lot of talk about stale old policies to bring down the rich.

The reasons so many Americans are stuck in the kind of poverty that Christine Miller sees every day are varied and complex. The modern economy has eliminated many low-skill jobs and the jobs that are left require the kind of education our schools aren't delivering to the poor. Most significant of all, too many American children are born into communities where marriage is a vanishing institution. I will have much more to say about this in Chapter Seven, but for now I'll just note this: It is no coincidence that 71 percent of poor families with children lack a married couple to provide for them.

The root causes of poverty are deep in family and education, but the immediate cause today is pretty straightforward: not enough jobs and not enough Americans working. In 2012, only about 11 percent of the poor were working full-time. Most of the poor in their prime working years—from eighteen to sixty-four—hadn't had even a single week with a job.
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And just as it is true globally that free enterprise, not foreign aid, eliminates poverty, so is it true here at home. According to Keith Hall of George Mason University, there has never been a decline in the poverty rate that wasn't associated with a rise in employment. As a matter of fact, in the past twenty years work seems to be the only thing that can be relied on to reduce poverty.
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But the disappearance of work in America isn't just confined to the poor. The number of able-bodied adults who are working today has fallen to a thirty-six-year low. Less than 63 percent are in the labor force. This is the equivalent of between seven million and eight million people giving up on finding a job. Part of the reason for the decline in work is expected—the retirement of the baby boomers. Part of it is still not completely understood—the changes in the economy due to technology and globalization, which we've discussed. But for the poorest American families, the decline of work has had particularly disastrous consequences. Families with little or no savings, no assets in a home and no partner in marriage to share the load are the families that can least afford to not work.

Not only are the roots of poverty complex, but poverty affects different parts of the country differently. We're used to thinking of the poor in America as being concentrated in big cities, but the fact is poverty is more widespread in rural areas than in cities. The Census Bureau has identified 353 persistently poor counties in the United States and 301 of them—over 85 percent—are rural counties.
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The recession has made poverty in America even more diverse. It hit children in rural areas harder than children in the cities, so much so that children living in deep poverty—in families surviving on less than $1,000 a month—are now more numerous in rural areas. The recession also increased poverty in the suburbs. Between 2000 and 2010, the growth in the number of people living below the poverty line was twice as high in the suburbs as in the cities. Today there are actually more poor people in the suburbs than in the cities.
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Add to this the fact that there are regional, racial and ethnic differences in poverty as well. The poorest Americans are concentrated in the rural areas of the Southwest, the northern Midwest, the Southeast and on Native American lands.
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In the Southwest many are Hispanic, in the South many are African American and in the Appalachian Southeast many of the poor are white.

Not surprisingly, the poor struggle with different challenges in different parts of the country. Transportation is a major issue for the rural poor—the nearest grocery store or hospital may be thirty or forty miles away. Cars aren't luxuries there; they're necessities—necessities that too often break down and always require gas. Similarly, in the suburbs there may be public transportation to and from the city, but not to the local supermarket or doctor's office. And in the cities housing costs eat up more of a family's budget than elsewhere—often because of government zoning regulations.

Poverty in America is as diverse as America, and yet Washington has a one-size-fits-all approach to fighting it. Instead of finding new and innovative ways to address unique needs, the federal government has piled on duplicative agencies and programs to address the same need. Oren Cass, an adviser to Mitt Romney in 2012 who has written about giving states more flexibility to fight poverty, describes a web of programs created through different pieces of legislation and administered by different agencies with different rules, procedures and eligibility requirements. What freedom states have to administer programs is complicated by the many strings attached by the federal agencies that fund them.

We shouldn't be surprised. For fifty years our antipoverty policy has been guided by the idea that more and better-funded Washington programs administered by bureaucrats who know better will help the poor. As time has passed, these programs have acquired constituencies in the special interests that benefit from them. As programs grow, the forces encouraging their continued growth multiply and the process perpetuates itself. Anyone who questions the status quo—questions, that is, not whether we have an obligation to help the poor, but merely whether the current course is the best way to do so—is declared to be an enemy of the poor.

Taken together, all of this makes it highly unlikely Washington will be any more successful in the next fifty years in lifting Americans out of poverty unless we pursue real and fundamental change. We need a dramatic shift away from the mentality that says one more federal program, one more bureaucracy or one more pile of money will successfully lift the poor. We need to move away from the tired old debate about inputs—how much money we spend—to an honest examination of outputs—how many American lives we can change.