-Caveat Lector-
By DEB RIECHMANN
WASHINGTON (AP) - Ever since Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty 35
years ago, the government has had little success elevating depressed
areas like those President Clinton toured this week. Nurturing economic
revival in poor pockets of Appalachia, inner cities and the rural South
has sometimes proven all but impossible, say some veterans of those
wars. More progress has been made among poor people than poor places.
"There was never a war on poverty," says Housing Secretary Andrew
Cuomo,
who went with Clinton on his poverty tour. "Maybe there was a skirmish
on poverty for a brief period of time. We have done the broad people-
based programs - Social Security, Medicaid, welfare. But we have never
done intensive geographically targeted work." Clinton says it's these
ignored areas of America that are the untapped markets of tomorrow. He
wants Congress to give tax incentives, tax credits and loan guarantees
to people who invest there. "I think it's a good thing that we
encourage people to invest in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean,
but they ought to have the same incentive to invest in the Mississippi
Delta, Appalachia, in the native American reservations and the inner
cities," Clinton told people in Clarksdale, Miss. That's been tried,
counter the president's critics. "You know how many times we've saved
Appalachia?" says Robert Rector, analyst at the conservative Heritage
Foundation. "We have the Appalachian Regional Commission. We have the
Economic Development Administration. We have community development
block grants. We have done this over and over and over again." Doug
Besharov, scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says government
money given to communities is sometimes spent unwisely. If it does
improve people's status, they often pack up and move out, he says. "I
would aim for a people strategy, not a place strategy," he says. James
Galbraith, a professor at the University of Texas' Lyndon Baines
Johnson School of Public Affairs, commends Clinton for raising
awareness about places untouched by the nation's economic boom, but
says what begets business activity is building better schools and roads
and raising the minimum wage. "If you throw business activity in a
region where that does not exist, then you have a sweatshop
phenomenon," Galbraith says. Poverty experts agree, however, that many
programs aimed at helping individuals have worked. When LBJ declared a
war on poverty in his 1964 State of the Union address, 19 percent of
the population was living in poverty. By 1997 - the most recent data
available - that number had fallen to 13.3
percent of the population. That's one of every seven Americans. Social
Security drastically reduced the poverty rate among the elderly. Still,
the poverty rate for children remains near 20 percent, a bare
improvement from Johnson's day. Johnson took his own poverty tour,
visiting tarpaper cabins and meeting with workers. In Inez, Ky., he
talked with Tom Fletcher, a jobless father of eight, who made $400 a
year scrounging for coal. So intent was their conversation that neither
noticed when a gust of wind tore off the door of an outhouse nearby. On
another celebrated poverty tour, in the spring of 1967, New York Sen.
Robert Kennedy was moved to tears by the squalor he saw in Mississippi.
Kennedy's brother-in-law, Sargent Shriver, was Johnson's "Mr. Poverty."
Many of the programs launched then remain today - Medicare, Medicaid,
Head Start and Job Corps. Their effort, however, stalled during the
Vietnam War. Skepticism about the government's ability to solve social
problems waned. By the time Ronald Reagan became president, many
Americans agreed with him that the government had gotten too big and
that solutions should come from the private sector. "President Reagan
said the war on poverty was a failure," Shriver said in an interview.
"It was not a great success, that's true, because we didn't have the
money. I told Lyndon Johnson myself that we needed two or three times
the money we had to overcome the problem." Life is better in Appalachia
and the Mississippi Delta - a little better. Sociologist Cynthia "Mil"
Duncan of the University of New Hampshire, who wrote a book about
Appalachia and rural Mississippi, says residents in their 30s and 40s
say the quality of their lives has improved. "When they were growing
up, they didn't have plumbing in their homes and they lived in really
deplorable conditions. Black children were pulled out of school to work
in the fields. That doesn't happen anymore," Ms. Duncan said. "People
now are living more often in trailers and homes with plumbing." But she
adds: "I did interview people in the 1990s in two-room shacks without
plumbing, so it's not that it's all fixed."
Copyright 1999 The Associated Press. The information contained in the
AP
news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise
distributed without prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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