Spirit in Action

So Rich, So Poor: Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America

Peter Edelman's new book is So Rich, So Poor: Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America, and he brings great credentials an passion to the concern. As an aide to Senator Robert Kennedy, having servied in Washington in various posts, including the one he resigned from during the Clinton administration in protest of the "welfare reform" that Clinton signed, he knows the nuts & bolts as well as the mechanics of government.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 11 Jun 2012
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today, we're going to delve into one of the mysteries of the modern American landscape for spirit in action. Why it's so hard for us to tackle the problem of poverty in one of the richest countries on the earth. We'll be talking with Peter Edelman and drawing on the fruits of his more than 50 years wrestling with the problem. Starting as an aide to Senator Robert Kennedy and up through his work under the Clinton administration, a post that he left in protest of the misguided welfare reform of that time. The newest book by Peter Edelman is called So Rich, So Poor. Why it's so hard to end poverty in America. Peter Edelman joins us by phone from Washington, D.C. Peter, thanks so much for joining me for spirit in action. - Thank you, I'm glad to be with you. - You're over there in Washington, D.C. Living in what I think must be a quite a hotbed right now. Of course, Wisconsin's no slacker this past year either, but. - Yeah, you're in the hotbed. - Yeah, so in the hotbed there, what's your current perspective on how the fight against poverty is going? - Well, I think right now it's not going very well because first of all, we're in a terrible recession and people are struggling all over the country. And no matter what the economists say or the official measures say the real people are still out of work and having a very tough time. And then the second thing is the politics in Washington are particularly awful. I don't have to tell you that. And I'm sorry to say your Congressman from Wisconsin, Paul Ryan is leading the group of people who want to cut deeply into programs and policies that help low-income people. - I think it'd be safe to say from your work history that you're a Democrat. You certainly worked for Democrats in many different levels. At a certain point, say early 1970s, Richard Nixon, he looks pretty liberal compared to most Republicans now and to some Democrats. How do you cite yourself on that continuum of liberal, conservative and Republican Democrat? - Well, I'm a Democrat. I'm a lifelong Democrat. And I would guess that I'm what you would call a liberal Democrat. I think I'm a pretty mainstream person, but I certainly am on the progressive side of things. - You got involved in this whole thing with poverty way back in the 1960s, working for Senator Robert Kennedy or Bobby Kennedy as we mostly knew him at the time. Could you talk to us about your introduction to the issue and to the concern? - Yes. I grew up in Minneapolis in a middle-class household. My father was a lawyer and a good Democratic farmer labor person. He was certainly somebody who respected Hubert Humphrey a lot. And so I always had that kind of inclination, but I didn't really know anything about poverty until I went to work for Robert Kennedy. I was on my way to probably law practice maybe in New York, something like that. I ended up through a series of happy accidents being a legislative assistant to Robert Kennedy and it really changed my life. And it did it in two steps. One was the influence of Kennedy himself on me, which was enormous. He cared very, very deeply about people in our country who aren't fully included in our society economically and in other ways. And the way he learned about these issues, and particularly after his brother died and he was on his own, was to travel around the country and see and listen to people who had some very great issues and problems. And it was my privilege, I would call it, to go with him, to be his staff and to learn, as he learned and to learn from him. So that was number one. Number two was that as a consequence of working for him, one of the places we went was Mississippi in 1967 where we saw children who were on the edge of starvation. But on that trip, I met Mary and Wright who was to become my wife. She was a civil rights lawyer in Mississippi. So that was the second thing that happened that really immersed me what's turned out to be a lifetime immersion. - So you're saying that connecting up with your wife has immersed you in a life of poverty? - That's right, exactly. Well, I'll have to try to be more precise won't I in this conversation. We managed not to be poor. I'm very grateful for that. But both of us obviously care a great deal about poverty in our country. - In the book, So Rich So Poor, you take a broad picture of the last 50, 60 years of poverty in the United States. Could you give us the overview of how poverty has gone up and down in those years when it's looked effective and effective are dealing with the issue? - Yes, I think just the numbers tell us part of the story. If you start back when we started measuring poverty, the first numbers that we have are from 1959 although that was retrospect of the poverty line itself was invented in 1963. But in 1959, we had 22%, 22.4% of people were poor, according to this measure that we use in our country. In just about 14 years from then to 1973, that was cut in half, it went down to 11.1%. Now we can get into why that happened, but just giving you the flavor. That was really an important period of change. Then it was kind of up and down. It stayed low through the 1970s. It went up under President Reagan and the recession of the early 1980s. And then sort of went back and forth. It went up to 15%, over 15% in the early years of President Reagan, went down a little, then it went up to that level again under President Bush and was somewhere around 15% when President Clinton took office. And then again under President Clinton because the economy improved so much in the second half of the 1990s, poverty went down to 11.3% when he left office. So you had from 1973 to 2000 about the same achievement. And we can come back again to why it didn't go down more because we've had some very good public policy that does make a difference. And then finally, over the course of the last 12 years since President Clinton left office, it's gone up in two bites. It went up by six million people until the recession started and it went up by another nine million over the course of the last four or five years. So we now have again about 15.3% of our people in poverty and that's 46 million people at the moment. So that's the numerical ups and downs. - And of course, what we need is an idea of what those numbers mean. What does it really mean to be in poverty or into deep poverty as you discuss in the book? What does this mean in terms of our personal experience? - Yes. Well, let's talk about that and then let's also talk if you want to about what those numbers mean in terms of the why of them. First of all, the measure that we have of poverty, what it means in that sense, at the moment the poverty line for a family of three is about $18,000 and for a family of four, about $22,000. You can see that that's pretty low in terms of what it costs to live in most parts of our country. We have a new measure. We don't probably have to go into that, but under that we count all the income that people have. It's not all counted in the current measure. And we have a better measure of what it costs to live. And so by that measure, just to give you one contrast, it's 49 million people right now instead of 46. Anyway, the poverty line we have understates the amount of the problem. What it means to be poor is that you live in housing that's very likely to be not good, overcrowded. Not so much that it doesn't have indoor plumbing. If you looked at this 50 years ago, there were a lot of places in the country that didn't have indoor plumbing. And so we have improved in that respect and we should feel good about that. Kids who were poor tend to go to substandard schools, wildy schools, that's particularly true of African-American and Latino children. Poverty among African-Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans is almost three times the rate among whites, about 10% among whites, about 27% now among those three minority groups. So children who grow up poor tend obviously for reasons that relate to the opportunity structures to what happens in school, but to some extent for what happens in communities and in families, they have a higher chance of growing up to end up in poverty. So it's tough and one of the things that's happened now, especially has increased since the year 2000, is deep poverty or extreme poverty. It's people who have incomes below half the poverty line, below $9,000 for a family of three. And that's now 20.5 million people. It was 12.6 million just at the turn of the century. And it's almost impossible to understand how people survive in those circumstances. Worse than that, and these are government figures, there's 6 million people whose only income is food stamps, who without food stamps would have no income at all. And food stamps by itself gives an income of about a third of the poverty line, about $6,000 for a family of three. And so those are people who very likely don't have a place of their own in which to live. Many are homeless, others move in with somebody, which is almost invariably not a permanent, not a viable situation, and so they're constantly moving. And that's terrible for the children. You can't live on that kind of income without getting help in one way or another and maybe doing some things you shouldn't do. The only thing that we can say that's a little better is that most people who are that poor don't stay down there for too long, they end up being only regular poor instead of deep poor. But if it's a temporary situation in a way, it's all the more reason that we ought to say, well, we're just not gonna tolerate that situation and we're gonna see to it that people don't get stuck that way, that we have a safety net that works. One of the things that's happened, and we can get into this more deeply, but we used to have a combination of cash assistance or welfare for families, at least whether they were headed by a single mom. And that is substantially gone in large parts of the country. In Wyoming, for example, we're down to 617 people in the whole state, mothers and children, 4% of the poor children. So that's how you can end up with 6 million people with only food stamps and not having cash assistance. - And Paul Ryan being willing to take that away too, right? - Yes, that's right. Paul Ryan and others are now saying, well, food stamps is another formal welfare and Newt Gingrich says that to President Obama is the food stamp president. Anyway, maybe that gives you a little sense of, or adds something for your listeners that gives them a little sense of who and why and what it's like. - You're not shy about sharing statistics in the book and there's a lot of them and they do help crystallize the focus on what poverty is and isn't. There are some possibly scurrilous or misleading statistics that were shared last year by Fox News. And what they were talking about was people who are classified as being poor or below the poverty line, who had things like 82% of them have microwave oven and 64% of them have more than one TV. Is that a reason we should think that poverty is not such a bad thing in the US? It's not the grind that we think of when we think of poverty or does that in some way affect the idea that we should have when we're picturing it? - I think it's basically misleading. Some of those numbers when you get into looking at them in detail and what their sources are based on very small samples or they're very kind of out of context. One of the facts is that it really is true that most people who were ever poor, this is similar to what I said about deep poverty a minute ago, don't stay poor. They go in and out of poverty. The number of people in this country who were ever poor is quite large. Again, one of the reasons why it's so weird and so unacceptable that we don't help is because people are in a rough patch and they need help. I mean, the idea of temporary assistance to needy families, the name for welfare now, was supposed to be that you could get temporary help. That's some other bad aspects, but you can't even get temporary help now in all the places where it's disappeared. There certainly are people who at a given time have gone into poverty. They do have some kind of an appliance that maybe they wouldn't have if they were persistently poor. On the other hand, a lot of the things that they talk about in those statistics are really not a very big deal. So they have a television set. Is it fancy fancy or is it a little thing that they've had for 15 years? If they have a microwave, again, is people envision some fancy thing or is it just a very small thing? Anyway, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation tries very hard to sell people on the idea that there really aren't any poor people because they have all these things. But then he turns around and he says that we spend $700 billion helping poor people and it's ineffective because we still have all these poor people. So I kind of want him to tell us whether he's worried that we have too many poor people and we're not helping him or we don't have any poor people at all. He's got two different stories that are totally inconsistent. - I wanna take one more look at the relevance of poverty before I go on to some of the details, the specifics that you address and so rich, so poor. And that is, I have an unusual perspective, probably from point of view, most people in the US, in that I lived two years in West Africa, in Togo. I was in the Peace Corps. Because of that, I saw people whose income is not one-tenth of what our poverty rate is. How does poverty in the US relate to poverty as seen in different countries or when we look outside our borders? - Yes, that's of course a very good question. So it gets to the question of how you define poverty because it would be shocking if we said in order to be poor in this country you have to be poor the way people are in third world countries. There is some notion, I think, it's partly a moral question, I think, about what's an appropriate measure in relation to a particular society? Actually, in all the European countries, Japan and so on, they measure poverty differently from the way we do. We have this set number. It now is much further back from median income than it was 30, 40 years ago. In other words, our definition of poverty hasn't kept up with changes in the standard of living. Now, somebody might say, well, why should it? They should be, you know, if they're poor, it should be in an absolute sense. But in Europe, by definition, poverty is half the median income. So it's just, or in some cases, in some countries it's 60% of the median income. So when the standard of living goes up, the definition of poverty goes up. And it's about a question of inclusion, and about a question of not having too much inequality, not having too much of a distance between the top and the bottom. So part of our problem is absolute, that we have people who just really are barely sustaining themselves in our, obviously, much higher cost of living society than where you lived in Africa. But also, it's a question of the distance between the top and the bottom, which I think is really corrosive of our whole democracy. - So you're talking, of course, about the idea of relative poverty. And that is, I mean, if you can't dress appropriately to attend a school, given the standards of the school, then that means you can't get an education within the society. That's one way that people can see that. Or if you can't afford the foods that one is allowed to eat in the cafeteria in that school, obviously, you're poor. People could live on a pittance in Togo because the standards of everybody were that low. And I mean, in the US, you can't go to a hotel that costs a dollar a night. That doesn't exist here, whereas it would exist in Togo where I was at. So I'm aware that relative poverty is a very important issue. And we can't just discount poverty in this country because it doesn't look like poverty in Togo. - A key element or key feature of what's been happening in the United States is this raising disparity in incomes. You already alluded to that. Rich getting richer, the middle class is stagnating and diminishing in numbers, I guess. And the poor are getting poorer. Do you have any idea why this has happened? Really, the root causes, as opposed to the secondary causes that continued the process? - I think I do, yes. I think that particularly starting in the 1970s, we've had a tremendous increase in the income of people at the top and there's some reasons for that. And we've had a stagnation of the wages of people in the entire lower half, not just people we call poor. That's because of the tremendous flood of low wage jobs that came on then that replaced the much better paying industrial manufacturing jobs that went away. If you look at the distance between the top and the bottom from most of the 20th century up until then, it didn't change all that much. I mean, it varied at particular times. But this change since 1973 is actually unprecedented in terms of going in the wrong direction. Why did that happen on the top? - Well, some of it is there were certain number of people, entertainers and sports figures and so on who began to have very, very high incomes. But then in the business world, there was this kind of new phenomenon where, and I can't exactly tell you why, some of it's interlocking directorates, kind of people scratching each other's back. But the pay of CEOs went up from about 23 times the pay of the average worker in the early 1970s to around 400 times that now. So that's a internal decision that corporations are making where they're essentially allowing that situation to get out of hand. And then the tax policy has been at the top. It's gotten taxes on people at the top of just gone steadily lower over the course, certainly since the Reagan period until now and including Bush tax cuts. And so the amount of money that people at the top pay in taxes is, of course, we know the Buffett rule is less than their own secretaries pay in taxes. So it's a combination of the way corporations function and the public policy mainly. The other part of it is this incredible flood of low wage jobs. So now the median job in this country pays around $33,000. In other words, half the jobs in the country pay less than that. And that's if you have it full time in all year. And a quarter of the jobs pay less than the poverty line for a family of four. Again, even if you have them full time. And those wages have not gone up. Over 40 years, they've gone up 7% when you take inflation into account. A fifth of a percent each year. These are stunning numbers. So now you have, generally speaking, the researchers think that the line for when you have a decent income, when you can pay all your bills and make ends meet is about twice the poverty line, you know, around $44,000 for a family of four. That's now 103 million people. That's now a third of the people in this country. So I don't think we really focus on this question of the horrible number of low wage jobs that we have. Again, these low wage jobs, there's several reasons for it. I would imagine that one of the reasons is this exporting of so much of our manufacturing to other countries. And that of course is facilitated by things like NAFTA and other programs that have opened up our borders and made it easier for corporations to export across borders. What other reasons do you see? And there are how important is that particular reason? I think that's certainly a part of it, although then there's a pretty complicated discussion to be had about exactly what our trade policy should be. But I think long before we had NAFTA, we had, well, a number of things. Economies like Germany and Japan that had been destroyed in the war, where we had everything to ourselves in the years after World War II, they began to compete with us. And so the whole global economy began to develop and it's only gotten stronger and stronger. Now you have China and you have India, and they start regardless of the trade policy, but affected by it to some extent, they just have lower wage structures. Now that's gonna change, that will change some, but it's just for so many products, even though it costs money to ship them if they're a manufactured product, it's just cheaper to produce them in other places and the trade policy is only a part of that. So that's a major thing that's happened. On the other end though, you have to look at the jobs that replace them and it's good that jobs replace the ones that we lost, but they're low wage service jobs. A lot of them are because when so many moms went into the labor force, either because they wanted to, or because they needed that second worker in their home to go out and earn money so they could get somewhat past the low wage job problem, then you get jobs that are things that make up for the fact that mom is working outside the home. So you get more childcare, you get lots of people eating out and those are jobs, you get people taking care of people's yards, so you get a bunch of low wage jobs that come as a result of they're not being generally the mom who's staying home doing those things. So that's one of the causes, but the bigger thing is that we've become this sort of low wage service economy and it's just so pervasive. - I'm gonna spring something on you that I don't know that I've ever told anyone, but it's my theory of how we are headed for some kind of severe problem unless we do major income distribution. And that is, in a kind of a theoretical end of the process type analysis, we could imagine where everything in the world is mechanized and the only person who say controls or has any income is the person who owns everything. So one person could have all of the income and all the work that's being done and all of the need for that work to be done for individuals would be pouring into the pockets of the one, shall we call them the giant CEO. How much has mechanization played into this rise of the low wage economy and the ability to funnel it all up to the CEO? - I think that technology automation, et cetera, is certainly a part of the reason why some of the higher paying jobs have disappeared. Now it's complicated because you get, you know, the whole new technology has its own jobs, the people who work in Silicon Valley work on a high tech in one way or another. So it's not a total disappearance and there are a lot of jobs that we call middle skill that are there, you know, whether it's electricians or people who work in engineers in one way or other kinds of technicians. But you're asking a different question, which I think is a very interesting question. It's a moral question, it's a philosophical question. If there were no jobs in the world and whether it was all owned by one person or whatever, then the question would be, how would the people of the world eat? And it suggests that you would have to have the income that would be generated to this oligarchy or this one man would somehow have to be shared or there wouldn't be any, among other things, there wouldn't be anybody to consume that man's product. So there would be, he'd have a self interest in sharing his income with all these people who don't work because otherwise he wouldn't have anybody to sell his product to. It's a really interesting thought problem about what are the considerations in terms of the sharing of the income if you have that extreme situation. And then apply it back to where I think we are going to be for a long time, which is too much low wage work. And whether the people who are running the big companies and so on would actually ever see that it's in their self interest that there be, in one way or another, a sharing of revenues in a way that make people who are lower down in the consumers and who therefore actually recycle the money and it goes through the economy and it helps everybody. - I think it goes without saying that you're probably not a great fan of the trickle down economy type of approach. What do you think of trickle up? You give all the money to the people who are on the lower end of the wage scales. You give it to them so that they can buy appliances and make all of these corporations a great success. What do you think of that approach? - Well, that's essentially what I'm saying. I wouldn't call it trickle up because I'm not, I don't think it's correct let alone a realistic to talk about some sort of equalization. That makes no sense to me. But I also think there are people who are making more money than they need and more money than is good for the society. They can still be billionaires but they don't have to have that many billions sort of a way to put it. But yes, I think that as we go along here, look, what are the sources of income for workers beyond just whatever the labor market causes the wage to be? - Well, unions should be stronger, in my view. I hope they come to be stronger. The minimum wage could be higher, but only up to a point because actually you raise the minimum wage too far. I would say at this point, you can safely go to $10. But if you start talking about a $15 or $20 minimum wage, I think we've got plenty of research that shows you actually do some damage. So then you go on to, well, if we had decent healthcare for everybody, if we had childcare help for those who need it, housing help for those who need it, which we don't have. Only the current childcare programs reach one in seven people who need it, housing vouchers and public housing reach one in four people who need it. If we had all of those things and help with college, that adds to income. We have the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit that add to the income of workers in low wage jobs. So we're already doing some wage supplementation. We already have a policy about not leaving people just stuck with the result of their low wage job. I think that the question that is a more realistic form of what you've raised that we need to be talking about as we move out of the current depth of the recession that we're in is about wage supplementation. If we have so many low wage jobs and it's just not going anywhere and people can't make ends made, I think we need a national debate about the fact that people should get more help through public policy than they do. - We're talking right now to Peter Edelman. He is author of So Rich, So Poor. Why it's so hard to end poverty in America and you're listening to Spirit in Action. I'm host for Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeet and this is a Northern Spirit Radio production, our website, northernspiritradio.org. And on the site, you find our archives of almost seven years. Find links to our guests. You can find books like Peter Edelman's So Rich, So Poor via our site. There's also a place to drop comments. We love to hear from you. And if you want to drop some financial support in our direction, we'd love to see that too. Again, Peter Edelman is our guest and amongst his curriculum vitae, you will find that he is currently a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. He, along the way, has worked for Supreme Court Justice, Arthur Goldman, who was top advisor for Bobby Kennedy, back from between '64 and '68. He was issues director for Senator Edward Kennedy when he was in presidential campaign. And he worked for President Bill Clinton's administration until he resigned in protest. And maybe we'll come to that in just a moment. He's also author of another book, Searching for America's Heart, RFK, and the Renewal of Hope, and he's co-author of two other books. You'll find that information also on northernspiritradio.org. So back to you, Peter. There are so many threads to follow in the debate, in the concerns, in the dealing with poverty. And we go down the education route or the income supplement and how it happens regionally and how it's concentrated in certain areas. And people will find that in the book, So Rich, So Poor. So do take a look at the book. But let's talk about a couple of the highlights. One of them that strikes me as really relevant. Certainly there was always this divide Democrats and Republicans and liberals and conservatives. How would you compare what you saw when LBJ was there and the great society was passed, those programs? How would you compare that with the political gap these days between Democrats and Republicans? Oh, it's like night and day. I hope that the current gap does not last, that we will come to our senses and get back toward the center. In general, our history is that when we've had periods of either more liberal period, like the progressive era or the New Deal or the great society, that those more progressive times find their way back to the center after a while. And that people on the other end, when we have a more kind of conservative or people on the right being on top, that that tends to end. So I sure hope this time is going to prove to be temporary and one way or another, we get back toward a balance. So this is definitely a time that's in stark contrast to the 1960s. But the 1960s were very unusual in the other direction. The polarization is something that I've seen. Did it feel as polarized? I mean, maybe if you had been a Republican, if you had been very goldwater, would you have felt like things were polarized to the same extent that perhaps the Democrats feel in Wisconsin currently? No, I don't think so. The very goldwater to the contrary notwithstanding, the Republicans in those days had moderates. They had Nelson Rockefeller. They had, you know, in order to get a culture in the Senate of the filibuster on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in those days it required 67 votes to stop debate. The Southern Democrats were all opposed to enacting the Civil Rights legislation. So the South from, you know, the Atlantic Ocean across to Texas and Oklahoma was all opposed to the Civil Rights Act. So you had to have something on the order of 25, probably Republican votes to get culture. Well, that's a kind of Republican who was now basically extinct. Much to our losses, what I think. Yes. You were raised Jewish. As you said, you grew up in Minneapolis, Jewish family. Is this in any way a part pro or con of your motivation to work so hard concerning poverty for so many decades? I think so. I am very consciously Jewish. I've been very involved in issues in Israel that relate to social justice there. I've been co-chair of Americans for Peace Now, which is the American Support Group for the peace process, which is languishing now. But I was involved more in that back in the days when we had Oslo and when there was optimism. And I've been chair of the New Israel Fund, which works on social justice issues in Israel. And all of that is, of course, very much because of my strong feeling as a Jewish person. So I think that my application of Jewish values is very much a part of why I think and do what I do in relation to American poverty. Of course, we both know that perhaps more so now than 40 or 50 years ago, we have such distinct polarization within each religion so that there are Jews like me and there are ultra-orthodox Jews as politics and whose moral attitudes are 100% different from mine. And it's true in the Protestant world, the Catholic world, the Islamic world, et cetera. So this polarization in the religious world is mirrors and to some extent, perhaps actually fuels the political differences on the secular side. My impression of your book, So Rich So Poor, Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America, is that you don't address the role of religion or spirituality in those factors in terms of helping or hindering dealing with poverty or maybe enabling or curing the problem of poverty. I don't know if that's an intentional one. I know you were focusing mainly on governmental programs and sometimes programs are kind of quasi-governmental. My question is, with the breadth of your experience over these decades, do you think that religion has been more often a help or a hindrance in terms of dealing with this issue? I think that's very hard. I do think that we know that faith-based the churches and synagogues and mosques in the '60s were an important, were a huge force for civil rights. The moral force of people with collars and ministers generally going to the South and putting their bodies on the line, taking enormous risks, bearing witness for justice, that was powerful. That was incredibly powerful. We don't have as much of that now. The liberal leadership in all of our religions is not as strongly active for social and economic justices, I think, as it was 50 years ago. So that's a change and it's too bad. Now, I talk about, I think, religion in a couple ways in the book, but as you say, not extensively. One is that insofar as we would put together a coalition that's more effective than what we have now on these issues, there's the liberal part of the labor movement that's represented by the SEIU Service Employees International Union and some other unions. There are various groups that are associated with particular racial and ethnic minorities and women that play an active role. But certainly, I think that the churches and synagogues, et cetera, and the national organizations need to be a part of that. So there are people in Washington and leaders around the country, my friend David Saperstein, who is the head of the Religious Action Center, Reform Judaism. That's a wonderful example of a deep commitment to social justice. And so we do have that and I would hope that that could strengthen itself over a period of time and I talk about that to some extent. The other is that in communities, and particularly in African-American, inner city, low income communities, I say in the book that I would like to see a lot more contribution and activism of people in the faith community to be helpful, both one-on-one. They do quite a lot, some of them. And also politically, I don't think that we've had the same kind of strength there that we could and should have. So it does come up because some, particularly in my chapter, concentrated poverty on the inner city, a lot of the answers are not governmental, they're civic. They're things that come out of communities. They're people helping each other and strengthening each other and the faith organizations, the churches and all, really should be playing a major, major role in that. - I guess that's something that spirituality alone cannot do, that religion, that is to say, a corporate group of people with a spiritual focus, make a big difference. One of the ways that they can have an effect, and you talk about how this affects poverty in the U.S., and that is the breakdown of the traditional family. You've got a household's headed by a single person, often a woman, women having babies, you know, when they're 16 out of wedlock, all of those trends affect poverty deeply as well. - Yes, I think we need to face up to that, but not with the kind of slogans that we often get. I think that we really, it's just very important. That's where I think some of the civic and one-on-one activity is so important. Now, the question of babies being born to women who are not married, this is a worldwide question, this is not just the United States, and I'm at a point of citing those numbers, and it's a question that goes across racial lines, and I make a point of citing those numbers, but having said all of that, it is true that 70% of babies being born in the African-American community are being born to women who are not married, and well, there are many, many individual stories about that, and I would not want to talk in any kind of broad brush terms about that. I think we need to look at the question of what's happening in those communities. A lot of it is what we've done to the criminal justice system, so that the young men have gone through essentially the cradle to prison pipeline, too many of them are going to jail, they aren't good marriage material, that's a part of what's happening, so if we want more marriage, more presence of two parents, together raising children, we have to look at the education system, we have to look at the opportunity structures in the economy, we have to look at the criminal justice system, so some of this is about individual morality, there's no question about it, but at the same time, some of it is structure, and what we need is for people to come together so that we don't have this debate, where on the one side everybody says, all these are structural problems, that's it, end of story, and on the other side, everybody says, oh, it's all individual responsibilities, people behavior responsibly, both of those are wrong, and so there does have to be a question of, I mean, after all you and I, and our children, don't get anywhere in this life, if they don't take responsibility for themselves, so that should be true of everybody, and the question is how do we promote that, and what are the strategies to get more for these kids who are growing up without enough guidance in their lives, without enough role models, how do we get more of that into their lives, and governments don't do that, they may fund some programs, but people have to do that, so I really think it's fair and important to say that there is a tremendously important civic responsibility aspect to moving forward here. - I think that anybody who knows, Peter Edelman, knows that you are a liberal Democrat that you're on that end of the field, there's no question where your sympathies lie, that having been said, I'm particularly proud of you for not tiptoeing around some of the issues that I think might be raised by the more conservative end of the population, things that on the left are sometimes considered politically correct things that you cannot say. One of them that you address is the whole issue of how many children you are, and I think you just addressed it very sensitively, we can't ignore it, and the fact that you don't ignore it in this book, so rich, so poor, makes a big difference. Another one that you address is what was, I guess, called this cultural dependency on welfare, we have a culture of welfare that meant that people were raised in it and lived on it, never got out of that, that was their world view. Do you think there was some kind of fundamental flaw in how we originally implemented the great society programs or welfare or other such programs? - Those are two different things, I do think that the welfare system that we had that was replaced in 1996 was deeply flawed. So just on that question, this is something that I first became aware of in 1967 when I was working for Robert Kennedy. I had been working for him for a couple of years, and there came a point where he had to do some testimony about welfare to, I think it was some kind of a city council or some kind of a hearing in New York City anyway, and so without much knowledge, I put together a speech for him that built on something that he had said in passing a year earlier in another speech, but that talked about how welfare was hated by the people who gave it out and by the recipients all, it was demeaning and it wasn't helping the people who needed the help because it wasn't helping them end up with a job, and Kennedy got a front page story that next day in the New York Times, he was shocked, he had just said what he thought, and the headline was, "Kennedy declares welfare system bankrupt, not in a financial sense, obviously." That was kind of where I was first exposed to the fact that there was nothing to say that was particularly good about the way we were doing welfare. So we never did anything to fix that, and by the time Clinton thing came around, there was a strong drumbeat of opposition and calling for change and a lot of anger in the population because it had been sort of drummed up at the so-called deadbeat people and so on. But what they did was instead of fixing it in a way that would really help people get off the rolls and kind of help them support training other kinds of support they needed to succeed in the labor force, it just was a series of bumper stickers kicking people in the behind and saying to the states, you should get people off the rolls in any way that you can, which is what actually happened. So that's one whole thing that's in your question as well for itself, which was unsatisfactory and then made more unsatisfactory by the 1996 law. Now, you asked me about great society programs. Generally, no, that's a completely different thing. Some of them weren't done very well, like job training has never been done very well and we could get into a long conversation about that. There are things about what we did about education policy that we still haven't fully figured out but we're doing I think better now than we did until recent years. Was Head Start wrong? Of course not. Were the different housing, public housing, the high-rise public housing that goes back to the '30s and then post-war but not more probably up until sometime in the '60s we began to realize that it was just not good for people. Anyway, you have to go program by program and most of the things that were put in have made a huge difference. Food stamp makes a huge difference. Earned income tax credit is very, very important. Obviously, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, legal services for people. Community health centers, what a great program. Now reaches 21 million people around the country with healthcare that they would not otherwise be getting. You know, just because you're eligible for Medicaid doesn't mean there's somebody there to serve you. We've done so many things that are right. So we have to be careful about differentiating between the things that didn't work so well and some of the really terrific things that we've done that we only need to do more of. - That's a pretty good summary of things. I obviously our time is winding down end of the hour. There's one thing that just tickled my fancy and I'm sure someone had a great idea along the way. And I have to thank you because I've never seen it before I saw it and so rich, so poor. You refer to a program whose acronym is HIPY, H-I-P-P-Y. And I have a feeling that many of our listeners are much prouder to be associated with the program called HIPY than one called the Patriot Act. The Patriot Act did not win my favor because I thought it was a loss of what's important. - It tells what the HIPY program was. - Don't give me a quiz on what the acronym stands for. I'd have to look that up. But it's a wonderful program. It started in Israel and it was actually Bill Clinton who brought it over to Arkansas when he was governor. But it's a home visiting program and it's done in a very dignified way, not intrusive and so on. And there are other examples around the country that Aaron Holm, a child program that's based in Long Island, New York is in about 15 states, quite similar. You know, it's been evaluated. It makes a huge difference. It's just a common sense thing, not forced on a young mom, but with her cooperation in welcoming it and somebody comes to their house and the kids get books and the mom gets and keeps on parenting. And the consequence of all of that is real improvement in the parenting that takes place in those households. - And in a cost effective way. And that's one of the things that's unfortunate. Some people have a prejudice towards punishing people instead of helping them. And if you can help them for one seventh of the cost of punishing them, putting them in prison for extended periods. It seems that the most fiscally conservative person would be supporting that. - Yes, yeah. Well, and those programs have had more, at least up until recently, bipartisan support programs like it, but it just does make sense. - Again, we've been talking with Peter Edelman. He's author of So Rich So Poor, why it's so hard to end poverty in America. It's a book with a wealth of information. He follows so many threads of this important debate and programs that have happened. His experience has been extensive. I have to say, Peter, that you've opened up so many facets that I think I'm only now at this much later point in my life, ready to look at governmental programs and begin to make a good judgment about what's helpful and not helpful. So I thank you for writing So Rich So Poor, and I thank you for joining me for spirit in action. - Well, the hour went really fast. I enjoyed the conversation very much. Thank you for the opportunity. - I thought a little reward might be well deserved. For those of you who stayed with Peter Edelman and me as we wrestled with the issue of poverty. So I'm gonna send you out for today's spirit in action with a little tongue-in-cheek song about the issue, performed by Pete Seeker. Here's his version of "Alleluia, I'm a Bomb." Meet you next week for "Spirit in Action." ♪ Oh, springtime has come ♪ ♪ We're just out of jail ♪ ♪ Without any money without any bail ♪ ♪ Alleluia, I'm a bum ♪ ♪ Alleluia, bum again ♪ ♪ Alleluia, give us a hand out to revive us again ♪ ♪ I went to a door and asked for some bread ♪ ♪ The lady said, "Bumbumb, the baker is dead." ♪ ♪ Alleluia, I'm a bum ♪ ♪ Alleluia, bum again ♪ ♪ Alleluia, give us a hand out to revive us again ♪ ♪ Well, I went to a house and knocked on the door ♪ ♪ The lady said, "Bumbumb, you've been here before." ♪ ♪ Alleluia, I'm a bum ♪ ♪ Alleluia, bum again ♪ ♪ Alleluia, give us a hand out to revive us again ♪ ♪ Oh, if I don't, you work like colored men do ♪ ♪ How can I work when the sky's up so blue ♪ ♪ Alleluia, I'm a bum ♪ ♪ Alleluia, bum again ♪ ♪ Alleluia, give us a hand out to revive us again ♪ ♪ Oh, springtime has come ♪ ♪ We're just out of jail ♪ ♪ Without any money, without any bail ♪ ♪ Alleluia, I'm a bum ♪ ♪ Alleluia, bum again ♪ ♪ Alleluia, give us a hand out to revive us again ♪ - The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World" performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. (upbeat music) ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our evening ♪ [MUSIC PLAYING]