The challenges of eliminating poverty, or at least lowering poverty rates, were outlined recently in a three-part series in the Banner-News by Joe Inscore.
The series described the War on Poverty from its inception in the 1960s during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration on through today.
While we seem to have progressed beyond the worst, saddest days of poverty when Americans were starving to death, significant rates of poverty still exist in many areas, including Columbia County, where in some cases we exceed national average rates.
A variety of anti-poverty programs have had impacts in lessening poverty’s impact, but it is clear that caring for our poorest citizens has required a combination of public and private sector endeavors. While the government program generically known as food stamps might be putting food on a needy family’s table, an organization’s project such as The Stew Pot at the First United Methodist might be the only way an individual will be able to get a hot meal today. That is, of course, an oversimplification of the complexities of poverty, but we use it as an example of how it takes all of us, government and private efforts, to address the problem.
As the final installment of Inscore’s series pointed out, there are conflicting opinions of how best to battle poverty.
Some of the methods proposed by those favoring a governmental approach to the problem include raising the minimum wage, having government create jobs, increasing and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit/ Child Tax Credit, expanding Medicaid or providing Universal Healthcare, establishing guaranteed paid family leave, expanding childcare and early childhood education, reforming the criminal justice system, achieving pay equity and adjusting families’ work schedules.
Proponents of a private market approach propose reducing regulations on small businesses, creating apprenticeship programs such as those common in Europe, abolishing the minimum wage, reforming education and adjusting proverty rates for geographic differences.
So, which way is best?
Obviously neither government nor private sector programs, or combined efforts, have enabled the United States to win the War on Poverty.
Here in Columbia County, in some respects, the war has been less successful than in other areas. According to Arkansas Department of Health statistics, the percentage of Columbia County residents who fall under the Federal Poverty Line is 25.4 percent, which is slightly above the state average. However, for children under age 16 the rate rises to 37.9 percent, and for children living in single-parent households the rate swells to 52.8 percent.
Inscore’s series gave us a look at all that has been done since the 1960s to combat poverty in America and it clearly spelled out that we have a long, long way to go.