Not Gone, But Perhaps Forgotten

Those heartbreaking scenes of Hurricane Katrina's victims, the ones of people who didn't have the vehicle or the money to escape the rising water, sent pangs of conscience rippling through the entire country.

"People were ashamed of the sights we saw on television," says Democratic Sen. Barak Obama of Illinois. "They're so isolated, we can safely ignore them. Or at least we think we can."

To liberal and conservative poverty experts in Washington's think tanks, reports CBS News Correspondent Susan Spencer on CBS News Sunday Morning, it was "the combination of the depths of their poverty and their desperation."

"I asked myself the question, 'Why were they forgotten?' " says Douglas Besharov, director of the Social and Individual Responsibility Project of the American Enterprise Institute.

Even to Stanley Battle, the president of Coppin State University, a small, historically black college in Baltimore, in what Spencer describes as "smack dab in the middle of wrenching poverty."

Still, those images were a shock, Battle says: "I remember thinking, 'Where are we going? What does this really mean? Is it some sort of sign or message? Is it a question of our humanity?"

In today's consumer, celebrity-driven culture, poverty isn't chic, Spencer points out, "although, according to the United States Census Bureau, it's a fact of life for some 37 million Americans. And the rate has inched up in each of the last four years.

Or has it?

Both liberal and conservative experts, such as Besharov warn: Beware the numbers.

"You're asking an almost metaphysical question," he tells Spencer.

"There's no way to know how many people are in poverty?" Spencer persists.

"There's no way to agree," Besharov responds. "If you ask five economists what poverty means, you'll get six opinions."

But, Spencer notes, few dispute that the problem is persistent, that the poor are disproportionately African American or that, in Louisiana and Mississippi, the situation even in normal times is a crisis, as it is in big cities throughout the country.

And yet it's been 40 years since poverty topped the political agenda, with President Johnson proclaiming, to applause, "This administration here and now declares an unconditional war on poverty. No single weapon or strategy will suffice, but this war will be won."

The weapons in LBJ's war on poverty included food stamps, Medicaid, Head Start, job training, and income supplements.

And, adds Spencer, almost everyone agrees that those programs have been a huge help.

Almost everyone.Besharov said in a speech, "My friends, some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty. And poverty won."

"I said," he stresses to Spencer, "I thought Ronald Reagan was wrong."

Besharov says, for one thing, poverty among the elderly has gone down dramatically: "The degree of material hardship in this country is much less than it was 10 years ago."

So, Johnson's Great Society programs must have worked?

"Oh, sure. …There's no question that if you put enough money to a problem, people's earnings, at least, go up."

So the answer to entrenched poverty is that we have an expansion of these programs?

"Oh, I hope not."

Why not?

"Because those programs are the kind of programs that created the people we saw, the images in New Orleans. Those programs locked people into place."

On Capitol Hill, Spencer observes, the prevailing conservative view is that "Big Government" programs have perpetuated the problem, by creating dependency.

Says House Whip Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, "The government cannot accept all responsibility for everybody for a long period of time. …You're gonna end up with multi-generations who have no contact with the kind of Americans that most Americans know about, where you find a job, you go to that job every day, you have a family with relative stability."

Obama, the Illinois senator, counters, "If you walk into any inner-city around the country and you ask people what can we do to help people rise out of poverty, they'll tell you. 'Folks gotta take responsibility for their own actions, but the government's got to provide basic help along the way.' "

"It's not the failure of the programs!" exclaims Sheldon Danziger of the University of Michigan Population Studies Center.

In fact, he continues, poverty would be even worse without them. Instead, Danziger says, he blames the lack of educational opportunities, and a minimum wage that hasn't been raised since 1997: "There are millions of hard-working poor who, as the sound bite goes, are 'working hard and playing by the rules,' but still ending up with less than $19,000 a year," which is below the poverty line.

"We've not really made fighting poverty a priority in America since probably the early '80s," Danziger asserts.

"What do you attribute that to?" Spencer inquired.

"I think we lost faith in government," Danziger replied, "both from the problems in Vietnam and from the perspective that we were spending a lot of money and poverty wasn't falling."

Now, surmises Spencer, in Katrina's aftermath, it's clear the government will spend billions in immediate aid to the poor but, in a country drowning in red ink, bold action to deal with poverty as a national problem isn't likely.

Says House whip Blunt, "I don't see it as the opportunity to pass a new big, totally government-oriented initiative to help fight poverty."

"I hear a little lip service, but not much beyond that," laments Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He says he worries that once the waters ebb, it will be business as usual on Capitol Hill, meaning scaling back benefits and cutting taxes more.

"What I'm hearing," Greenstein explains, "is the well-connected, well- financed, heavy-hitter lobbyists, taking items off their long wish list, like for a new round of corporate tax cuts. …But on the poverty front, I'm not hearing anything but vague philosophical expressions."

Still, sums up Spencer, despite all partisan bickering, the studies and the programs, no one has a sure answer. One conservative, Besharov, will be looking for clues among Katrina's own victims, forced out of an inner city he says helped keep them poor.

"I think," Besharov says, "that if those neighborhoods are as described, if the lack of jobs is as described, if the New Orleans schools were as abominable as people say, this could be a silver lining to an otherwise large catastrophe. …It's a statement about how terrible some places are to live in America."

"That's a heck of a way to get a trip: to be relocated because of a disaster," remarks Coppin State University's Battle, who finds it hard to find any silver lining in Katrina, unless it becomes a national wake-up call.

"I would hate to see us ignore a lesson," he says. "I'm not going to quote biblical scripture, but something happened for a reason. If that wasn't Revelations, I don't know what was."

"This is one of those moments," Greenstein concludes, "that I think, 20 years from now, we may look back either positively or with a lot of regret and say, 'We have this moment. Things opened up. You could have a broader political conversation, and the nation was in shock over the hurricane.' Did we take advantage of it? It's a test for the whole nation!"