The Poverty Dialogue That Wasn't

from CBS News

What Became Of The Post-Katrina Dialogue On Poverty?

(AP) Don't tell the Rev. Randall Mitchell that Hurricane Katrina somehow opened people's eyes to the depth of poverty in this nation. Americans knew the extent of the problem long before the storm, he says.

They'd just learned to live with it.

"They've come into acceptance of it," the preacher says from the apartment he evacuated to, in Dayton, Texas, 300 miles west of New Orleans. No, rather than revealing poverty to Americans, he says, the storm "exposed ... the people who maintain it. That's all."

When Katrina struck Aug. 29, thousands of people who had not known loss suddenly knew what it was like to be homeless and jobless. To taste hunger and feel thirst. To go without medical care or even toilets.

And those who didn't experience the misery and chaos firsthand saw it in graphic detail every day and night on television. The desperate, angry masses stranded at the Superdome and convention center. The rampant looting. The floating bodies.

With much of New Orleans still under water, President George W. Bush declared the nation had "a duty to confront this poverty with bold action."

Katrina was the cataclysmic event that was supposed to launch a vigorous "national dialogue on poverty." It didn't happen, many say.

"From my perspective, it's kind of like one hand clapping," says Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. "We'd love to have a dialogue, but there needs to be someone to have a dialogue with."

Not long after Katrina struck, the Census Bureau released figures showing that the poverty rate had climbed for the fourth straight year. More than 37 million Americans live below the federal poverty level, including 12 million children.

Five million of those children live in families that earn less than half the poverty level.

Stanford University researchers Emily Ryo and David Grusky, hearing pundits insist that Katrina "unleashed a newfound commitment among the public to take on issues of poverty and inequality," decided to measure this supposed awareness-raising effect.

The researchers analyzed data from Syracuse University's Maxwell Polls on Civic Engagement and Inequality, conducted in 2004 and shortly after Katrina. Ryo and Grusky divided respondents based on their answers to detailed questions on their attitudes toward poverty. They created four basic categories: "activists," "realists," "moralists," and "deniers."

Activists, defined as those who support state intervention to reduce poverty, went from 58 percent of respondents in the 2004 survey to 60 percent post-Katrina; and there were small gains for deniers, who believe poverty and inequality are "neither substantial nor growing" (from 21 percent to 25), and for moralists, who see poverty as a motivator, not a social problem (from near zero to 1 percent).

The most dramatic gain was among so-called realists, who don't believe in the state's ability to reduce poverty or inequality; their numbers nearly doubled to 11 percent.

Interpreting the findings, Grusky, a professor of sociology, says they show a majority of people already accepted that there was a problem and were doing something about it. The rest, he says, either see poverty as an individual problem or simply don't care.

"This idea that it's a dirty little secret, this poverty and inequality," he says, "just doesn't pass muster."

News coverage could partly explain the rise in denier and realist views. Some "did not take well to the liberal lesson that they no doubt regarded as foisted upon them," Grusky and Ryo wrote in their report, and so "the `call for action' story ... was countered by the equally powerful lesson that government intervention is all about inefficiency and ineptitude."

If President George W. Bush, faced with falling support for the war in Iraq, has had little time to address entrenched poverty, there is activity on the state and local levels, says Bruce Katz, director of the metropolitan policy program at the Brookings Institution. A growing number of states are passing minimum wage laws and adopting their own earned income tax credits, Katz says.

But Katz and others say recent federal actions to reduce funding and flexibility in public housing programs threaten to undermine these efforts.

"Just about anything you can think of needed to address the needs of poverty is on the chopping block," says Avis Jones-DeWeever, study director for poverty, education and social welfare programs at the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

She contends that many Americans believe that most poor people must have something wrong with them.

"This is a huge, cataclysmic event, and it's sad to say that even that is something that hasn't maintained a push or momentum to address poverty in America," she says.

Jones-DeWeever and others accuse the Bush administration of using the Iraq war and the Katrina recovery effort as excuses for not addressing poverty nationally. Others say, war or no war, the needs of the poor never top the agenda of politicians.

For his part, Rev. Mitchell is tired of seeing people beat up on the president and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Disabled in a work-related accident 20 years ago, the 56-year-old preacher turned his attention to social issues in New Orleans. He says the despair in parts of his city was just as deep during the two terms of Democrat President Bill Clinton, and that elected officials in New Orleans have to accept some of the blame for money wasted and opportunities squandered.

"The national dialogue has to be an honest dialogue," says Mitchell, who lives on $600 in disability payments and $65 in monthly food stamps. "We have to look at ourselves first. That's honesty."

He says it's time for a little less talk and a lot more action.

"Talk is cheap and costs nothing," he says. "And something from nothing leaves us exactly that.

"Nothing."