January 13, 2016 The Skanner Page 5
Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
National Youth Summit Leaders Say Poverty War Has Been Lost
By Dinkinish O’Connor
Special to the NNPA from
The Miami Times
A
merica has 99
problems, and pov-
erty is one.
At the National
Youth Summit’s war on
poverty discussion in
April, experts rapped
about poverty’s caus-
es and solutions in a
numbers battle. At the
discussion’s center was
President Lyndon John-
son 1964 declaration
“to not only relieve the
symptoms of poverty,
but to cure it and, above
all, to prevent it.” Many
of President Johnson’s
programs including food
stamps, job corps, Medic-
aid, Medicare and Head
Start still exist today. 51
years later, the question
is: Do we need a new war
on poverty? The panel-
ists at this summit said
yes, but differed how to
execute the war and what
it would entail.
Carmack Waterhouse,
professor of law and pub-
lic policy at Georgetown
University Law Center
Peter Edelman said that
President Johnson wasn’t
just interested in pover-
ty but civil rights. He ref-
erenced how the anti-dis-
crimination act of 1964
improved employment
Poverty Still Major
Affliction for Blacks
By Stacy M. Brown
Special to the NNPA
from the Washington Informer
B
lack America is in a state of emergency,
and what’s happened in Baltimore, Fergu-
son, Missouri, and other places isn’t sole-
ly about police misconduct, according to
members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
The demonstrations and civil unrest are
mostly about poverty, unemployment, a lack
of opportunity, hopelessness and despair, the
organization said. CBC Chair G.K. Butterfield
said Democratic proposals to fix these problems
stand in stark contrast to the Republican bud-
get, which he considers a recipe for national
decline.
Federal government statistics revealed that
the median income of African American house-
holds stands at $34,600, or nearly $24,000 less
than the median income of White households.
Also, the median net worth of white house-
holds is 13 times the level for Black households,
and Blacks are almost three times more likely to
live in poverty than White Americans.
Further, at 10.1 percent, the current unem-
ployment rate for Black Americans is double
the rate for White Americans, and blacks cur-
rently face an unemployment rate higher than
the national unemployment rate during the
peak of the recession.
“In my home state of North Carolina, the un-
employment rate for African Americans is 9.9
percent while the unemployment rate of whites
is 3.2 percent,” Butterfield said.
Also, the poverty rate for African Americans
currently stands at 27.5 percent, while its just
12.6 percent for Whites.
For District residents, the median household
income for African Americans is $38,300, while
it stands at a whopping $115,900 for Whites.
“Yes, that’s right; that is a gap of $77,600, and
the poverty rate here in the nation’s capital is
27.4 percent for African Americans compared
to 7.6 percent for Whites,” Butterfield said.
And while, on the surface, there’s a smaller
gender pay gaps within the Black community,
it’s really not all that rosy, based on an analysis
this month by The Philadelphia Tribune.
“The problem is that a smaller Black gender
wage gap is an advanced indicator of much more
serious economic and financial hemorrhaging
within the larger Black community. Baltimore
just snapped the entire nation back into that
conversation,” the newspaper wrote.
African American females, when compared
with other populations, are almost level with
their male counterparts in average income, but
this comes amid significant economic decline
for Black men, their traditional community
partners.
opportunities for Afri-
can Americans, citing
that in the 1960s, Black
poverty went down from
55 percent to 32 percent.
The summit, facilitat-
ed by the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of
American History, al-
lows American middle
and high school students
nationwide to be among
audience members and
participants in national
conversations about in-
delible events in Amer-
ica’s history that shape
the present.
HistoryMiami, a Smith-
sonian Institution af-
filiate, hosted students
in the Stephen P. Clark
Miami-Dade
County
Commission Chamber,
in addition to an online
audience of 33 states, Ye-
men and Ireland.
POVERTY BY THE
NUMBERS
The Census Bureau de-
fines poverty for a fam-
ily of four as living with
an annual income below
$23,050 and adjusted
according to household
size.
The youngest are the
poorest in the county.
Bloomberg News in 2014
reported that some Mi-
amians live on $11 per
day.
Almost one fifth of Mi-
RICHARD JOHNSON/MIAMI TIMES
Leaders call for renewed focus on income inequality, but differ on possible solutions and tactics
Students who gathered at the National Youth Summit in April discussed the War on Poverty launched in
the 1960s and agreed many, particularly African Americans, have fallen behind.
ami-Dade County’s 2.7
million residents live in
poverty. In Miami-Dade
zip code 33127, almost 80
percent of the residents
are deeply poor, accord-
ing to City-Data.com. In
October 2013, the De-
partment of Regulatory
and Economic Resourc-
“
steadily decreased with
no matching fall in the
poverty rate,” the report
said.
“One of the things we
need to look at is how
big the war on poverty
has gotten,” said Michael
Tanner, senior fellow at
the Cato Institute. “The
poverty rates are about
the same level as they
were in 1965.”
Poverty and Prosperity
Program vice president
at the Center for Ameri-
can Progress Melissa Bo-
teach countered: “One of
the issues is that a lot of
times when people talk
To go back to 1965 from $22 trillion fighting
poverty, the standard poverty rates are about
the same level as they were in 1965
es Planning Research
Section reported that
poverty in Miami-Dade
hovered at around 20
percent and was not
improving even as the
Great Recession ended
and unemployment fell.
“… since 2010 the un-
employment rate has
fact is the federal govern-
ment has 126 separate
anti-poverty programs
today. We spent about
$688 billion last year on
those programs, about
$300 billion at the state
level. To go back to 1965
from $22 trillion fight-
ing poverty, the standard
about poverty, they use a
poverty rate that doesn’t
take into account the
interventions that are
made from the war on
poverty. I’d say the war
on poverty has been a
success. If you look at the
outcomes, a lot more peo-
ple are a lot better off.”