Assault on the poor - international and domestic aid - Column

Christian Century, April 5, 1995 by David Beckman

CONGRESS IS WAGING war on poor people. Domestic programs that help low-income Americans, as well as international programs that help poor people overseas, are under attack. The House of Representatives voted 234-199 on March 24 to approve the so-called Personal Responsibility Act, which would cut $66 billion from food and other domestic antipoverty programs over five years; at least $26 billion is scheduled to be axed from food programs alone. The act would also transfer to block grants many antipoverty, programs, shifting reponsibility to the states and eliminating many entitlements and federal standards.

Cutting $66 billion in public spending will fall far short of making up for the $189 billion in tax breaks over five years that Republicans have crafted for upper- and middle-income people. Where the odd $100 billion in lost revenues will come from is anyone's guess. One thing, though, is clear. For the 39 million Americans who subsist below the poverty line (set at less than $15,000 a year for a family of four), $66 billion in cuts would take away an average of $1,700 per person, Senate and presidential actions are expected to moderate House proposals, but poor people are certainly going to turn out to be the big losers of last November's elections.

Some say that churches and charities can provide the services that government is abandoning. But $66 billion is more than the total annual revenues of all religious communities in the country. If the country's 350,000 churches would try to make up for the shortfall, each would have to come up with an additional $190,000. To be sure, churches, especially those in low-income communities, have already responded to growing poverty and hunger in our country. Independent Sector, which studies charitable giving, estimates that religious communities' aid to the needy soared from $1 billion in 1986 to $7 billion in 1991, while their total revenue dropped from $50 billion to $48 billion.

Fifteen years ago this country didn't have many soup kitchen or food banks, but churches and other concerned people responded to government cutbacks and growing hunger in the 1980s with a massive movement of private feeding. Now 150,000 private agencies provide some $3 to $4 billion in groceries each year for hungry Americans. Yet the private feeding movement hasn't kept up with the number of hungry people. And if the Personal Responsibility Act passes, funding for food stamps, schools meals and other child nutrition programs will drop by more than $4 billion from this year to next. The decline in funding would cancel out what millions of donors and volunteers achieve.

Attempts by our political leaders to make churches and charities the social safety net for the nation have only succeeded in hindering these institutions from doing what they do best. Churches are good at helping people in need take responsibility for their actions. Some House Republicans claim that cutting or ending financial benefits will encourage personal responsibility among low-income people. But reduced benefits won't be as effective in discouraging teen pregnancy as churches can be.

To cite another example, nonprofit social services are probably more effective than government agencies in helping low-income people with drug and alcohol problems. But churches and charities have been forced to spend more and more of their time and effort just feeding hungry people. At the very least those who favor reducing assistance to the poor should stop pretending that by slashing benefits to the needy they are actually acting in the best interests of the poor.

The Bible teaches that people do indeed bear a responsibility for supporting themselves. "The person who will not work shall not eat," the New Testament says. That's the early Christian community's version of the Personal Responsibility Act. The Bible also teaches that individuals have a responsibility to people in need: that biblical message has fueled the private feeding movement of the past 15 years.

However, the Bible also teaches that poverty is a social responsibility. The prophets preached about social justice especially to Israel and Judea's kings, the governmental authority of their day. If U.S. church leaders have been echoing the prophets, not enough churchgoing voters, nor government authorities, have been convinced.

The war against the poor is being waged internationally as well, but this campaign isn't stirring much controversy. The TV cameras are no longer focused on Goma, Zaire, where millions fled last summer from Rwanda. The camps that sheltered tens of thousands of orphaned children are being shut down, and Newt Gingrich is not proposing orphanages for them. Nor is he proposing more classrooms for children in Africa's emerging democracies, such as South Africa, Mali and Benin.

Foreign-aid spending accounts for less than 1 percent of our federal budget. Each U.S. family spends just $3 annually on assistance to Africa. Yet the committee chairs who handle foreign aid in this Congress intend to slash assistance and to reorient what's left even more toward U.S. commercial and political interests. They are proposing cuts of some $2.5 billion from the $13.7 billion foreign-aid budget, with the heaviest cuts coming in the area of development assistance.