That's rich - improvement in economic condition of lower-income Americans

THE DEMAGOGIC din about how the rich got richer and the poor poorer during the Reagan era shows no sign of abating. Kevin Phillips, while applauding the fact that wealthy Americans pay a larger share of federal taxes than ever before, bemoans the "upward redistribution of wealth" in his new book, The Politics of Rich and Poor [see "Kevin Phillips: Left Out," NR, Aug. 61. In commenting on the Bush Administration's decision to embark on no new anti-poverty programs, Tom Wicker sneers: "Why tamper with a system that caused the average family income of the poorest 10 per cent of Americans to fall 10.5 per cent between 1977 and 1987, while the average family income of the wealthiest 1 per cent rose 74.2 per cent in the same years?"

Despite their statistical panoply, neither Wicker nor Phillips pays attention to facts. The data show that the real incomes of the bottom fifth of Americans declined between 1977 and 1982, and bounced back during the subsequent economic recovery. Inflation, not Reaganomics, set lower-income Americans back. In fact, the fraction of Americans living in poverty during the last full year of the Reagan Administration-13.1 per cent-was the lowest since 1981. A substantial underclass persists. But the big growth in female-headed welfare families occurred during the late Sixties and early Seventies-a legacy of the Great Society. Most of those programs are still in place: the Federal Government spent $145 billion on programs designed specifically for the poor or jobless in 1990, about ten times more in inflation-adjusted terms than thirty years earlier.