Commentary––

Hunger In Paradise

By William A. Collins

Jobs aplenty,

On the street.

Just don’t earn,

Enough to eat.

There’s bad news out there for the president about America’s rising poverty rate. It seems that all too often Junior and Sis, having lost their jobs, are coming home to live with Mom and Dad. Yes, voters may be able to overlook homeless data and food bank shortfalls, but when the kids want to reclaim their old rooms, now that’s getting personal.

Connecticut, as always, seems somewhat above this fray. In contrast to the rest of the country, our median family income went up. (Though that may be mostly due to prosperous folks moving in.) But like the rest of the country, our poverty rate went up, too. In 2002 alone, it rose from 7.5 percent to 7.8 percent of the population. Fortunately that’s only 250,000 of us living in anguish, a reasonably easy number to ignore. Nationally, the rate is 12 percent.

Of course if you live in the suburbs, this hardship isn’t very visible at all. There may not even be a shelter or a soup kitchen in town to report those added clients. And when a home is foreclosed it isn’t headline news, nor does the affected family typically resort to camping out on the town green. If someone ends up sleeping in their car, they usually have the decency to drive it into the city first. For city sufferers, there often is no car for refuge, which is where bridges come in.

And bridges are coming in more and more. Nowadays more than 33,000 Nutmeggers take a shot at homelessness each year. Further, last year various poor souls were turned away from overflowing shelters 27,000 times. Unfortunately, growing median income doesn’t help much if you’re at the bottom of the ladder.

Eating is often an adventure, too. Folks in the lower economic strata are doing less of it. Connecticut soup kitchens report a steadily growing demand, and food banks report a steadily shrinking supply. Thus it is no surprise that the USDA reports a steady rise in people actually going hungry.

So at a time when macro-economic figures suggest that the economy is finally recovering, you may wonder why there is still all this misery. Well, perhaps you haven’t been sufficiently attentive. Those macro data focus on stuff like gross domestic product and new home construction, not on people. They may show joblessness leveling out, but they purposely don’t show the steadily decaying quality of employment. They don’t mention, for example, that unionized retail stores are shrinking, while Wal-Mart is growing. That means more part-time, benefit-free jobs, frequently filled by illegal aliens.

In addition, Connecticut jobs in manufacturing, insurance, and technology are steadily drifting overseas, under the auspices of the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA). Many of the displaced workers, in turn, drift into lawn care, hamburger flipping, security, delivery services, adjunct teaching, and other forms of marginal employment. Then with family income down, debts mount, college is deferred, and any sudden crisis pushes more folks over the brink.

For many, the treasured American path of upward mobility has thus turned painfully downward. And for those Nutmeggers who never made it up to the brink in the first place, crisis takes the form of welfare cutoff, reduced child care, or loss of health coverage. All these reductions are called for in our new state budget.

Hence it takes no special sagacity to see that much of Connecticut’s poverty is directly due to public policy. The same free trade law that sends jobs abroad also steers more money to corporations. The same health policy that that reduces coverage for the needy also reduces the need for taxing the wealthy. The same government disdain for labor protections that impoverishes millions allows greater profits for their employers.

And if we follow the money, we find that the current growing benefits for the rich at both the federal and state levels are largely traceable to campaign contributions and lobbying. Sure, both our nation and our state are plenty rich enough to prevent hunger. But political contributors aren’t interested.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)