A Debt to Ourselves
What also helped reduce poverty was the economic boom of the 1990s and the 1996 welfare-reform act. By imposing tougher work requirements, the new welfare law raised the proportion of single-mother recipients with jobs from 46 percent in 1994 to 66 percent in 2002. It also cut the number of families receiving traditional welfare from 5 million in 1994 to 2 million in 2003.
So why haven't overall poverty rates declined further? In a word, immigration. Many of those who come to the United States are not only poor but unskilled. Hispanics account for much of the increase in poverty--no surprise, since 25 percent of poor people are Hispanic. Since 1989, Hispanics represent nearly three quarters of the increase in the overall poverty population. Immigration has also helped keep the median income for the country basically flat for five straight years, the longest stretch of income stagnation on record.
Another major contributor to poverty in America is low wages--a reflection of a federal minimum wage that has remained unchanged for eight straight years. Today, the minimum wage is roughly two thirds less than the wages of all private-sector, nonsupervisory workers. That's a 56-year low, down significantly from the 1950s and 1960s, when the minimum wage was between 50 and 60 percent of private-sector levels.
Raising the minimum wage should surely be considered by this Congress. Hurricane Katrina has refocused old issues and created new ones. How humanely--and sensibly--we address them will say much about the nature of our country in the next decade and determine how we are perceived by the rest of the world.
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