Poverty and Inequality in the USA

The United States is going through a change characterized by three irreversible trends.

At the beginning of June, the RAND Corporation invited a small group of community organization leaders, public policy makers, local authorities, academics and journalists (like myself) to a workshop sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.

To start the discussion, RAND Corporation researchers Greg Treverton, Robert Lempert and Krishna Kumar shared four essays documenting demographic changes in lifestyle and the workplace and analyzing the challenges the labor market faces in the U.S.

The data is not encouraging. There are 45 million people living in poverty, and the official rate continues to increase. Inequality has increased as well. Five percent of wealthy Americans have more accumulated wealth than the remaining 95 percent. Workers, women and children in the African-American and Hispanic communities are the most affected by this poverty rate increase.

While all of this is happening, the country is undergoing a change characterized by three irreversible trends: the unavoidable aging of the Caucasian population, the unstoppable growth of the Asian and Hispanic populations and the increasing migration of African-Americans to southern states and Hispanics across the U.S.

Additionally, unemployment continues to grow, the disparity between the skills and needs of workers is wider and wider and budgets that finance social programs for the poor continue to shrink.

Once the researchers went through all the data, the workshop participants set out to accomplish the event’s main objective. “This event,” Evan Michelson, Associate Director of the Rockefeller Foundation, told me, “is part of a large-scale global project that we have named the ‘Searchlight Function’ and whose goal it is to create a web of individuals and organizations that work together to identify trends and issues that will have the most negative impact on the poor and other vulnerable groups.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavski and Field Deputy Flora Gil Krisiloff also discussed homelessness and their solutions to that issue. In 2005, there were 90,000 homeless in Los Angeles. In an effort to solve this problem, authorities followed traditional models that offered temporary shelter to some but did not solve the overall problem. Yaroslavski and Gil take a different approach to the problem by trying to eradicate homelessness instead of just reducing its numbers.

To this end, they identified the 50 worst cases of chronically homeless individuals on Skid Row and, with the help of doctors, psychiatrists and social workers, convinced them of the benefits of having their own place.

Thus far, the savings to taxpayers have been substantial. Furthermore, 85 percent of original participants continue to live in the apartments that were given to them four years ago. The program is now in place throughout all of Los Angeles, and today only 52,000 homeless individuals remain.

The bigger issue, however, is that if the current trend is maintained and the ability of the government to finance social welfare programs to children and adults in vulnerable situations continues to diminish, the country as a whole will suffer the consequences. The country’s future does not rest on the shoulders of its aging Caucasian population but rather on its young, whose possibility for higher education and work have been considerably diminished because they are poor.