The new Ford Foundation working paper on poverty. (1985).

OVERVIEW

• More than 13 million American children (one in five) live in poverty.
• Their lives are marked by poor health, miserable housing, marginal education, and poor vocational prospects—all characteristics of the self-perpetuating cycle of poverty.
• Families headed by women have more than doubled in the past two decades. Such a trend guarantees increased poverty since a family headed by a woman is four-and-a-half times more likely to be poor. The number of children living with a divorced mother doubled from 1970 to 1982. The number of unwed mothers increased four times in the same period. One in five babies is born to an unmarried mother today.
• Increasingly our government and society seem to be reverting to the old attitudes and moralistic judgments as to how "undeserving" these poor families are—a simplistic and relieving "blaming of the victim."
• Anti-poverty programs cost the country some $60 billion a year. Five times that is spent on programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and veterans pensions that benefit all social classes. Some experts claim that one may trim many times that figure from Defense excesses alone.

IMPLICATIONS

• There is a social problem here. How can poor, self-supporting families be encouraged? How can poverty-stricken women be rewarded for something other than having babies and receiving aid?
• The great poverty programs of the 1960s and 1970s failed. All of us must now ask, "What is to be done to provide opportunities for self-help with necessary aid which does not destroy dignity and initiative?"
• Powerful lobbies and interest groups support many kinds of government subsidies and benefits. Hungry children and tired mothers have no such political clout. Are the basic rights of food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and education covered by the Declaration of Independence?

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