ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 13, 1996 TAG: 9612130049
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-16 EDITION: METRO
NOTHING, that we can imagine anyway, could be more outrageously out of kilter in Virginia and in America today than this simple fact: Children under 6 are likelier to live in poverty than any other age group.
According to a study released Wednesday by the National Center for Children in Poverty, no fewer than 6.1 million American children under 6 - or 25 percent - are living in poverty. In Virginia, the picture is only marginally better. Here, nearly 100,000 children under 6 - or 17 percent - live in poverty.
The national total is nearly double what it was 20 years ago. The poverty rate for children under 6 is 40 percent more than three decades ago.
You hear a lot of moralizing about poverty these days. Yet, somehow, we as a society have managed to consign to poverty that age group most blameless for the condition, least able to do anything about it, and most vulnerable to its debilitating effects - not to mention those whose well-being is most important to the future of the commonwealth and country.
Granted, answers to the poverty question aren't as self-evident as many Americans once thought them to be. But in the same three decades in which the poverty rate for toddlers grew by 40 percent, the poverty rate among elderly Americans plunged by two-thirds. It is now less than half that for young children. Clearly, some things can make a difference, at least if we're willing to try.
The sad fact is that Virginia and the rest of the nation aren't trying very hard. Many of the young children in poverty are in families not on the welfare rolls; indeed, the fact that a full-time job is no longer a guarantor against poverty is a key contributor to the jump in the poverty rate among them. And yet, as Virginia Hardin, director of the Roanoke Valley Alliance for Children, rightly observes, the degeneration of the concept of much-needed welfare reform into a means to cut off and punish welfare recipients illustrates the prevailing attitude toward poverty in general. So does blithe unconcern for the children.
In Virginia, Gov. George Allen has looked upon his welfare-reform efforts and pronounced them good. We don't necessarily disagree. Single-parent households' dependence on government handouts is not ultimately good for the children.
But we'd be a lot more confident of Allen's assessment, as well as about the course of welfare reform to come, if the measures of success put less stress on saving tax dollars short-term and more on saving the futures of kids.
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