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Those who stay behind are the truly dispossessed, the old, the ill and, most deleteriously, the alienated young who, in the phrase of Newark Detective Charles Meek, himself a Negro, "dance their hips off, turn on to booze, narcotics, airplane glue, girls." To them, a steady job, in the slang of the ghetto, is "slave," and no amount of youth-corps training at "skills centers" can help them. Many of the jobs open to these youths cannot match either the income or the romance of the traditional ghetto occupation: petty crime.
Says Economist Bullock: "It simply doesn't make good sense economically to give up hustling pot in order to concentrate on a car-wash or service-station job. As long as the rewards of welfare dependency or hustling exceed the income from a job, the ghetto resident is merely obeying the sacrosanct American principle of maximizing his economic gains. This fact, of course, deeply offends those middle-class Americans who are vigorously pursuing these same goals."
Another adverse effect of the War on Poverty has been to set deprived minorities in competition with one another for federal aid. Militancy becomes a weapon for winning attention; and the minorities grow increasingly jealous and imitative of one another's extremism. "We've tossed a few crumbs in the middle of millions of the nation's people and said, 'Folks, you fight for it and may the best man win,' " says one high-ranking poverty warrior. "That's a disgrace." Nonetheless, for all its faults, the War on Poverty has at least dramatized the plight of the poor to the rest of America.
Poor No More. And the poor need not always be with us. Certainly, in a modern industrial society and a free-enterprise system, the hard-core unemployed and unemployable will be around for a long time. The needed initiatives, which still require sound and sober study, include the guaranteed annual wage, the family allowance (which only the U.S. among the world's maior industrial democracies denies its citizens), and the negative income tax, which late last month was endorsed by a committee of industrialists including Ford's Arjay Miller and Xerox Chairman Joseph C. Wilson. The statistic that moves businessmen the most: from the age of 17, a male who lives to 57 can cost the public $140,000.
Whatever the solution, the poor need no longer suffer the extremes of actual hunger and physical debilitation. By guaranteeing a minimum income to every one of its citizens, a society as affluent as today's America can afford not only to keep its economic cripples well housed, well fed—and well—but also to provide them with the crucial increment of dignity that is denied by penury.