One thing we learned from Hurricane Katrina is that America still has a lot of poor people, who are disproportionately black and mostly invisible to the affluent and to the media. Behind the glitzy stage set of the quaint New Orleans tourist economy was a grindingly poor city.
Most poor people work for a living, just like most middle-class people do. They are the people who the Rev. Jesse Jackson famously said ''take the early bus," and take care of other people's young children and aging parents, sometimes at cost to their own families.
In this decade, the working poor have not done well. The Labor Department reports that wages of nonmanagement workers have lagged behind inflation, and those of low-income workers in particular.
President Bush, on the defensive, has announced a new program of rebuilding. It's a reminder that circumstances sometimes require even conservatives to recognize the indispensability of government. But look a little deeper. Bush's approach doesn't really address the poverty we have witnessed.
While many students of poverty in America blame depressed incomes on low wages, unaffordable health insurance, inadequate childcare, and the lack of opportunities for good jobs that stay put, leading conservative intellectuals blame poverty on character defects.
This is an argument as old as the English Poor Law of 1601. If only the poor were more provident, they would scrimp, save, and join the middle class. In this view, social programs are just handouts that spoil the poor.
Bush, interestingly, doesn't reject all social programs. One of his major social programs, intended to remedy ''character defects," is a program that puts the federal government squarely in the business of promoting marriage.
Another key tenet in the Bush version of a war on poverty is the idea that churches and private charity can serve social needs more effectively than government.
A third is that the poor can help themselves if only the government better promotes entrepreneurship.
Each of these premises is a half-truth at best.
Take character. It's obvious that a person of good character is more likely to do well materially than someone who is lazy or dishonest. (Even that contention needs to be qualified, because a lot of Wall Street moguls, who turned out to be as crooked as a question mark, made out like bandits until their deceptions were caught.)
But do we really think the Great Depression was mainly a problem of defective character, and that people with grave personal inadequacies in 1935 somehow turned into worthy souls by 1955? Hardly. What changed, of course, is that the economy began providing decent jobs again (with a big assist from government).
By the same token, you can show statistically that people who are married and live in two-income households are far less likely to be poor than single people, especially single parents.
But that's the easy part. Half of all marriages break up, many of them deservedly. Research by social scientists such as the sociologist Kathryn Edin shows that many poor single women who'd like to get married can't find a husband who is an acceptable risk; that their first priority is to protect their kids and themselves, often from abusive or exploitive men.
A recent report from the Center for Law and Social Policy concludes that marriage-promotion efforts can be helpful but are no substitute for income supports. The ''abstinence only" approach to pregnancy prevention favored by the religious right is similarly partial and wishful.
As for charity, there was a time in America when, after disaster struck, people looked to the Red Cross, and local churches, and government for help. We still need all three sorts of institutions. Two decades into the Reagan revolution's tax-cutting and the vogue for ''faith-based" services, charitable giving of all kinds has just kept pace with inflation. You can shrink government, and bless organized religion, but private charity doesn't make up the gap.
And as for entrepreneurship, programs like micro-credit and individual development accounts have been kept at token levels, while the big bucks have gone to tax breaks that benefit the already affluent.
Meanwhile, the one surest weapon against poverty -- a living wage -- continues to shrink. And the administration, opposed to minimum wages, opposed to unions, using the hurricane emergency to waive prevailing-wage legislation, and promoting outsourcing, surely isn't addressing that gap.
Prayer, anyone?
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in the Boston Globe.
