Ronald Reagan's administration, at his direction, limited and sought to eliminate numerous government programs that low and middle income individuals and families relied on to survive. Many Americans, abruptly cut off from a welfare system that barely met basic needs, staggered into a newly created, two-tier wage system that provided less pay for new-hires for the same work performed alongside their more fortunate co-workers, with little or no benefits. Many immediately fell further behind because of the absence of basic health care, child care, and rental assistance, which many of the new positions would not provide.
One of the tactics used by Reagan, as he attempted to soften the political blow, was to call on private charities to absorb the burden of the disenfranchised poor without the benefit of federal support. The predictable result was a disintegration of an impoverished community, a disproportionate number black and Hispanic, labeled as greedy and excessive for accepting help which seldom brought them above poverty level. The Reagan administration claimed that the increasing number of welfare recipients were an impediment to economic recovery, although welfare represented less than 1.5% of the budget.
In response to the nation's burgeoning debt crisis, Reagan and his cronies in Congress made countless Americans ineligible for public assistance with an arbitrary adjustment of the levels of eligibility. Reagan's welfare reform movement gave the back of the hand to federal job training programs.
Reagan saw no need for the federal government to finance low income youngster's college education and sought to reduce the federal role in education altogether in his attempt to eliminate the Dept. of Education.
Funding for low and middle income housing assistance and community redevelopment was all but eliminated, creating a stagnation in the nation's poorest neighborhoods. The nation's poor were systematically locked out from opportunity and legislated into a state of perpetual depression, farmers and migrant workers, union laborers, industrial workers, and everyone else who was scraping by at or below poverty level.
Reagan compounded the alienation of the nation's poor by granting a massive tax break to those individuals and corporations that were already prospering. Although these well-off folk's traditional indifference to the needs of the nation's poor had led to the need for legislation that protected and enhanced equal opportunity, Reagan claimed that they would share their tax-break enhanced wealth. However, newly created tax shelters successfully trapped the wealth that was supposed to "trickle down" to the poor in the form of jobs and opportunity.
Investment schemes were encouraged and developed, such as IRAs and Money Market accounts. Government bonds were offered at low rates with anticipated high returns. This effort by Reagan and his congressional cronies was presented as an effort to encourage savings, which would, in part, justify the huge tax cuts to the upper end of the income scale. Naturally, the ones who benefited the most were those who already had enough money or income to invest the amounts needed.
The median income at the time for Blacks barely rose above $18,000 annually. The majority of lower income Americans put their money into passbook savings, if they had any money to save at all. To invest the amount of money needed to facilitate and maintain high-yield investment accounts, an investor would have to earn more than $22,000 annually. This largely excluded most black wage earners from these investment opportunities. Whites with median incomes over $24,000, not surprisingly, outnumbered black and Hispanic investors by as much as 6 to 1. The gap widened when considering longer term, higher yielding investments that required more capital, such as CDs, interest checking, U.S. government securities, and municipal and corporate bonds. The lack of substantial monetary investment is one reflection of the growing disparity between upper and lower income Americans.
The Reagan administration attacked every federal program that helped those at poverty level gain a foothold in a fast rising economy. Many who were denied access to public assistance slipped further into depression, invisible because of distorted and misleading figures on poverty and unemployment provided by the Reagan Labor dept. The overall projections did not illustrate the proportional plights of individual minority groups.
Despite the fact that many former welfare recipients eventually returned to work, 31% of adult blacks remained at poverty level compared to only 11% of adult whites. In the aftermath of the Reagan administration, black children made up 43% of the nation's poor. Reagan's insensitivity to the nation's poor was pointed up by his refusal to meet and work with members and leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Instead of supporting badly needed legislation that would increase the minimum wage, he lobbied instead for a sub-minimum wage that he claimed would create new jobs for the nation's youth. Reagan ignored the fact that millions of Americans were working to support families with a wage that had become sub-minimum with no increase since '81.
Reagan sought to abolish the Small Business Administration which mostly assisted minority owned businesses, while at the same time, calling small business the "backbone of the American economy." Reagan appointed a pro-business Labor Relations Board to deflect the grievances of the nation's displaced workforce.
Reagan strongly supported legislation that would have outlawed federal-funding for abortions, a move that would mostly affect those who couldn't afford an abortion, leaving the affluent as the only group of females with the ultimate choice in their own pregnancy, and doom most low income women into poverty by forcing them to have a child they could not afford.
Reagan sought to limit the federal role in education by reducing the amount of money in the federal education budget. He appointed a controversial education secretary whose outspokenness on non-educational issues prevented a focus on school problems. Secretary Bennett then suggested, and it was subsequently disproved, that federal student aid was responsible for high tuition costs.
Reagan described congressional initiatives to lift the nation's poor out of poverty as misguided compassion. He admonished Americans to "Stand tall", but he repeatedly pulled the rug from under those who found themselves at the lower end of the economic spectrum. Many Americans could not see their way across the abyss that Reagan created between the nation's rich and poor.
I would not hesitate to repudiate those who would claim that Reagan's presidency should be canonized or emulated. Hopefully, historians will not elevate the myth that Reagan actually achieved economic equity and competitiveness, and instead, records the reality of his efforts in systematically targeting and weakening the programs that were in place to shorten the gap between the rich and poor.
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