REAGANOMICS - Everyone feels | the crunch By TOM MORRIS Announcing American sanctions against the USSR > last week, president Reagan waxed poetic: ‘‘ The pur- pose of our actions,”’ he told his people, ‘‘is to speak for those who have been silenced, and to help those who have been rendered helpless.”’ : It was the actor at his nauseating best. He was, of + course, talking about the Poles lest anyone think he | meant the millions of Americans who have been Less than one year into its Reagonomics experience, ' smacked between the eyes by his economic policies. _ the U.S. finds itself in an economic mess unprecedented ing, corporate tax cuts of $750-billion and slashing fed- + eral human services programs by $50-billion, Reagan’s .* ‘ since the 1930s. Based on a huge increase in arms spend- eee » victims are mounting. Some 13 million Americans are out of work —- close to | 12% of the workforce. The figure does not include mil- lions temporarily laid off and government statistics show ore .5 million workers were jobless for some period in The U.S. Federal Housing Administration says that mortgage foreclosures are up by 30% and are running about 2,000 a month. Evictions are rising and affordable of federal funds for low income housing this year will see a drop in home construction of 40%. Other government figures warn that 20% of the coun- try’s farmers will be unable to finance their operations in 1982 because of funding cuts from $8.5-billion in 1981 to $3.5-billion in 1982. _ Smaller businesses are feeling the crunch with bank- Tuptcies up 42% in the first 10 months of 1981 over the year before. Program after program has been cut or reduced. Mil- lions of Americans are losing eligibility in medicare, welfare, foodstamp, school lunch and other needed pro- , gtams. Supplemental Unemployment Benefits (SUB) funds are all but dried up. A half million families with PHOTO — TASS housing disappearing. As a direct result of cancellation - The South Bronx in New York City, unemployment reaches 80%. : some two million children in the Aid to Dependent Chil- dren programs are being cut off. A 20% increase in medical costs, cutbacks in medicare and hospital shutdowns are causing brutal hardships for the poor, the elderly and the unemployed. The overall youth jobless rate stands at 21% while uhemployment among Black youth has reached 45%. Crime, alcohol, drug and child abuse are rising dramati- cally. : Soup lines are growing longer. Real spendable wages are now at the 1958 level and have declined 19% since 1972. Writing about Reaganomics, the New York Times said editorially: ‘* The Reagan administration’s vaunted economic policy cannot work. The administration knows that.”’ But if it does, it isn’t admitting anything. Responding to reporters’ questions about the high job- less rates, Reagan’s press spokesman said, ‘‘ This is the price you have to pay to bring down inflation .. .”’ Discussing the state of the nation under Reagan recently, Gus Hall, leader of the Communist Party USA said, ‘‘There now exists city and regional pockets of poverty-disaster areas and emergency enclaves where whole communities are blighted by joblessness, hunger, broken homes and broken lives, surrounded by dead, smokeless, windowless, lifeless old industrial plants. “They are vivid examples of the ‘showplace of capitalism’, the miracle of the marketplace and free enterprise.” And of Reagan’s concern ‘‘for those who have been rendered helpless’’? On the last day of 1981 which, it transpires, was the last day of the United Nations’ Inter- national Year of the Disabled, the White House took dead aim at programs to protect the rights of the nations’ handicapped. Deemed too expensive, federal regula- tions to extend facilities for handicapped persons on pub- lic transit and buildings are being dismantled. As one disabled reader bitterly wrote, ‘‘Instead of the International Year of Disabled Persons, it should have been the International Year of Dismantling Programs.” LONDON — British people numbed by what many see as callous disregard by the Thatcher government for their social welfare needs were given a further shock Dec. 2 when a supplementary ‘‘mini- budget’’ was announced by the govern- ' Ment. After having cut heavily every other feature of the now tattered welfare state, _ the Tories are swinging the axe at un- | B employment benefits. It is proposed that the three million Titish people who have been thrown out _ Of jobs will now have to take a 2% cut in their unemployment payment. This is being done by holding statutory in- Creases in unemployment benefits 2% below. the rate of inflation. _ The Thatcher cabinet had actually de- cided on a 5% cut in jobless ‘‘benefits,”’ but Tory MPs themselves could not Swallow this, fearing the reaction of vot- €rs. As one Tory MP, the secretary for Wales, Nicholas Edwards, said, ‘‘ There 18 @ very clear limit to what is possible or Socially acceptable at a time when 3 mil- On are out of work.”’ ‘nat is apparently ‘‘socially accept- able” in Britain as far as the Tories are Concerned, are worsening conditions of Poverty that are alarming social analysts. The poor are getting poorer and are be- Coming more numerous, say several re- Cent studies, EEC Report claret prepared for the EEC’s -ommission and published in book form in November (‘‘Poverty and a the Development of Anti-Poverty Policy in the United Kingom,”’ by Richard Berthoud and Joan C. Brown), con- cludes that after 30 years of welfare state measures to deal with poverty, at least one household in seven in Britain lives in poverty and that at least six million people are poor. In the findings of this report, retrogres- sion in the economy and in government policy has caused the proportion of people living in poverty to appear un- changed since the start of the welfare state. It asserts that the abandonment of anti-poverty policy by the present Thatcher government is likely to worsen the situation. The chairman of the Child Poverty Ac- tion Group, Professor Peter Townsend, says that the worsening has already been going on at a drastic rate: ‘‘As a result of government policies, millions of people are now facing conditions worse, in many respects, than the thirties.” Professor Townsend estimates that since 1977, in the short space of four years, those living below the govern- ment’s official poverty line have more than doubled, from an official figure of two million to over five million or almost one in ten of the total population. He says: ‘‘If you include those with incomes - on the margin of the poverty line, you soon reach a figure of one in four living in what any civilized society would de- scribe as poverty.”’ ‘Poverty Definition Because the visibly wretched condi- From Britain William Pomeroy tions of poverty which existed half a cen- tury or more ago are less visible today, the conclusion is sometimes made that the poor are no longer with us. This view was corrected in a 1978 report to parlia- ment by the official Supplementary Benefits Commission, which gave this definition: poverty means a standard of living so low that it excludes people from the community in which they live. Said that report: **To keep out of poverty people must have an income which enables them to participate in the life of the community. They must be able, for example, to keep themselves reasonably fed, and well enough dressed to maintain their self-re- spect and to attend interviews for jobs with confidence. Their homes must be reasonably warm; their children should not feel shamed. by the quality of their clothing; the family must be able to visit relatives and given them something on their birthdays and at Christmas time; they must be able to read newspapers, and retain their television sets and their membership of trade unions and churches. And they must be able to live in a way which ensures, as far as pos- sible, that public officials, doctors, Thatcher escalates war against poor teachers, landlords and others treat them — with the courtesy due to every member of the community.”’ These studies in Britain have been confirmed and their estimates given broader emphasis in a massive report undertaken for the European Commis- sion. Approved by the Commission Dec. 9, it contains the results of a five-year study on the state of poverty in the coun- tries of the European Economic Com- munity. 30 Million in Poverty According to this report, there are 30 million people living in poverty in the nine EEC countries and their number is increasing. In arriving at the figures, the compilers of the report used this definition of pover- - ty: ‘Individuals or families whose re- sources, goods, cash income, plus ser- vices from public and private. sources, are so small as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life of the member state in which they live.”’ Usirig as a “‘poverty line” a level where the adult income of a household was only 50% of the average individual net income in each country, the EEC report compiles this table of ‘‘House- holds Below the Poverty Line’’: Bel- gium, 209,000; Britain, 1,241,000; Den- mark, 334,000; France, 2,630,000; West Germany, 1,527,000; Ireland, 172,000; Italy, 3,823,000; Luxembourg, 16,000; Netherlands, 233,000. * PACIFIC TRIBUNE—JAN. 15, 1982—Page 5