The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [122]
But we also need to admit that work alone does not ensure that people can rise out of poverty. Across America, welfare reform has sharply reduced the number of people on the public dole; it has also swelled the ranks of the working poor, with women churning in and out of the labor market, locked into jobs that don’t pay a living wage, forced every day to scramble for adequate child care, affordable housing, and accessible health care, only to find themselves at the end of each month wondering how they can stretch the last few dollars that they have left to cover the food bill, the gas bill, and the baby’s new coat.
Strategies like an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit that help all low-wage workers can make an enormous difference in the lives of these women and their children. But if we’re serious about breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty, then many of these women will need some extra help with the basics that those living outside the inner city often take for granted. They need more police and more effective policing in their neighborhoods, to provide them and their children some semblance of personal security. They need access to community-based health centers that emphasize prevention—including reproductive health care, nutritional counseling, and in some cases treatment for substance abuse. They need a radical transformation of the schools their children attend, and access to affordable child care that will allow them to hold a full-time job or pursue their education.
And in many cases they need help learning to be effective parents. By the time many inner-city children reach the school system, they’re already behind—unable to identify basic numbers, colors, or the letters in the alphabet, unaccustomed to sitting still or participating in a structured environment, and often burdened by undiagnosed health problems. They’re unprepared not because they’re unloved but because their mothers don’t know how to provide what they need. Well-structured government programs—prenatal counseling, access to regular pediatric care, parenting programs, and quality early-childhood-education programs—have a proven ability to help fill the void.
Finally, we need to tackle the nexus of unemployment and crime in the inner city so that the men who live there can begin fulfilling their responsibilities. The conventional wisdom is that most unemployed inner-city men could find jobs if they really wanted to work; that they inevitably prefer drug dealing, with its attendant risks but potential profits, to the low-paying jobs that their lack of skills warrants. In fact, economists who’ve studied the issue—and the young men whose fates are at stake—will tell you that the costs and benefits of the street life don’t match the popular mythology: At the bottom or even the middle ranks of the industry, drug dealing is a minimum-wage affair. For many inner-city men, what prevents gainful employment is not simply the absence of motivation to get off the streets but the absence of a job history or any marketable skills—and, increasingly, the stigma of a prison record.
Ask Mac, who has made it part of his mission to provide young men in his neighborhood a second chance. Ninety-five percent of his male employees are ex-felons, including one of his best cooks, who has been in and out of prison for the past twenty years for various drug offenses and one count of armed robbery. Mac starts them out at eight dollars an hour and tops them out at fifteen dollars an hour. He has no shortage of applicants. Mac’s the first one to admit that some of the guys come in with issues—they aren’t used to getting to work on time, and a lot of them aren’t used to taking orders from a supervisor—and his turnover can be high. But by not accepting excuses from the young men he employs (“I tell them I got a business to run, and if they don’t want the job I got other folks who do”), he finds that