Gore Seizes on Drop in Childhood Poverty Rate

Vice President Al Gore, who hasn’t heard very much good news lately, got some Thursday as the Census Bureau released figures showing broad income gains for American families--and even more important a significant decline in the poverty rate, especially among children.

Seizing on the numbers, Gore immediately launched a broadside against challenger Bill Bradley in a telephone interview with The Times.

“Both candidates in the Democratic Party have talked about making a difference in childhood poverty,” Gore said. “[But] I have a record on this issue that I’m proud of. . . . My opponent has offered a lot of rhetoric on this point but in Congress he voted for Reaganomics--a vote that hurt many on the lower end of the income scale, and then he left public service when so many of the important battles were taking place. There is a difference, and it is a real difference.”

Gore’s comments--perhaps his sharpest yet about Bradley on any subject--underscore both the intensifying nature of the Democratic race, and the role of the child poverty debate in that contest. Gore referred to Bradley’s Senate vote in 1981 for Reagan’s budget cuts, and his decision to retire from the Senate after three terms in 1996.

Eric Hauser, Bradley’s communications director, dismissed Gore’s criticism. Hauser noted that Bradley, during his Senate career, played a key role in efforts to expand Medicaid eligibility for poor families, and to increase tax relief for working poor families.

Behind the pointed words about Bradley’s record is a deeper debate between the two men about the underlying problem of poverty, particularly among children. One of Bradley’s central arguments against Gore is that he and President Clinton have not done enough to reduce childhood poverty.

The new numbers could give Gore formidable ammunition to counter that accusation: They show that the number of children in poverty has dropped by nearly 2 million since Clinton took office, and the share of children living in poverty is at the lowest level since 1980.

Yet, even so, the annual snapshot shows that before government benefits are included, nearly 19% of all children--about 13.5 million overall--continue to live in poverty, a figure Bradley is likely to continue citing in his case that the country must “dramatically reduce the number of children” who are poor.

“If you want to brag on the economy, the trend is your friend,” says Jared Bernstein, an economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, “but the level continues to haunt you.”

Gore hailed the new numbers as evidence for his case that the best way to make continued progress on social problems is to build on the strategies the administration is already pursuing. “We need to do a lot more for sure, and I have proposed additional steps,” Gore said. “But we need to continue moving in the same direction because it is obviously working.”

Hauser acknowledged that the numbers represented progress, but said the country should be seeking even greater gains in a period of prosperity. “A good economy has been helpful and that’s good,” he said. “But as Bradley has talked about, when we are in a moment of prosperity we shouldn’t simply count on it, but really use it to extend possibilities to many more people. There is surely more to be done.”

Both Gore and Bradley have promised to do more to help poor families. Both want to raise the minimum wage. Gore has proposed to expand the earned-income tax credit for married couples, and to expand health care for uninsured children and their parents under the Children’s Health Insurance Program; Bradley this week proposed a $65-billion plan to provide health coverage for all uninsured children and virtually all adults, and also has talked about increasing the earned-income credit. He’s planning to release more proposals for reducing childhood poverty in a speech in New York City in late October.

Childhood poverty has been a flash point in the Democratic primary race since June when Bradley delivered a speech in Los Angeles accusing the administration of “tinker[ing] around the margins” while “the percentage of children living in poverty has barely changed.”

Actually, even at that point, Bradley was incorrect: the number of children in poverty had fallen since Clinton took office. And the report released Thursday showed the numbers fell even faster in 1998. In 1998, the children’s poverty rate dropped by a full percentage point, from 19.9% to 18.9%; it has fallen that much in a single year only twice in the last quarter century. “A 1% drop [in one year] . . . is just unbelievably good,” says Wendell Primus, an analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.

Overall, since Clinton took office, the children’s poverty rate has now fallen by 3.4 percentage points--from 22.3% in 1992 to 18.9% in 1998. That’s the largest decline over a six-year period since the late 1960s, when it fell by nine percentage points between 1963 and 1969. Yet the overall children’s poverty rate remains higher than during that earlier period--largely because single-parent families, who are far more likely than married parents to live in poverty, now constitute a much larger share of all families.

Two other measures Bradley supporters have cited in criticizing Clinton and Gore also showed positive movement. The share of families in deep poverty--with incomes at half the poverty level or below--fell to the lowest level since 1989; the percentage of children under 6 in poverty is now the lowest since 1980.

All of those numbers fall further when government benefits are added into the equation. Census figures show that when taxes are removed from income, and government cash benefits like food stamps, welfare and the earned-income tax credit are added, the overall poverty rate for all children fell to 13.6% (compared with the 18.9% in poverty before benefits were calculated). Those federal benefits lifted a higher percentage of children out of poverty in 1998 than in 1997--a potentially significant point since Bradley has accused the administration of not offering enough help to poor families.

Still, amid all the positive news, Primus noted one disquieting trend Bradley may seize on: families with children who are still poor were living even further below the poverty line in 1998 than in the mid-1990s. Primus and other administration critics believe that change is related to the number of women moving off the welfare rolls since the massive reform bill of 1996.