Word: underclass
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...center of Kaus' book is a thoughtful but no less risky proposal to dynamite welfare. He rightly understands how fear and loathing of the chronically unemployed underclass have encouraged middle-income Americans to flee from everyone below them on the class scale. The only way to eliminate welfare dependency, Kaus maintains, is by cutting off checks for all able- bodied recipients, including single mothers with children. He would have government provide them instead with jobs that pay slightly less than the minimum wage, earned-income tax credits to nudge them over the poverty line, drug counseling, job training...
Pronin's grim quarters are all too typical of the scores of derelict apartment buildings peppering the capital, where he and others live in squalor. They are members of the fast-growing underclass, made more visible by the demise of the Soviet Union and forced by Russia's economic revolution to live down-and-out in Moscow. Though many of today's losers would have difficulty surviving under any regime, the painful shift to a market system has pushed thousands of citizens, once able to maintain an acceptable living standard with the help of government subsidies and benefits, below...
...Democrats, it will require policies and rhetoric which address the concern of both Blacks in the underclass and white working-class voters. If affirmative action is to continue and aid to cities is to increase (and we believe both should happen), the costs must be shifted onto wealthier Americans. In short, this will require ending the largest upward income redistribution in history...
...about to be accused of doing something wrong. It may just be improperly removing a hook from a fish ("Good intentions notwithstanding, the result of such handling can be a severely injured fish . . ."). But most often since the Los Angeles riot, the subject has been the cities and the underclass...
...some hard-earned pessimism about government programs at work. But much of the pessimism is mere posturing. Bush and others have said repeatedly in recent weeks that the government has spent "$3 trillion over 25 years" fighting poverty, with the implication that this money has been lavished on the underclass. According to the White House's own figures, most of this mystical $3 trillion went for such non-underclass and politically sacrosanct programs as Medicare (more than a trillion) and veterans' benefits ($287 billion). The good intentions of anyone who talks about $3 trillion spent fighting poverty are suspect from...