Remember how the nation’s official poverty rate fell to its lowest point on record during the pandemic? That’s over.

Let us recall for a moment the vast array of programs in the 2020 Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, better known as the CARES Act, and the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. They tackled a wide range of socioeconomic aid. Suddenly, evictions were halted, and a lot more money was available for almost everyone’s emergency needs, which included rental assistance, free school meals, food stamps, access to Medicaid and child care subsidies.

Also, unemployment benefits, stimulus checks and expanded child tax credit payments were sent out to help lift millions of Americans out of poverty.

Suddenly, this country had a national safety net about as robust as that of, say, Sweden or France.

The benefits were enormous but, alas, temporary. The bonanza of anti-poverty bucks was not meant to last beyond the pandemic – and it didn’t. Neither did the record-low poverty rates for Black and Hispanic Americans, the U.S. Census Bureau reports.

After that experience, what lessons have we learned about the never-ending challenge of raising poverty rates when there is not a national disaster like the pandemic facing us? What lessons can we draw from this in our long-running fight to end poverty? So far, to no one’s surprise, almost everyone uses the experience to confirm whatever they felt all along.

On the right, I have not been surprised to see conservatives, as always, opposed to “throwing money at problems,” no matter how tempting that may be, because sooner or later, the bills must be paid – and that’s never the fun part of giving.

Conservatives, in my experience, point to the decline of two-parent families since the early 1960s and the rising percentage of Black families without fathers at home. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, while he was assistant secretary of labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson, spotlighted this social shift in 1965 with his influential study of Black family poverty.

Since then, it has become politically correct on the left to blame systemic changes in the economy for disappearing jobs and other pressures on family life that hit Black families and communities particularly hard.

In the Harlem neighborhood of New York, the city where Moynihan grew up, 85% of Black households had two parents. By the time Moynihan’s study came out, the out-of-wedlock birthrate had increased to 25%. That rate continued to rise to 68% by 1991.

But, as some other studies have shown in recent years, if you are tallying by household income, the differences between the races shrink, to where upper-middle and upper-class household incomes and birthrates within marriage are close to the same across racial lines.

In her new book, “The Two-Parent Privilege,” Melissa Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, finds that the percentage of households that include two married parents appears to be holding steady among upper-class adults, both Black and white, even as it becomes increasingly rare among most everyone else.

Coming down somewhere in between the extremes on this touchy topic, Kearney views the family to be troubled, as an American institution, but finds that marriage offers more solutions to the problems of family stability than many of us have recognized.

For example, she counted herself as one of the social scientists who criticized the George W. Bush administration’s Healthy Marriage Initiative, which at first seemed to her to be throwing money at the problem without increasing the marriage rate.

“But I’ve softened my position,” she recently told The 74, a magazine for educators, when the administration “shifted its scope from trying to encourage marriages to trying to strengthen families.”

“That’s an important goal because a lot of families really do face barriers to setting up a two-parent household and enjoying a healthy marriage between parents, and we need to meet those families where they are,” she said. “The government can support community programs that work with vulnerable or fragile families.”

Right. Marriage is only the most visible challenge facing the future of the Black family. To have fewer Black births outside wedlock, we should help strengthen Black families.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. He may be contacted at:
cpage@chicagotribune.com
Twitter: @cptime

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