Columnist E.J. Dionne: Child poverty should be enemy No. 1

Wednesday, Feb. 17, 1999 | 12:03 p.m.

IT'S EASY to ignore unpleasant facts, especially when they don't affect you personally. But occasionally, someone comes along with a bit of inconvenient news.

In a speech earlier this month to a group of Democrats in Virginia, Bill Bradley, the presidential candidate and former senator, ticked off a list of problems going unaddressed in the country. One is child poverty.

Among Americans under the age of 18, one in five lives in poverty. Even if one factors in various forms of federal help, says Wendell Primus, director of income security at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 16 percent of kids are still in poverty.

Let's face it: Talking about child poverty is not fashionable at the moment. If you do, you might be cast as a bleeding heart liberal, or, God forbid, a "compassionate conservative."

So here is a modest proposal. Since both parties want to show that the impeachment mess has not crippled their capacity to govern, and since both want to show how reasonable, bipartisan and cooperative they can be, they should undertake a joint venture. Congress and President Clinton should atone for the viciousness of the last year by jointly leading a Campaign Against Child Poverty.

Neither side will get much political benefit out of doing so, which is why they should do it. No one can accuse anyone of political opportunism. There are not a lot of votes or PAC contributions in the child poverty issue.

And let's can ideological posturing and accept that there has been some "social learning" about curbing poverty, to use a nice phrase of which Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan, D-N.Y., is fond.

There is little argument now that the rise in the number of single-parent families from the 1960s until a few years ago aggravated poverty. Despite heroic efforts by individual parents, single-parent families, on the whole, are not good for kids. So a campaign against child poverty necessarily involves family policy.

And could we also stipulate that while government alone cannot solve this problem -- the role of voluntary organizations, especially religious institutions, is vital -- it won't be solved without government's commitment.

If the old arguments are given a rest, some practical measures become possible. One is for states to spend the money that the federal government is already offering them through welfare reform to help poor kids.

They might put the money into better child care or after-school programs, or into helping the parents of poor kids get better jobs. Primus says that states are simply not using at least $3 billion a year in federal money that's available to them for the poor, and the number might be as high as $7 billion. Surely the states could do some good with that money.

We can ask if some of that big federal surplus might go into academic enrichment programs for poor kids, both before they go to school and after they get there. It's fair to reserve much of the surplus for Social Security and Medicare, two worthy programs. It's not so fair that kids are being left out as the surplus pie is cut.

With Congress likely to ease the "marriage penalty" in the income tax code, it should also ease the penalty as it affects families who benefit from the Earned Income Tax Credit. The EITC lifts the incomes of the working poor. Under current law, unmarried couples in which both parents receive the EITC benefit can see their joint income go down if they marry. That's anti-family.

An interesting assortment of politicians -- Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Tex., Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., and Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass. -- has ideas on how to fix this. You've got to like the sound of a Gramm-Daschle Pro-Family Child Poverty Act of 1999.

Finally, Primus suggests that it would be good for poor kids if we paid more attention to their fathers. It's not just a question of getting "deadbeat dads" to pay child support. It's also about making support payments possible by helping the poorest dads find and keep jobs. Working fathers are far more likely to marry and care for their kids.

No single step will magically eradicate child poverty. But after all the talk over the last year about how this terrible scandal "affected the children," it would be good if politicians in both parties gave some thought to those children who could most use their help.