Government home grants

UP AN UNPAVED DRIVEWAY, inside an antebellum house turned job-training center in Soul City, North Carolina, Sam Jefferson is tapping a white-sneakered foot on the floor. He is fidgeting his way through this morning's "spirit up" seminar, led by an impeccably dressed evangelical woman who is here to elevate the self-esteem of a dozen or so unemployed workers.

Jefferson, 48, was laid off in March from Harriet & Henderson Yarns, a large family-owned textile company in nearby Henderson that filed for bankruptcy this summer. He had worked there for 30 years, having started while in high school to help put food on his family's table. A single parent ever since his 14-year-old son was a baby, Jefferson had seen hundreds of his colleagues at the mill pink-slipped over the past two years. But he always figured a company that had come through the Depression would survive this recession--at least, long enough for him to put his two teenagers through college. "This is the first time I've ever been on unemployment in my life," says Jefferson. "It doesn't feel good at all."

A counselor with the unemployment office suggested Jefferson attend classes at the job-training center--if only to keep his morale up. Yesterday's presentations included a seminar on truck-driving schools and a recruiting talk from a guard at the local prison, one of the area's largest remaining employers. But Jefferson, a stocky, gregarious, and exceedingly polite man with a mustache and wide smile, doesn't think jailhouse work is for him: "Those prisoners got 24/7 to think about how to hurt you."

So now he listens as the "spirit up" presenter, Linda Smith, reads affirmations and encourages the audience to set goals for themselves--any goals (her own: getting laser eye surgery). Smith tells people to find their hidden talents, like poetry, or to meditate in nature. "We all know where the economy is right now," she calls out, "so we need to tap into our skills to have a rich self-worth. Amen?" Jefferson and his fellow students answer with an embarrassed silence.

The lackluster response suggests that, however well-meaning, Smith and the state unemployment officials who invited her here have little but moral encouragement to offer people facing the region's dismal economic landscape. Only an hour away from the high-tech Raleigh-Durham area, Henderson and surrounding Vance County boast North Carolina's highest unemployment rate--15.5 percent as of last June, double the rate of 1999. The rest of the state is suffering as well. North Carolina lost 111,000 jobs between January 2001 and February 2003; and in the next seven months, an additional 29,000 layoffs were announced, all part of the 3 million jobs lost nationwide since President George W. Bush took office. So many people have applied for jobless benefits that the North Carolina unemployment trust fund went broke twice this year; in September, the fund was facing a $75 million deficit and had to be bailed out with emergency loans from the federal government.

"I saw President Bush on TV the other night," says Jefferson, "and he was saying the economy was getting better. I thought, 'He must not have been to Henderson, North Carolina.'"

WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH ran for president in 2000, he positioned himself as a new breed of conservative, one who believed in the soft side of government and in compassion for those less fortunate. "As president, I will be committed to the advancement of all Americans," he said in April 2000, "including those who struggle." Aware that Republicans of the Newt Gingrich mold were viewed as too harsh and coldhearted, Bush promised to rally the "armies of compassion" to combat poverty and other social ills.

But for all the campaign talk about compassion, Bush has shown little interest in the plight of workers like Jefferson. Last year, as more than a million workers were on the verge of losing their unemployment checks, Bush ignored calls to extend benefits for additional weeks. (He finally relented in the face of pressure from congressional Democrats and supported the extension late in 2002.) And throughout the past three years, the president has pursued an agenda of limiting government assistance for lower-income Americans--through a combination of massive tax cuts, frozen appropriations, and wholesale restructuring of the way programs are financed.

The policies haven't been the stuff of headlines--largely because the administration has worked hard to avoid the kind of negative publicity that plagued Gingrich and Ronald Reagan when they attempted to slash social spending. Nonetheless, the likely outcome is much the same. "The administration's proposals have probably gotten less attention both because the details are seen as technical and the language used is often reassuring," says Mark Greenberg, policy director at the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy. "Instead of making cuts now, it's laying the groundwork for future cuts."

Many of the administration's changes in social policy are subtle, coming in the form of regulatory adjustments that make it harder for people in need to get assistance. This spring, for example, the Education Department changed the rules for Pell Grants--college funds designed to help students from lower-income working families--so fewer people can qualify. The Internal Revenue Service has moved to create new requirements for workers eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, a credit for low-income workers that is so effective at keeping people off welfare that even many conservative groups praise it. Parents seeking the credit would have to provide extensive documentation--such as two years' worth of school records, to prove that their children actually live with them--and would be audited at a substantially higher rate than the country's millionaires. In yet another proposal, the administration seeks to create more stringent verification procedures for families applying for school lunches, to make sure they are poor enough to receive subsidized food. Research conducted by the Reagan administration found that rather than prevent fraud, such measures tend to force eligible children to drop out of the program because of language barriers and bureaucratic hurdles.

Changes like these don't stand to save the government a lot of money--and, critics say, fiscal responsibility may not be the administration's chief motive. "Just in terms of domestic spending, Bush has been pretty loose," says Max Sawicky, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, pointing out that government spending--even without counting homeland security and defense--has increased faster under Bush than it did under President Clinton. What the administration wants, Sawicky and other critics say, is to reduce the federal government's role in helping the needy, but without attracting attention. Like previous Republican administrations, notes David Bradley of the National Community Action Foundation, the Bush White House is committed to rolling back the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society. "But they realize they've got to take different steps to do it," he says. "They do it with a smile."

One way Bush has avoided scrutiny of his social policies has been to make public commitments to "compassion" initiatives, only to abandon them when it comes to providing funding. Bush pushed hard for Congress to pass the No Child Left Behind education act, highlighting it as a signature accomplishment in this year's State of the Union address. Yet in his 2003 budget request, he left the program underfunded by $8 billion. Similarly, Bush pledged to create new tax incentives to encourage more donations to charity. "It's not sufficient to praise charities and community groups," he said in May 2001. "We must support them ... both [as] a public obligation and a personal responsibility." Yet neither of his tax-cut packages, in 2001 and 2003, included any incentives for charitable donations. "The language used [by the administration] has consistently communicated a commitment that one doesn't find in the funding proposals," says Greenberg of the Center for Law and Social Policy.

In perhaps one of the most notable contrasts between rhetoric and reality, Bush issued a call to young people to serve the country after the September 11 attacks. He urged them to participate in AmeriCorps, which provides college aid in return for a year or two of community service, pledging to expand the program and to recruit more than 25,000 new volunteers. Young people flocked to AmeriCorps in record numbers; when the program ran out of funds, Bush sat on the sidelines as Congress refused to authorize $100 million in emergency funding and volunteers were turned away by the thousands. (He has since asked Congress for a $159 million budget increase for AmeriCorps.)