Theft at the Public Till
by providing government cash assistance. Increase funding and improve the quality of education and training. The data available do not begin to convey the social devastation that has been visited upon our poor communities. In some areas, capital flight has systematically robbed the younger generation of any opportunities for meaningful, stable employment. In others, violence has escalated to war- zone levels, and mothers and children share a single aspiration: to live until the following week. Childhood diseases such as measles and rubella have returned, along with the new plague of violence led by guns and drugs. In some areas, AIDS fills a majority of hospital beds, and gunshot wounds account for a majority of emergency room admissions. In rural areas, the need for jobs is so intense that communities welcome hazardous waste in- cinerators and federal prisons. In cities and rural areas alike, some families send every available adult and child into the growing underground economy to work for sub-minimum wages. Homeless people push grocery carts full of scavenged belongings past people who have increasingly learned not to see them. Everywhere communities have responded with organizing and charitable efforts, but none of these efforts are commensurate with the scale of the devastation and many are just inappropriate and a waste of funds. For example, social service advocates agree that the problem of low birth weights is poverty. Yet the solution they propose to reduce the rate of such births is to increase access to health care in advance of these births especially for uninsured women They all but ignore the fact that for most of the poor- est, those with the highest rates of low-weight births, medical insurance per se is not the barrier; they have Medicaid, which covers health care, however feebly. Still, these women give birth to low-weight babies. If the common de- nominator is poverty, then the solution must deal with it. Creating more jobs for health care professionals, advocates, and nutritionists will not change the unalterable fact that eating enough food is and always has been essential to birthing normal-weight babies. Food cannot be prescribed by a physician or dispensed by a pharmacist. Telling someone what is nutritional will not access nutritional food. Only being able to purchase it will. All social programs, whether the benefits are paid in cash or in kind, are
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