February 18, 1975
Page 3317
INFLATION HURTS POOR
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, I invite the attention of Senators to an article entitled "Inflation's Grip Tightens on Poor," by James T. Wooten in the New York Times of February 13, 1975. The article is a very vivid and touching description of today's plight of the poor.
It is one thing to read the statistics of deprivation. It is another to experience deprivation. This article brings the reader close to that experience. It also is a stark reminder of this Nation's unfulfilled promises and the plight of those who must endure the results.
I ask unanimous consent that the speech be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the speech was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
INFLATION'S GRIP TIGHTENS ON POOR
(By James T. Wooten)
ST. PETERSBURG, FLA.– When Mrs. Elsie DeFratus could no longer afford the cost of living, she died.
She was nearly 80 years old, and she had survived somehow for a long, long time on her meager widow's pension, frugally measuring it against the rising prices, scrimping and scraping and skipping meals, making do with less and less each day until finally, on a recent morning at an ancient hotel in this city, she crumpled quietly to the floor of her dark and tiny apartment.
She weighed 76 pounds. An autopsy found no trace of food in her shrunken stomach.
"Malnutrition," the coroner concluded.
"Surrender," sighed an elderly friend. "She just stopped believing tomorrow would be better."
Both may have been right, but in any case the small, emaciated woman had become the ultimate victim of inflation. Her extremity had gone as far as it could go.
For millions of other Americans, inflation's effect has been not as extreme, but it is hurting deeply nonetheless.
From one end of the country to the other, in rural hollows and small-town slums, in prairie reservations and mountain enclaves and city ghettos, it attacks the poor, the elderly, those on fixed incomes. Sometimes, it leaves them, like Mrs. DeFratus, both hungry and hopeless.
President Ford, in his first few months in office, concentrated his economic policy on reducing inflation. And even though prices rose by 12.2 per cent last year – the most in 28 years – some progress was being made.
Last month, however, Mr. Ford decided that the time had come to shift the power of government from primarily fighting inflation to fighting a deepening recession, which has pushed the jobless rolls to 7.5 million, or 8.2 per cent of the work force.
The Administration itself foresees no immediate drop in living costs. Its forecast, submitted earlier this month with the President's new budget, listed an average inflation rate of 11.3 per cent this year, as against 11 per cent last year.
Should inflation stay high, it seems certain to provide new dimensions to the nation's longtime poverty problems. And there are already some signs that economic difficulties are putting fresh edge on traditional class, ethnic and racial antipathies.
At the airport in El Paso, a middle-aged aircraft executive who declines to give his name, tells a fellow traveler his views on the poor.
"They just suck at the Great American Teat," he says, "That is their sole function, to milk the country."
One of the poor, Robert Davis, sat at his kitchen table in the tiny dinette of his housing- project apartment in Little Rock recently, talking with his wife and some visitors about the way he believes other people see him.
"I don't think they think much of me," he said, staring at his mud-caked, high-top shoes. "I mean, they don't think I've amounted to much as a man. Used to be, I don't much care what they thought, but nowadays – well, I don't know. Maybe they're right."
Mr. Davis is a 40-year-old black man who works more than 40 hours almost every week on a construction crew and earns slightly more than $2 an hour. Occasionally he takes odd jobs on Saturdays to supplement his weekly earnings.
"It wasn't hardly ever enough," he said. "Not with nine kids at home. But there was a time there not too far back when we were sort of looking up. Now, I don't see nothing but down."
SOUP AND CRACKERS
As he talked, his wife quietly prepared dinner for the family, a meal consisting of chicken soup, some crackers, milk for the younger children and coffee for the older ones. She is 38 years old.
She cannot remember a single moment in all of her life, she said, when she was not lacking something she really needed.
Her husband said: "I know people look at us and laugh and say how come we got so many kids, and I say it's because we always wanted a bunch of them and because I never did know we was going to be poor."
Mrs. Davis laughed – a slight chuckle barely heard above the sounds of her puttering at the stove.
Mr. Davis went on: "I always thought that the way I could work – I'm a right strong man – that we'd make it some way. Now, tell the truth, I don't think we can."
In the last few months, their utility bills have gone from $8 to $21 each month, the result of a rate increase by the local power company. The cost of their groceries has risen from about $60 a week to more than $100, even when Mrs. Davis buys less than she believes they need.
A few weeks ago, with several auto loan installments long overdue, they chose to pay for their food and their water and their lights and their shelter, and the finance company repossessed their second-hand car.
They pay $33 each month for their cramped, dark quarters, and, should Mrs. Davis take a job, the rent would increase proportionately and make the added income almost inconsequential.
"You know them beans I used to buy, Robert?" she said softly. "You know, those dried beans – Lord, I guess I've cooked a ton of them – and they used to be four pounds for 59 cents. You know how much they are now, Robert?"
Mr. Davis shook his head.
"Just guess, Robert," she said.
He declined silently.
"Well, they're $2 for four pounds, that's what they are, and we just can't buy them any more," she said.
Still her husband said nothing.
"You know what, Robert?" Mrs. Davis said, turning away from the stove for a moment. "I think you're right."
"What's that?" he asked.
"I don't think we're going to make it either."
High atop a new St. Petersburg hotel, only blocks from the old one where Mrs. DeFratus died, a bartender talks about the problems of poverty.
"There are no such things," he says. "There are only those who will not work, and I say to hell with them. I work hard. Everybody I know works hard. Why can't they work hard?"
In Seattle there is an old, beige, Victorian house at the corner of East Olive Street and 14th Avenue where every Tuesday morning hundreds of men and women – young and old, black and white – form a long line that snakes down the block toward the towering Space Needle.
ABSOLUTELY FREE
It is a "food bank," a pick-up point for absolutely free, no-strings-attached groceries distributed by Neighbors in Need, a nonprofit group funded partly by the Federal Government and partly by public support.
It was formed after massive layoffs by the Boeing Company, Seattle's largest industry, in 1971. Thousands of formerly middle-class workers were abruptly unemployed.
"We tried to fill that space between the Government benefits and the needs of the people," Milton Kemp, a 28-year-old employee of the group, said. "But we're not really doing it any more. Inflation is killing us. All we're doing is just throwing a few groceries into the gap."
The group's purchasing power in the last few months has plummeted to a point at which pork and beans was listed recently as a "meat" item.
"And there wasn't any pork in those beans, either," MT. Kemp said.
Each week, thousands of Seattle residents shuffle through one of the group's several "banks," and each week the number of its clients increases
"People who were once using us as a supplement – our original function – are now solely dependent on us," Mr. Kemp said.
The people who pick up the food are a varied collection. On one Tuesday morning not long ago, a young black man and a middle-aged white woman stood next to each other in the line outside the house.
LESS THAN $100 A WEEK
He was unemployed, and his wife's job brought the couple less than $100 each week. They have two children.
"Can't make it without these – these, well, these gifts," he said, slightly embarrassed.
"Why, if you weren't black your face would turn red," the matronly woman chided. "Shame on you. When you need help, you need help. When your babies need food, they need food, and there's nothing about that to be embarrassed about."
The young black man stared at the sidewalk. "Yes, ma'am," he said. "There is."
Reggie, a black Vietnam veteran in his late 20's, leans against the wall of an abandoned store-front in Columbus, Ohio, and offers his views on inflation.
"It means just one thing to me," he says. "America, the white middle class sort of rearranges its life-style, you know, sort of moans a little about how much hamburger is costing these days, but the black people – you know, man, the poor people – they got no life-styles to rearrange. They're just getting destroyed, you know. I mean, getting killed. And that's America to me. I never knew it to be any other way."
In Seattle Peggy Maze, director of Neighbors in Needs, was embarrassed about the food donations, too.
"Not for me," she said in her office at an old warehouse near the Puget Sound waterfront. "I'm embarrassed for Seattle."
In 1971, public donations were over $250,000. This year, they will be less than $100,000. The Office of Economic Opportunity gave the program $750,000 in 1972, $650,000 in 1973 and $500,000 this year.
"When we need more, we get less," she said.
"SUCH GREAT SENSE"
"You see the grand logic here," Mrs. Maze went on. "As the number of poor increases because of inflation, the need for services such as our group's grows. Correspondingly, the interest and the funding of the public and the Government decreases. It makes such great sense."
As the line lengthened throughout the morning at the food bank, the wind from Puget Sound increased sharply and several of the people on the line pulled their old coats close around them, embracing themselves with crossed arms and patting their own shoulders to keep warm.
"A few months ago," Mrs. Maze said as the brown paper bags crammed with groceries were doled out, "many of these people wouldn't have been here. They wouldn't even have thought of being here. Now, they come. They can't buy what they need any more, and they've got to eat somehow."
A young white man and a young black man – both Southern immigrants to Detroit – stand outside a food wagon at a small plant and talk about charity.
"Not me, brother," the black man says. "No giveaways for me. I'd steal to feed my family before that, wouldn't you?"
The white man hesitates for a moment and then nods an affirmative response.
"I know a hell of a lot of people that are going to steal before they'll stand in line for food," the black man says.
In New York, Detroit, Miami and Chicago, there have been arrests of elderly citizens – some of them extremely feeble – for stealing groceries in order to eat.
"But Elsie never would have done that," said Steven Haddock, manager of the hotel where Mrs. DeFratus lived here on the Sunshine Coast of Florida. "She just wouldn't have stolen anything."
Instead, she chose to attempt to manage on her Social Security checks of less than $100 a month, and with the cost of her room, $15 a week, and her transportation to and from the Post Office to pick up her check, her food allowance was down to less than 65 cents a day.
Frequently, when her funds were nearly depleted toward the end of the month, she would settle for a single ice-cream cone each morning, and somehow it had always been enough.
But on Oct. 3, after carefully arranging her clothes on her bed, she collapsed to the door and died. Her Social Security check arrived the same day.