Political Horizons for March 29

• By MARK BALLARD
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Mar 29, 2009

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Probably because it’s the Lenten season, I got involved in a conversation at church last week about helping the poor.

Like similar conversations with neighbors or at the market, this chat soon turned to claims the poverty-stricken are responsible for their condition.

“Why should I care about them?” is a common refrain when Louisiana’s affluent residents talk about the 20 percent of their neighbors living in poverty.

There are some obvious throw-down answers: John Dunne’s 1624 meditation: “Never send to know for whom the bells toll, it tolls for thee” or the biblical quote of Jesus’ command 2,000 years ago: “Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.”

A more-direct answer on why Louisiana should care might be found in a recent Entergy Corp. study. The report was promoted as a business plan “for investing in low-income programs.”

Eradication of poverty, Entergy’s report states, “would increase the resources of each American household by an average of more than $18,000, equivalent to a wage increase of more than 30 percent.”

The New Orleans-based utility company, covers much of Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and therefore services some of the most poverty-stricken population in the United States. Entergy calculated that addressing poverty would decrease losses from crime, reduce health-care costs and increase the number of taxpayers.

Entergy’s analysis also makes the case that property values and wages are dragged down by a high incidence of poverty.

A less-theoretical take shows that Louisiana taxpayers this year are spending around $8.8 billion on about 90 programs spread over 16 different agencies. That’s roughly 30 percent of the state’s $29.6 billion annual budget this year.

By comparison, the state plans to spend $4.3 billion on public education.

A credible argument could be raised that all that spending has done little to shake Louisiana from its perch as having the highest poverty rate in the South. For more than a decade, about one in every five of Louisiana’s residents has been classified as poverty-stricken by the U.S. Census Bureau.

For children, it’s 27 percent.

That’s roughly one Louisiana child in four living in a neighborhood where a household is likely headed by a single mother, where vast numbers of adult men are unemployed, where many of the teenagers drop out of school, where families of four get by on about $1,800 each month and depend on government for food and health care. The neighborhoods usually lack banks, grocery stores and employers.