Good News, Bad News

The Census Bureau's new report on Americans' financial condition had the makings of a not terribly funny "good news-bad news" joke. The good news was that last year for the first time the median income of the American family rose above $10,000, to $10,285. The bad news was that inflation had wiped out the gain; in constant dollars the median income was almost exactly the same as in 1970. At the same time, the number of poor in the U.S. (a poor family is defined as a nonfarm family of four with an income of less than $4,137) remained virtually unchanged: about 13% of the population.

The news for black Americans was also good and bad. Between 1960 and 1970, the Census Bureau said, blacks made significant progress in education, income, job opportunities and housing. The greatest improvements occurred in the North and West among black families where the parents were under the age of 35, especially when both husband and wife were working. The high school dropout rate for blacks decreased sharply to 11.1% in 1971 , compared with 7.4% for whites. On the college level, the number of black students enrolled rose from 10% to 18%, compared with a constant 22% for whites.

Yet black families still remained far behind whites; their median income in 1971 was only $6,440, compared with the $10,670 median for whites. For all the gains of those families in the growing black middle class, about 31% of blacks remained below the poverty line, compared with 10% of the whites. Among the black poor, 56% lived in families headed by only a mother -- lending some added credence to Daniel Patrick Moynihan's much-debated thesis that family structure is part of the pathology of black poverty. The statistics can also be read to support the idea of some form of income maintenance -- an idea embraced in principle by both Richard Nixon and George McGovern. Unlike the present welfare system, which penalizes those who work and tends to drive fathers out of the house, income maintenance might begin to end the stalemate at the bottom.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.