American Notes SOCIAL ISSUES

The Reagan Administration has long maintained that the traditional family is a bastion in the battle against poverty. It contends that the dramatic addition of 7 million Americans to the ranks of the poor since 1979 is rooted in a cultural phenomenon: the increase of single-parent, female-headed households.

Last week, however, a congressional study proposed a set of economic causes of poverty. The report by the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Democrats, declared that the Administration has wrongly ignored "weak trends in employment and wages" from 1979 to 1985 as primary factors in keeping more than 33 million Americans below the poverty line, which for a family of four stands at $10,989 a year. It linked jobless statistics from the same period to show that two-parent households accounted for 45% of the rise in the number of poor. Single-parent families made up only 32% of the increase. Conservatives quickly defended the Administration from the implied criticism of its social agenda. However, according to Democratic Senator William Proxmire, a committee member, "When you have policies that provide less for dealing with poverty, you're going to have more people in poverty."