Numbers of needy in California growing

Press, 21 January 1982, Page 12

Numbers of needy in California growing

By

JOHN HUTCHISON

in San Francisco

Here in California, where living standards are higher than the national level, people by the thousands are falling through the safety net which President Reagan insists he is maintaining to protect the “truly needy.” His cuts in funding of social programmes, and the rapid rise in unemployment are reflected in lengthening lines at charities which feed the hungry. Unemployment in California. which has been less severe than the national average, has leaped to equal it in the last few weeks. Private welfare organisations in San Francisco which supply food to the poor have seen the lines outside their doors triple- and quadruple in the year Mr Reagan has been in office, pursuing policies which have steadily cut away government assistance to the indigent, appropriations for free or low-cost lunches for school children, subsistence rental subsidies and the distribution to povertylevel Americans of food stamps exchangeable for groceries. The Salvation Army in San Francisco says the number of persons it provides with food and shelter is up by 500 per cent in the last 12 months. Its centres are reported to be filled to capacity where they had vacancies a year ago. A

large downtown church which provides food to the poor reports that three times as many line up daily as did last January.

A suburban charity supported by an interdenominational church group reports that it supplies food to 300 persons each week — four times the number it served a year ago. St Anthony Dining Room, renowned in San Francisco for giving a hearty meal to anyone who asks to be fed, reports that only the increased generosity of donors has made it possible for the Catholic institution to meet the need. The dining room sometimes feeds 2000 persons a day. Critics of Mr Reagan's attitudes toward welfare say that the supply-side economics which he promised would provide “jobs, jobs, jobs” are in fact producing unemployment. Figures just released by the United States Department of Labour show that national unemployment, at 8.4 per cent at the end of November, and California’s rate of 8.2 per cent, had jumped to 8.9 per cent for both at the end of December. A Bank of America executive recently surmised that the California figure may reach ten per cent this year before it begins to drop‘again. In this

populous stale there are already more than a million persons out of work. A new phrase is entering the economic lexicon: the “discouraged worker,” who wants work but has given up looking for it. The number of weeks for which a worker can receive unemployment compensation has been reduced by the new Administration in Washington, as have been programmes to train the unskilled, assist lowincome students, and improve the educational potential of under-privileged children. State and local governments, scraping the bottoms of their treasuries, cannot rescue more than a small share of these programmes which have been funded for years by the Federal Government.

The Governor of California, Mr Jerry Brown, is proposing modest increases in the state’s welfare payments, certain fields of higher education, and salaries of public employees, but the boosts will not match the inflation rate. His budget proposals will be at the mercy of a state legislature acutely sensitive to the growing tensions between those citizens who identify themselves as aggrieved taxpayers and those who believe they are being intolerably shorted in services or compensation.