by Guy F. Smith
March 6, 2006

David K. Shipler, a former New York Times journalist, has produced an important profile of the vast segment of American society, an estimated 35-million Americans, that work hard, play by the rules and labor – sometimes without success – to achieve a comfortable standard of living that the rest of us enjoy.

Shipler’s book comes at a time when there is a need for new solutions, not just government or programmatic, for easing the burdens of this segment of the population.

His portraits of individuals and their daily struggles covers a broad sweep of contemporary America. There is the undocumented Mexican farm worker in North Carolina, Korean immigrants who labor in the sweatshops of Los Angeles’ garment district, working single mothers living on the edge, and many others, who, for one reason or another, are invisible to the majority of Americans.

In one chapter, Shipler focuses on the potential of an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) to help this segment of the population. Designed to subsidize low-wage working families and first enacted in 1975, the EITC has payments linked to tax returns. Benefits kick in at fairly high levels (for example, earnings of less than $34,458) for a worker who supported more than one child in 2004. At lower income levels, the tax credit can add the equivalent of a dollar to two to a worker’s wage.

Some mayors – Chicago’s Richard M. Daley, Miami’s Manny Diaz and Savannah’s Otis Johnson – have launched ambitious outreach efforts to extend the program to the many eligible low-income workers who fail to apply.

Through his analysis of workforce and employment issues, and the exportation of outsourcing to foreign countries, and the need for effective job training programs, Shipler achieves his mission of helping these individuals to be seen by the rest of society.

Shipler has attempted to provide rational solutions to re-engaging the collective will to help eliminate poverty in our midst. One of his core proposals is that we should expand some demonstrated service models in untangling some problems that underlie poverty. He advocates a “holistic approach” that encourages personal responsibility through properly supported public and private programs as the only one that makes sense.

The author’s efforts to give us a roadmap for solutions may be incomplete, but in a concise manner, lets us know that we can reshape the institutions of government, business and charity to fashion a national response to help the invisible poor among us.

At the recently concluded January 74th Annual Meeting of the Conference of Mayors in Washington (DC), the new Conference Task Force on Poverty and Opportunity met for the first time. The Task Force Chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and other mayors such as Daley, and those present, will be united to develop effective solutions in the coming months to address poverty in our midst.

Shipler’s book may provide an invaluable resource and an excellent beginning point for that journey.

In the 1960’s, Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” stirred the American conscience and laid the groundwork for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on poverty.” Shipler’s book, well written, researched and documented, may be the bible for a renewed effort to help the less fortunate.