Newt Was Solid On The Poor

A few points regarding your Dec 8 editorial "Newt's Proposal", wherein the Chronicle lambastes Newt Gingrich for proposing that poor children as young as nine be allowed to work.  First, what's wrong with that?  I had my first job delivering papers at age nine, and did yard work year-round starting at age six.  I made money, learned how to work and have benefited from that experience my entire life, just as Newt suggests poor children would.

My second point is that the statistics you cite from Charlie Blow of the New York Post to refute Gingrich's claim that our poorest children "have no habits of working and have no one around them who works" defy not just common sense, but readily available government statistics.  Counter to Blow's astonishing claim that "three quarters of poor adults.....work", the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the civilian labor force participation rate currently stands at 64 percent.  It defies common sense that the poor would show greater employment rates than the general population.

Blow further explodes his own credibility when he states that "among children in extreme poverty, nearly one in three lives with at least one working parent".  That reference to "nearly" is too clever by half, since HHS statistics show that ONLY one in three children in extreme poverty lives with a working parent.

The real statistics that Blow manipulates don't prove Gingrich's opinion that a lack of role models leads to a life of unemployment and crime, but they do validate his premise that the vast majority of poor children lack sufficient role models.  The coincidence of the expansion of our welfare state and the destruction of the two-parent family amongst black folk is proof of that.

Finally, the Chronicle does its readers no favor by misrepresenting Gingrich's suggestion that children as young nine be encouraged to work.  There was nothing mandatory about his proposal, nor was he proposing that they be underpaid or abused.  You can fault him for some hyperbole, but his argument is essentially sound.  The Chronicle does little to advance the debate by demonizing everything he says on

the matter.

Pete Smith