It is never easy to be poor. The history of poor people in this country has been one long fight for even the smallest alleviation of hardship. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the uprisings of labor unions and unemployed people's organizations finally became enough of a threat to the capitalist system to make Franklin Roosevelt realize that saving the system necessitated reforms. The result was legislation establishing a minimum wage, Social Security, unemployment insurance, relief payments for those unable to work, and guaranteeing the right to form unions.
Similarly, the black civil rights movement and related poor people's movements of the 1960s forced Lyndon Johnson to institute his Great Society programs, including food stamps, legal services, Head Start, free school lunches, and a variety of others that were supposed to give low-income people the tools to help themselves.
Now Ronald Reagan has declared "A New Beginning for America," and all the small gains that poor people have organized, lobbied, marched, gone to jail, and even died for in this century are under attack. The Reagan budget for 1982 is not a well-meaning attempt to cut back government waste in order to get the economy back on its feet. It is a coldly calculated offensive aimed at wiping out the notion that people have a basic human right to a minimally decent standard of living. It is an ideologically motivated and premeditated assault on the poor.
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