Poverty

Without a ride to work, it would have been a lot more difficult for Ronika Ford to get her first part-time job working at the Arlington Echo Outdoor Educational Center a few miles from her Annapolis home. Ford, 18, worked for two summers mulching trails and testing water quality in the West River as part of a youth summer jobs program at the Anne Arundel County Community Action Agency. She didn't have a car, but the program provided training, transportation to and from the work site and free lunches — offerings that Ford said were essential to her success at the Millersville job. Officials at the agency, which has traditionally relied on government funding, have grown concerned over the past few years about their ability to maintain that range of services.

Here's the biggest reason Baltimore's property tax rate is the highest in the state and twice that of the surrounding counties: We have most of the region's poor people. About one in four Baltimore residents is officially poor, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. From 2006 through 2009, Baltimore's poverty rate was around 20 percent. But the Census Bureau's survey for 2010 put the rate at 25.6 percent. And that being 15 percentage points higher than the poverty rate for Maryland, and poverty being related to a thorny array of other problems, it follows that taxes would be higher in Baltimore.

An optimist might want to raise a glass as 2011 winds down. U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by New Year's Eve. The global AIDS pandemic is ebbing. And the U.S. unemployment rate dropped by nearly half a percent in November. But an optimist would have to totally ignore one really important number to maintain the cheer. That number is 11. It was tossed out by scientists and economists at the international climate talks that just ended in Durban, South Africa. If we human beings continue to torch fossil fuels - oil, coal, natural gas - without any serious limitations in the next few decades, our planet could warm a full 11 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.

Well, it wasn't exactly something out of "Les Miserables," was it? When police in riot gear finally moved on Occupy Baltimore early Tuesday, there were no barricades, no gunfire and not even an arrest. No one singing, "One day more. " The men and women of Occupy Bmore folded tents and left the area peacefully, and the city was spared a riot. Ever since Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake issued her cryptic "time of our choosing" warning that the occupation of McKeldin Square would one day end, we've been waiting for the other shoe to drop and wondering if it would be a boot.

Newt Gingrich wants to pay poor kids to clean toilets. And all of the right people are horrified. The Nation says Mr. Gingrich is running on "a platform that seems to have been written by the unreformed Ebenezer Scrooge. " The editors of the Newark Star-Ledger proclaim Mr. Gingrich wants to "bring back the days of Oliver Twist. " The host of "Meet the Press," David Gregory, suggests Mr. Gingrich's take on the inner-city poor is a "grotesque distortion. " This controversy started last month at Harvard, when Mr. Gingrich suggested in a speech that perhaps the best way to break the cycle of poverty in inner cities is to break the culture of poverty that sustains it by, among other things, paying kids to do janitorial work.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and other members of the congressional "supercommittee" created by this summer's federal deficit ceiling law are charged with making a plan to reduce the federal budget deficit. That's a daunting task. But as new Census Bureau data shows, kids in Mr. Van Hollen's 8th District and in Maryland as a whole face an even more daunting one: staying afloat as more and more of them sink into poverty. First Focus, a national bipartisan children's advocacy organization, has crunched the numbers, and the Census figures show that an alarming 16,000 children in Mr. Van Hollen's district lived in poverty in 2010.

The persistence of poverty in Baltimore is disturbing. It is even more so when one looks deeper into the official data. The 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) estimates that 25.6 percent of Baltimore's population "for whom poverty status is determined" (602,129 people) are in poverty, as measured by pre-tax income relative to the poverty threshold used by the U.S. Census Bureau. For example, if a two-person family's pre-tax money income is less than $14,218, it is considered poor; the corresponding figure for a family of four is $22,314.

When I learned that single motherhood was the lowest rung of the prosperity ladder 40 years ago, I asked myself, "Why would I choose that?" Is that still the problem today? Where are the fathers? Where are the husbands? Must fathers live apart from mothers and children so that the government at all levels can give them money? Is it working? Are Baltimore, Maryland, and the federal government proving themselves good parents? Can we reverse this? Are kids so accustomed to having government buy food and shelter that they only have to pay for iPhones?

Maybe in the larger scheme of things, this is small stuff. But on a day gloomy with bad weather and worse news, I was happy to learn that a Baltimore preschool for homeless children won't be homeless itself after all. I'd written about The Ark this summer, at a time when it was desperate to find another home because its downtown building was being sold. Something about a preschool for homeless kids being booted out into the street just gnawed at me — and apparently others. "All I did was pick up the phone and call a number of folks who I thought might care," said Mark Furst.

About one in four Baltimore residents is living in poverty, a one-year increase of more than 20 percent, according to estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Although the recession officially ended in June 2009, a federal survey conducted last year shows that the downturn's enduring effects have led poverty rates to skyrocket over a short period. The uptick is straining government and charitable resources and leaving Baltimore leaders scrambling for solutions. "People who were managing have now dropped into poverty," said Susan J. Roll, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work.