(A Twisted) War on Poverty

Matthew Yglesias in the American Prospect steps back from the hand-wringing over the images of the underclass affected by Hurricane Katrina and provides some background on where we've now found ourselves face to face with John Edwards' Two Americas. First, taking BushCo to task:

It started with housing assistance, primarily a concern in big cities from which virtually no Republican legislators hail. Next on the chopping block was heating assistance, vital in the northern parts of the country but easily neglected by the GOP's Sun Belt leadership. Then came food stamps, cut as part of perhaps the cruelest of many farces initiated by 21st-century conservatism. The White House called for cuts in farm subsidies -- a good idea for which the right-wing press hailed Bush as a hero of both policy substance and political courage. Then, as had apparently been the plan all along, the congressional budgeters left farm subsidies where they were and cut the agriculture budget instead by quite literally taking food out of the mouths of poor children. Neither the White House nor the legions who praised its courage in taking on the farm lobby issued a word of dissent or disgruntlement. Most recently, Medicaid has come under attack -- because if poor people aren't going to have houses to live in, the ability to stay warm in the winter, or food for their kids, it hardly seems worthwhile to give them medicine, either. There is, of course, more to fighting poverty than anti-poverty spending. Work and wages are crucial. And throughout four years of lousy labor-market performance, touted consistently by the right as some kind of boom, wages have stagnated and the poverty rate has risen in each and every year. Having attracted praise in 2000 for attacking congressional GOP efforts to cut the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) -- a key program helping the working poor -- Bush proceeded to do the same thing by stealth. The IRS has redirected its efforts away from catching rich people who cheat on their taxes to denying on technicalities EITC benefits for poor workers who have trouble navigating the complicated thicket of paperwork the program requires.

But really, everyone's got their hands in the pie of this one:

In a more perfect world, these might be the kinds of things the leaders of the Democratic Party complained about loudly and often. The reality is rather different. Throughout the 1980s, anti-poverty efforts were, thanks to the unpopularity of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, an albatross around the neck of liberalism. Bill Clinton succeeded in lancing the political boil by signing the 1996 welfare-reform bill, which even did some substantive good, but with the issue out of the public spotlight, Democrats have preferred to leave it there.

He ends thusly:

National Review Editor Rich Lowry concluded a recent column thusly: If the tableaux of suffering in the city prompts meaningful soul-searching, perhaps there can be a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right’s support for more urban spending (anything is worth addressing the problem of fatherlessness). I have, honestly, no idea what he has in mind. But I'd be willing to listen. Spending money isn't all there is to be said about poverty, but, when well designed, it's part of the solution, and the amount of money in question is very small compared with the wealth of the nation, or the budget of the government. Family structure matters a great deal, too, if you can think of something workable to effect it. Compassionate conservatism is, at the end of the day, a good idea. If Bush wants to atone for his many hurricane-related sins, he'll consider picking up where Lowry left off.

I don't see much compassion leaking out of BushCo. I believe that people can change. I've done a lot of changing in my own lifetime when I've needed to make adjustments, but you have to work at it. I really don't see BushCo putting in the hard work.