October 14, 2005
Is the Post-Katrina War on Poverty Already Over?
By E.
J. Dionne Jr.
WASHINGTON
-- It has long been said that Americans have short attention spans,
but this is ridiculous: Our bold, urgent, far reaching, post-Katrina
war on poverty lasted maybe a month.
Credit for
our ability to reach rapid closure on the poverty issue goes first
to a group of congressional conservatives who seized the post-Katrina
initiative before advocates of poverty reduction could get their
plans off the ground.
As soon
as President Bush announced his first spending package for reconstructing
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the Republican Study Committee
and other conservatives switched the subject from poverty reduction
to how Katrina reconstruction plans might increase the deficit
that their own tax cutting policies helped create.
Unwilling
to freeze any of those tax cuts, these conservatives proposed
cutting other spending to offset Katrina costs. The headlines
focused on the seemingly easy calls on pork-barrel spending. But
some of their biggest cuts were in health care programs, including
Medicaid, and other spending for the poor.
Thus, the
budget Congress would cut spending by $35 billion and cut taxes
by $70 billion. Excuse me, but doesn't this increase
the deficit by a net of $35 billion?
Don't worry,
said Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, one of the leading House conservatives.
Cutting taxes for the rich is the best anti-poverty program. ``I'm
mindful of what a pipe fitter once said to President Reagan,''
Pence said, according to The New York Times. ```I've
never been hired by a poor man.' A growing economy is in the interest
of every working American, regardless of their income.''
In other
words, the conservatives have moved the conversation to ideas
that go back to Calvin Coolidge's low-tax economics from the 1920s.
And they say liberals are the folks with the ``old'' ideas?
If it didn't
matter, I'd be inclined to salute the agenda-setting genius of
the right wing. But since we need a national conversation on poverty,
it's worth considering that conservatives were successful in pushing
it back in part because of weaknesses on the liberal side.
Right out
of the box, conservatives started blaming the persistent poverty
unearthed by Katrina on the failure of ``liberal programs.'' If
there was a liberal retort, it didn't get much coverage in the
supposedly liberal media.
It's conservatives,
after all, who spent almost a decade touting the genius of the
1996 welfare reform and claiming that because so many people had
been driven off the welfare rolls, poverty was no longer a problem.
Yes, welfare
reform worked better than some of us expected in the 1990s. But
Katrina underscored the limits of welfare reform by showing how
many people had been left behind. It also brought home the failure
of conservative economics. The Clinton economy -- bolstered by
balanced budgets, tax increases on the rich, and the expansion
of innovative programs such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and
health coverage for the poor -- cut the number of poor people
by 7.7 million between 1993 and 2000. Between 2001 and 2004, on
the other hand, the number of poor rose by 4.1 million.
Or consider
that the recent Census Bureau report found that the percentage
of Americans getting private job-based health insurance fell from
63.6 percent in 2000 to 59.8 percent in 2004. What held down the
number of Americans without insurance altogether? The proportion
insured under government programs -- Medicaid and the State Children's
Health Insurance Program -- rose from 10.6 percent in 2000 to
12.9 percent in 2004. A time when more Americans than ever need
government-provided health insurance is when we should expand
government assistance for health care, not cut it back. It's also
a good time for raising the minimum wage and increasing the help
the Earned Income Tax Credit offers the working poor.
But liberals
also need to seize the initiative by speaking candidly and not
defensively about the social causes of poverty. These include
family breakdown and the heavy concentration of very poor people
in a small number of neighborhoods in our big cities. Just because
some conservatives are tempted, wrongly, to blame all
poverty on problems in the family doesn't mean that liberals should
shy away from talking about the difficulties faced by children
in fatherless homes.
I was naive
enough to hope that after Katrina, the left and the right might
have useful things to say to each other about how to help the
poorest among us. I guess we've moved on. You can lay a lot of
the blame for this indifference on conservatives. But it will
be a default on the part of liberals if the poor disappear again
from public view without a fight.
©
2005, Washington Post Writers Group
