The Politics of Poverty

Mona Charen wrote a convincing article for National Review Online last week on the political upside for Republicans to talking about poverty.  Of course, she's a conservative who believes conservatives have the right answers on poverty, but the unique insight here is on the politics of the issue.  Her conclusion:

[Paul] Ryan is right to see an opportunity for Republicans in talking about poverty. It might improve the Republican brand in the eyes of all voters. It opens a door to talk about the best anti-poverty program — economic growth, which has been conspicuously absent under Obama. It also highlights a fact the Democrats want to bury: All Americans are poorer as a result of Obama’s policies, but the poor are hit hardest.

The article begins and ends with references to Paul Ryan, seemingly the conservative standard-bearer on poverty (and a lot of other issues) right now.  I wrote about his attention to the issue in my first post on this blog.

What I think Charen hints at, but doesn't spend enough time on (perhaps because of space constraints), is that Republicans can use the issue of poverty to win votes, even if they don't win the votes of the poor.  It's going to take an awful lot of work before we change our culture and educate voters to the extent that the poor will vote against hand-outs in favor of economic growth (and the socio-economic mobility and opportunity that come with growth).  I think it will take a lot less work to change the attitudes of voters in other classes when it comes to anti-poverty policies.

My sense is that there are many upper- and middle-class voters who vote against Republicans because they feel charitable toward the poor when they vote for Democrats.  For some, there's a genuine belief that Democrat policies are better for the poor, and that group is going to be difficult to persuade otherwise.  For others, however, there's an uneasiness with Democrat policies (especially no-strings-attached hand-outs), but a greater uneasiness with perceived Republican indifference or hostility to the poor.  These voters can be swayed.  Just talking about poverty would peel off some of the votes Democrats typically receive by swing voters concerned about the poor.  Indeed, I think a sustained push by Republicans just to talk about poverty would astonish a lot of these voters - in a very positive way!  Talking about it persuasively - that is, making the case that Republican policies increase upward mobility and provide a path out of poverty, instead of mere hand-outs - would certainly peel off even more voters.

Conservatives should fight the good fight on poverty because it is a good fight, not because it is a political winner.  But I do believe it is a political winner, and for better or worse, only that argument can convince Republican politicians to talk about it.  So, we should make it.

Incidentally, Charen wrote a book about 10 years ago that struck a chord with me by synthesizing and articulating some ideas that only had been rattling around in my head in my younger years.  Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help provides example after example of the ways in which liberal policies purportedly (often genuinely) designed to help the poor instead have the opposite effect.  That's certainly one of the insights I hope to explore in this blog.  Kudos to Charen for keeping up the good work.

Kudos to the President

Today, President Obama hosted the Miami Heat in the White House, in celebration of their 2012 NBA Championship.  He did something I have faulted him for not doing - highlighting the impact a good father can make, particularly in the black community.  The President did not belabor the point, nor did he make it an explicitly racial or socioeconomic issue, and given the setting, his approach was entirely appropriate.  Still, the implication was clear, in view of the NBA's dominance by young black men and the somewhat checkered history of NBA players with fatherhood. 

I hope this is just the start of the President's efforts to raise awareness of the issue.  His comments today, alone, might not do much.  With some repetition, he might develop some momentum for the issue.  As I've written before, he is uniquely positioned to do this.

Here's the story.

What It Means to be Poor

From time to time, I've had occasion to take the Market-Frankford "El" (an elevated train line in Philadelphia) from Center City to the line's final destination in West Philadelphia - 69th Street Station.  The El runs through some of the poorer neighborhoods in Philadelphia on that ride, and I've noted the mini-satellite dishes (undoubtedly for Direct TV or Dish Network) that pepper the roofs of row homes visible from the train.  They're all over the place out there.  I'm not foolish enough to think that means the occupants of those homes are rich or even comfortable, and I certainly don't begrudge anyone their dishes.  But it has made me wonder about what it means to be poor in the 21st century.  If even the poor can afford satellite TV, poverty can't be quite as uncomfortable as it was 50 or 100 years ago.

I've had similar thoughts about food, and clearly I'm not alone here.  Repeated surveys and studies make clear that poor people are more likely to be overweight than those in other economic classes.  Again, that doesn't mean it's good or easy to be poor; indeed, the limited food choices faced by the poor seem to contribute to this problem.  But, poverty used to imply struggling to "put food on the table."  Now, things seem different.

One of my favorite bloggers, Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, posted yesterday on a new study suggesting that we may be winning the war on poverty, at least more than we think:

[M]oving from traditional income-based measures of poverty to a consumption-based measure (which is arguably superior on both theoretical and practical grounds) and, crucially, accounting for bias in the cost of living adjustment leads to the conclusion that the poverty rate declined by more than 25 percentage points between 1960 and 2010, with 8.5 percentage points of that decline occurring since 1980.

Pethokoukis explores the work of Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan more than I will here.  The gist is that the poorest among us are living at a higher standard than income-based measures might suggest, at least in part because of the impact of tax subsidies and transfer payments.

The work of Meyer and Sullivan makes a point different from the one I drive at above, but I think the questions they seek to answer are similar to mine.  While the typical government/academic approach is to focus on wealth inequality and an arbitrary "poverty level," it might be more helpful to understand how the poor actually live, how that might be changing, and to what end government policy should try to improve their condition.  To the extent poverty in 2013 presents challenges different from those faced by the poor of 1963, we should acknowledge and address that - even if it means some uncomfortable discussions and some changes in approach.  That's tougher work for bureaucrats, but I can't say that angle concerns me much.

Fatherlessness and Guns

This blog isn't going to focus on gun violence and gun laws.  Still, it's the public policy topic of the day, it's related to poverty to some degree, and there's a powerful new column on the relationship of gun violence and one of the themes of this blog to date - fatherlessness.  The column is by Lee Habeeb on National Review Online.  A few excerpts:

As we continue to hear calls for ever-tightening gun laws from the Obama administration, and from states such as New York, it is worth thinking about those headlines in Chicago. And in inner cities all around America, places where strict gun laws are already in place. Places where the weapon of choice isn’t an AR-15 but a semiautomatic handgun — the same kind of weapon most Americans use reasonably, and safely, to secure their most precious assets: their loved ones and their property.

***

In Chicago, it’s Newtown every month. But the media haven’t converged on Chicago this month.

You don’t know the names of those kids and adults gunned down in Chicago this January, all by handguns. But the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye website tracks the Chicago body count since January 1: Gregory Bady, 28; Damian Barnes, 22; Marcus Wallace, 23; Tyrone Soleberry, 39; Brian Cross, 34; John Taylor, 23; Darville Brown, 24; Tyshawn Blanton, 31; Marcus Turner, 19; Lavonshay Cooper, 22; David Bartzmark, 25; Michael Kozel, 57; Ulysses Gissendanner, 19; Kevin Jemison, 29; Myron Brown, 30; Devanta Grisson, 19; Octavius Lamb, 20.

***

You don’t know their names because the real racism that exists in the media is this: A young black male’s life is not worth reporting when it is taken by another black male.

***

You don’t know the names because the media don’t or can’t blame the deaths in Chicago on a weapon like the AR-15, or on the NRA.

You don’t know their names because the media aren’t interested in getting at the real cause of much of the senseless gun violence in America: fatherlessness.

About 20,000 people live in my hometown of Oxford, Miss., and there are probably twice as many guns. Folks own handguns, shotguns, rifles, and all kinds of weapons I’ve never even heard of. But I can’t remember the last murder story in the local paper.

That’s because my town has lots of guns, but lots of fathers, too.

Chicago doesn’t have a gun problem; it has a father problem.

Gun control isn’t the problem on Chicago’s streets; self-control is.

When young men don’t have fathers, they don’t learn to control their masculine impulses. They don’t have fathers to teach them how to channel their masculine impulses in productive ways.

***

So why don’t the media focus on the epidemic of fatherlessness in our inner cities and on the tragic consequences for boys? The mostly white liberal editors and gatekeepers of the mainstream media would never admit that liberal policies of the 1960s have had disastrous consequences. They won’t admit that government can’t replace the essential role that marriage and family plays in raising, disciplining, and loving children.

The gun control measures proposed by President Obama yesterday don't seem likely to prevent another Newtown.  I'm mildly in favor of additional regulation on the process for obtaining guns and additional restrictions on the kinds of guns that individuals may own (on the grounds that most such laws won't do any harm and won't inhibit the ability of law-abiding individuals to protect themselves), but I'm largely pessimistic these laws will do much to protect mass shootings - or even the violence Habeeb describes as sadly unexceptional in Chicago. 

On the other hand, who seriously can doubt that more fathers in the homes of poor children would reduce some of the gun violence we see in our innercities?  Too uncomfortable to discuss, though, apparently.

Yesterday was another opportunity for President Obama to speak out on the issue of fatherlessness - another opportunity missed.

A Conservative(?) for the Welfare State

A blog called "Conservatives on Poverty" wouldn't be worth its salt if it didn't acknowledge a blog post on the New York Times website called "A Conservative Case for the Welfare State."  So here I go.  It's an interesting post - albeit not one I find particularly persuasive or "conservative."

I'd prefer in this blog not to spend too much time questioning motives or backgrounds.  I'd rather focus on the merit of the ideas I explore.  But I'd probably be remiss if I didn't mention, in the course of discussing a "conservative case" for something, that the author isn't necessarily a conservative.  There's no question Bartlett once was.  He was an advisor to Congressmen Paul and Kemp, and he worked in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses.  Sometime in the early 2000s, though, Bartlett and mainstream conservatism seemed to part ways.  He wrote a book in which he criticized the Bush II Administration from a variety of angles, including some I find very persuasive (particularly on spending).  Since then, he has enjoyed some measure of popularity on the left as a conservative critic of the right.  He has advocated a value-added tax and Keynesian stimulus.  Bartlett's own story of his political journey was presented recently in his article in the American Conservative.

Again, the point of this isn't whether Bartlett is generally right or wrong, wise or unwise.  But I think it's worth noting, in the context of his "conservative case," that he may not really be a conservative anymore.

Back to Bartlett's post.  He makes several arguments for why conservatives should embrace a European-style welfare state:

• It "shaves off the rough edges of capitalism and makes it sustainable," producing greater social harmony.
• There is no empirical support for the American conservative perspective that the welfare state diminishes happiness.
• There is empirical support for the efficiency of a "properly run" welfare state - i.e., one in which benefits are nearly universal - because the bureaucracy needed to determine qualification questons and the incentive against work (arising from benefit phase-outs) are both eliminated.
• When tax expenditures are included in surveys of net social spending, the American system is actually no more efficient than the European system.

I happened to read Bartlett's post on the same day I read Yuval Levin's analysis of the fiscal cliff deal on the Corner over at National Review Online.  Levin makes a powerful case that, whatever merits our entitlement system might have, it is fiscally unsustainable in its current state.  I found Bartlett's arguments either to ignore or to gloss over the sustainability point.  (Or maybe he is leaving them for another day.)  I suppose he might say that the greater efficiency of a "properly run" welfare state would bring spending way down toward tax revenues.  From his earlier writings on the VAT, I suppose he might say he could bring revenues way up toward spending levels (after his efficiencies have been achieved).  I'd like to see the math that brings those levels close enough to be sustainable.  I'd also like to see a projection as to what higher taxation and more universal benefits would do to national economic growth. 

Color me skeptical.  One of my key objections to the welfare state is that it seems impossible to maintain projected benefit levels, increase taxation sufficient to support such benefits, and preserve economic freedom, growth, and prosperity.  Bartlett doesn't convince me otherwise.  (I have a number of other reservations, particularly on the welfare state and true happiness, but Levin's post has me focused on fiscal sustainability.)

Still, it's a worthwhile contribution to the discussion.  Conservatives might argue for an alternative to the welfare state.  As long as we have one, or if we're destined to have one forever, it's worth considering Bartlett's points on bloat and efficiency, if nothing else.