[Mb-civic] That Was a Short War on Poverty - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

That Was a Short War on Poverty

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, October 14, 2005; Page A19

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 the 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 is now considering 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 antipoverty 
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 those 
in poverty rose by 4.1 million.

Or consider that a 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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/13/AR2005101301408.html
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