There is likely to be a lot of talk about poverty in America in the 2008 presidential race, and not just because the former senator from North Carolina regularly sallies forth from his 28,000-square-foot mansion to lecture the rest of us for perpetuating the “two Americas” he sees out on the campaign trail.
Democrats in Congress are hell-bent to use the State Children’s Health Insurance Program as a wedge for an unprecedented expansion of government-run health care, beginning with the uninsured poor, and to vastly increase federal spending on domestic social services programs. So we are guaranteed to be hearing a lot about poverty in coming months.
One thing we probably won’t hear much of in this regard, however, is what the government can and should be doing to encourage the two most effective antidotes to poverty: work and marriage. Many government programs do little if anything to encourage the poor to get and keep jobs or to encourage fathers to marry and support the mothers of their children. Too often, government programs are actually hostile to these core values of building successful families and communities.
The data here are rather startling. As The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson point out, the typical poor family works only 800 hours per year. Just by expanding the hours worked to the full year of 2,000 hours — that’s one adult working 40 hours a week — Rector and Johnson estimate that three of every four children officially classified as in poverty would be lifted out of that status.
Similarly, based on Census Bureau and other federal data, the scholars at the conservative think tank estimate that if marriage became the norm among poor couples rather than absent fathers, two-thirds of the children in these communities would be lifted out of poverty.
It would be refreshing to hear all the presidential candidates in both parties address these facts. The road out of poverty has been the less traveled one for most government programs since the Great Society. As Rector and Johnson observe: “While work and marriage are steady ladders out of poverty, the welfare system perversely remains hostile to both. Major programs such as food stamps, public housing, and Medicaid continue to reward idleness and penalize marriage. If welfare could be turned around to encourage work and marriage, remaining poverty would drop quickly.”
We will listen closely to the candidates on this issue in the months ahead in the hope of hearing some genuinely new ideas rather than more of the same tired War on Poverty-inspired nostrums.
