Republican presidential candidates showcasing their anti-poverty ideas Saturday agreed on at least one thing: Their party needs to improve how it talks and listens to poor people.
In a rare, conservative-led forum focused on how to combat poverty, Republicans, including several presidential contenders, admitted they often just don’t know how to convince low-income Americans that conservative ideas can help, not hurt, them.
It’s not that the party doesn’t have great ideas about helping poor people, they insisted. It’s that most Republicans don’t value the time and effort it takes to listen to people in different income brackets.
“We need to be going into African-American churches and barrios,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is fourth on the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings, said at the South Carolina forum hosted by the Jack Kemp Foundation. “Our party has failed in going into those places because we’ve said we don’t get instant gratification back.”
“We do not do well with lower-income Americans, because they think the Republican Party doesn’t have their best interests at heart,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., who appeared before a discussion involving Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
Most policy discussions in the 2016 election season have revolved around dealing with Islamic State aggression, the Iran nuclear deal, Syrian refugees and illegal immigrants. Anti-poverty efforts have taken a backseat in the debates thus far, although the candidates have spoken broadly about how they’d reform the tax system.
But on Friday, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush became the first Republican candidate to propose a set of reforms to the U.S. welfare system. And newly-installed House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who acted as moderator at the Kemp forum, wrote in an op-ed this week that he wants to elevate the issue in the coming year.
“We’re trying to show how if you apply the principles you know to this inflexible mantra of the ‘war on poverty,’ we can make breakthroughs,” Ryan said Saturday.
Ryan, along with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, moderated three discussions with presidential candidates. The earned income tax credit, drug addiction and education were the top topics discussed.
The candidates agreed they need to do a better job on talking about poverty, but their policy approaches differed, especially when on taxes.
Both Bush and Christie championed the Earned Income Tax Credit, otherwise known as the EITC, which is a credit for low and moderate-income Americans. The credit aims to encourage them to work rather than rely solely on welfare.
After Christie touted how he helped boost the EITC in his state, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson slammed the tax credit.
Carson said it increases government bureaucracy without making the IRS code fairer. Carson wants a flat tax system, where everyone pays the same percentage, and wants to eliminate all tax credits and deductions.
“Any kind of manipulation of the tax system I just generally don’t agree with,” Carson said. “I think we need to make the earned income tax system extremely simple and extremely fair and stop having all these variations because what those things do is create need for bureaucracy.”
Carson said the next president should “educate” people on the importance of working.
Christie shot back. “A president’s rhetoric” isn’t going to cause people to get a minimum-wage job if they could collect more from welfare checks, he said.
“The EITC doesn’t create any more bureaucracy,” Christie said. “It’s already embedded in our tax code. The problem is that we have to find out a way to reverse our president’s policies that have made people more comfortable with dependence.”
Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina was scheduled to attend the forum, but her campaign she couldn’t attend due to missing a flight. Top-polling contenders Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz weren’t there either.
