By Mona Charen
Friday, January 25, 2013
The Republican party is picking up the pieces. Speaking
of the ticket’s loss for the first time since the election, Representative Paul
Ryan noted that many voters “don’t think or know that we have good ideas” on
fighting poverty and “helping people move up the ladder of life.”
It’s not surprising that Ryan, who got his start working
for Jack Kemp and William Bennett at Empower America, sees the world this way.
Though it’s a total secret to members of the press and the Democratic party,
conservative intellectuals have been grappling with the problems of poverty in
America for several decades and have arguably advanced more reforms (including
school choice, charter schools, enterprise zones, and community policing) than
liberals have. Some of those reforms, such as those adopted by Rudolph Giuliani
in New York, profoundly improved the lives of the poor by, among other
enhancements, making their neighborhoods far safer.
Still, the popular perception of Republicans as the party
of the rich has been reinforced by the party’s opposition to tax hikes (always
characterized by the press as “even for the wealthiest”) and by the Democrats’
relentless spin. Six in ten respondents to a December Bloomberg poll said
Republicans were too concerned about protecting the rich. A McLaughlin poll
from 2011 found that 88 percent of likely voters considered a candidate’s
position on poverty to be important in determining their vote.
If Republican politicians do begin to focus more on
poverty, as Ryan recommends, they will have the field to themselves. Democrats
no longer talk about the poor.
Barack Obama began his career as a community organizer.
In 2007, he excoriated George W. Bush for failing those in “vast swaths of
rural America” and in inner cities “who cannot hire lobbyists” and “cannot
write thousand-dollar campaign checks.” The government, Senator Obama said,
“cannot guarantee success and happiness in life,” but can “ensure that every
American who wants to work is . . . able to find a job, and able to stay out of
poverty.”
The anti-poverty talk was missing from the 2012 campaign.
It was all about the middle class. Perhaps that’s because Obama’s first term
created so very much more poverty. There are more poor in America today than at
any time since the Great Depression. There were 32 million Americans collecting
food stamps in 2008. Now that figure is 47 million. Spending on food stamps
doubled between 2007 and 2011.
Unemployment remained stubbornly high throughout the
Obama first term, leading many to abandon the search for jobs altogether. In
2008, 7.2 million Americans were getting Social Security disability payments.
Today, it’s 8.7 million, an increase of 20 percent. A normal increase due to
population expansion would have been 4 percent. Obama blamed his predecessor,
but the steep decline in labor-force participation didn’t begin until six
months into Obama’s term. Forbes magazine calculates that if long-term discouraged
workers, those who’ve dropped out to collect disability payments, and those
working part time because they cannot find full-time work were counted, the
real unemployment rate would hover around 22 percent.
Median household income fell by 8 percent during the
Obama first term — since the end of the recession in 2009 it’s dropped by an
average of $3,040 per household — and income inequality grew compared with the
Bush years. For African Americans, the drop in household income was even more
dramatic — 11.1 percent.
Obama talked about the middle class in 2012 for two
reasons: 1) because his record left him vulnerable on the subject of poverty,
and 2) because Democrats believe that Americans do not like poverty programs.
“People are much less inclined to support something that goes toward a targeted
population than something that they can benefit from,” Rachel Black of the New
America Foundation told Politico. This is why Democrats fight tooth and claw to
block reforms of Medicare and Social Security that would decrease benefits or
increase taxes for wealthier recipients. They believe that the middle class
would stop supporting the programs if they were at all means-tested.
But most voters do not disapprove of TANF, Medicaid, Head
Start, and dozens of other programs aimed at the poor.
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.
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