Something curious has happened to President Bush. On his way to expanding the federal government at historic rates (including unprecedented domestic spending), he has been called uncompassionate. On his way to placing more minorities into the highest positions of government than any other president in history, he has been called a racist. Now, on his way to endorsing record relief funding for the Gulf Coast, Bush has again been accused of turning his back on blacks and the poor.
Indeed, as the rhetoric and blame continue to accumulate in the light of Hurricane Katrina, the fundamental responsibility of government is once more being debated. But while staggering amounts of federal money will be spent for Gulf Coast reconstruction, conservative economic policies are not obsolete.
On the contrary, as we rebuild those areas, we should be mindful that decades of local liberal Democrat administrations have only failed inner cities and perpetuated the state of poverty that has been so grotesquely on display in the hurricane’s aftermath.
Forty years after a “war on poverty” was declared in America, we find ourselves in a quantitative quagmire (to use one of the Democrats’ favorite wartime catch phrases). Too often, elected officials have turned to tried-and-failed spending regimes instead of addressing the core societal illnesses that keep people in poverty.
Statistically speaking, one needs only to follow a few simple rules to avoid poverty: Graduate from high school, don’t commit a crime, don’t get married as a teenager and don’t have a baby before marriage.
Notice three out of four of those rules are completely free of any government role. As for the other, blind spending has not shown to help educational shortcomings either. Here in Washington, for example, per-pupil spending rates are among the highest in the country, yet students are still failing at alarming rates.
To quell the underlying fuel of poverty, policy must break the dependence on others to do what you should do for yourself. It must encourage personal responsibility and, more importantly, the importance of the family structure over the welfare structure.
The welfare reform pushed by a revolutionary Republican congress and signed by President Clinton in 1996 went a long way toward correcting some of the gaping shortcomings of the American welfare state. But curiously, Clinton was never accused of not caring for the poor when he declared, “The era of big government is over,” in his State of the Union address that year.
These days, it’s not fashionable to talk about the nuclear family in liberal circles, but one cannot ignore the enormous advantage a solid family brings one’s chances for success in America. After examining 23 peer-reviewed studies on this topic, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy concluded “that young adults and teens raised in single-parent homes are more likely to commit crimes, and that communities with high rates of family fragmentation (especially unwed childbearing) suffer higher crime rates as a result.”
When the government fails to help us out of hardship, we cannot rely on further bureaucracy to improve anything. Instead, it is times like these, columnist Thomas Sowell argues, “where the great moral traditions of a society come in – those moral traditions that it is so hip to sneer at, so cute to violate, and that our very schools undermine among the young, telling them they have to evolve their own standards, rather than following what old fuddy duddies like their parents tell them.”
So with all the finger-pointing and partisan campaigning aside, we need to understand sometimes bad things happen and government is not, has not and will never be the perfect or even efficient solution. As Sowell puts it, “Government cannot solve all our problems, even in normal times, much less during a catastrophe of nature that reminds man how little he is, despite all his big talk.”
CLARIFICATION: Because of an editor and columnist’s error, this column “The war on poverty quagmire” was unclear in explaining where information for one paragraph came from.
The paragraph that said there are a few simple rules to avoid poverty, including “graduate from high school, don’t commit a crime, don’t get married as a teenager and don’t have a baby before marriage,” should have made clear that rules such as those have previously been cited in other publications by other columnists and sociologists.
Troy Sookdeo is an aerospace engineering graduate student. He can be reached at troy@umd.edu.
