We Must Wage A New War On Poverty

Thirty-two years ago this week, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a War on Poverty. But in the last several months, We the People seem to have declared that war unwinnable, the Republicans in the House seem to have declared it unnecessary and the Democrats just say, “Well, I declare.”

It’s a shame. A noble idea - that the time had come when Americans as a community could whip the poverty that always had been with us - got lost in translation. Because some programs really didn’t work, because others were not well-managed and, as much as anything, because a majority of Americans just got tired of paying for it, the underlying idea itself is in danger.

Poverty wins by default.

And no one seems to be pointing out that if the American economy ever had indicated that it was capable of providing a good living for everyone, we wouldn’t have heard about poverty in the first place.

In Washington these days, politicians are arguing about who will deliver the funeral oration for a caring society.

The question is not how to get the federal government “off people’s backs” or “out of people’s lives” or “its hands out of our pockets.” Rather, the question is whether to go back to the 1880s or, at best, the 1920s, when government at all levels was indeed much smaller and taxes were much lower and so many people were poor (by modern American standards) that they made up a large majority and thus were given a measure of respect by those who weren’t poor. They weren’t given much help (and since most of them lived closer to the land, they needed less help to survive), but as long as they didn’t ask for anything, they were called “poor but honest” or “salt of the earth.”

Economist Robert Samuelson, in a new book and in a Jan. 8 Newsweek magazine essay, puts the blame for what ails us today on overly high expectations and the rise of a feeling of entitlement since World War II.

He has a point. It is no wonder that expectations rose and Americans felt entitled - for a time, America stood astride the Earth like a colossus. All systems were “go”; the engine of American economic well-being seemed to have a green light all the way down the track. And it seemed fitting that government should provide a safety net.

History, of course, would tell us that we were in an artificial wartime boom economy for 50 years (1940-1990). Now, the crunch has come, and as we head for the lifeboats, we tend to holler, “Every man for his own self!”

That - not budget-balancing - is the proper war cry for the House. There are many ways to get to a balanced federal budget if that really is the objective. Pretending that cyberspace eliminates need or that if the poor really do exist, it’s their own fault is altogether different from balancing the budget.

And what of the good old pre-Roosevelt days to which Chairman Newt Gingrich would have us return?

Well, much of the nation was in a depression before the 1929 market crash, but even poor folks raised some beans or turnips or chickens or something. Only in the cities, where more than half the population was only a missed paycheck away from begging on the streets, was much assistance needed.

In America, we should do better than that.

Now, most of us, Republicans and Democrats, have it pretty good and seem willing to disbelieve what our eyes tell us - that millions of our fellow citizens still need our corporate help, for their sake and ours.

Those millions are being left behind, written off, told to take jobs or else. Ah, if only the jobs were available and they were qualified. At this rate, they will be a drain on our resources whatever ideology we follow.

Expectations? Those millions have seen the good life (on television), they have been promised it (by Madison Avenue, not Pennsylvania Avenue) and we all will be dangerously ill-served if they now are walled off from the good life in the name of a balanced budget or low taxes or whatever.

We need a real war against poverty and ignorance and hopelessness even as we balance the budget.

All it requires is recognition that government - which is all of us - has a responsibility and a need to help the least of us.

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