Framing Poverty

The New York Times has an odd story today about how liberals are losing momentum in the debate about poverty that Hurricane Katrina helped revive. While I believe that conclusion is justified, writer Jason DeParle allows conservatives to frame the issue on their terms and assume something which really needs to be proven: that federal anti-poverty programs are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

"This is not the time to expand the programs that were failing anyway," said Stuart M. Butler, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research and advocacy group influential on Capitol Hill.

While the right has proposed alternatives including tax-free zones for businesses and school vouchers for students, Mr. Butler said, "the left has just talked up the old paradigm: 'let's expand what's failed before.'"

[…] "What we've done for the poor hasn't worked," said Robert L. Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a conservative policy group. "People are going to say, 'How did these people get into this circumstance in the first place?' It gives us an opportunity to really turn over a new leaf."

Nowhere in this article is this assumption challenged, and it's an important one. If everyone believed that the current system was fatally flawed, then there really would be no alternative but to come up with an different set of policies. But a lot of liberals (including this one) don't believe that. In fact, the Democrats' War on Poverty was a huge success:

When Johnson left office, the official poverty rate had fallen from 22 percent in 1960 to 13 percent - which is where the poverty rate remains today. AFDC payments had risen to $577 (in 1980 dollars). Infant mortality among the poor, which had barely declined between 1950 and 1965, fell by one-third in the decade after 1965 as a result of the expansion of federal medical and nutritional programs. Before the implementation of Medicaid and Medicare, 20 percent of the poor had never been examined by a physician; when Johnson retired as president the figure had been cut to 8 percent. The proportion of families living in substandard housing—that is, housing lacking indoor plumbing - also declined steeply, from 20 percent in 1960 to 11 percent a decade later.

But then along came Reagan, who cut a lot of these programs to the bone, and thus ended any serious attempt by the federal government to alleviate poverty on a large scale. Yet conservatives continue to point to the programs they eviscerated as proof that the programs themselves can't work. And now, because of their deficit, their tax cuts, and their lack of natural disaster readiness, they want to cut even more from the programs that work, and invest more in the programs that don't do a damn thing (tax cuts, enterprise zones, etc.).

And yet, despite the fact that conservatives have been singing this same tired song for years, DeParle somehow decides that they are the ones who get to self-identify as the new-leaf-turner-overs while portraying the liberals as a bunch of tired do-nothings. Which is why this story is, to put it mildly, odd.