Many unintended ill effects of the Affordable Care Act are unknown, but we could learn from federal antipoverty efforts. Expect a practical and moral disaster.
The name’s grandiosity, “The War on Poverty,” hardly fits a 4 percent poverty rate reduction over 49 years, especially when poverty rates had independently dropped 3 percent from three years before enactment.
Fifteen percent of Americans are officially poor, having incomes below $23,021 for a family of four.
So have those trillions of dollars - almost $575 billion this year - been wasted?
Probably not entirely.
Knowing is tough because the government doesn’t count government benefits in calculating the number of poor. This practice inflates the number who seem to live within a poverty income.
Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell provides a more realistic picture from U.S.
Census statistics, “Most Americans living below the government-set poverty line have a washer and/or a dryer, as well as a computer. More than 80 percent have air conditioning (and) both a landline and a cellphone.
Nearly all have television and a refrigerator. Most … also own a motor vehicle and have more living space than the average European - not Europeans in poverty, the average European.”
So, by possessions and living space, our poor beat Europe’s poor, despite, or because of, Europe’s welfare states being more extensive.
Before giving a tiny plus for the war, let’s consider how its practical benefits and the moral peril come together.
It is harder to escape poverty than before President Barack Obama took office and only partly because of his antigrowth economic policies.
Contrast the Reagan through Clinton years with the present. In those years a household was more likely to move from the lowest 20 percent of incomes to the highest, than to remain five years in the lowest.
That is income mobility.
Sowell points out America’s income mobility now trails some European countries.
President Bill Clinton’s reluctant acceptance of welfare reform in the late 1990s revealed the moral rot that is the welfare state.
Because of reform, some people may have been forced to find a job. But they also found dignity, a capacity to grow and a future. The poverty rate dropped by as much as 5 percent.
Even in better times, though, the welfare state itself complicates escaping poverty. The welfare state suppresses natural responses to poverty - working harder and longer with more family members, saving, getting an education, starting a business, etc.
Welfare reform freed former recipients to discover the nobility and efficacy of work. And they did.
With few now doing well in our economy and welfare reform neglected by the administration, the percentage of people in the workforce is at a 35-year low. Demoralized by long term unemployment and the shrinking availability of full-time jobs (thanks, Obamacare) and propped up by extended benefits, many have just given up.
Both Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt, architects of the American welfare state, knew the dangerous attraction of the “dole” and warned against it.
Government handouts create a feeling one’s fate is in the hands of others, an assumption that government, not family (especially not fathers), will provide and a sense of entitlement from faceless government rather than a sense of gratitude and responsibility toward a person or church or organization that has helped.
Poverty is perpetuated not only by supposedly practical federal housing projects like Chicago’s Cabrini-Green (demolished in 2011), but by a system that entices the poor to trade personal control and responsibility for material adequacy and soul destroying dependency.
The recipient soon finds the safety net a sticky web. Take a low-paying job commensurate with his skills or report income from the underground economy or marry the father of her child, and the government’s goodies go away. As Sowell asks the middle class, “If increasing your income by $10,000 would cause you to lose $15,000 in government benefits, would you do it?” It is an immoral bargain foisted on the vulnerable.
But for Democratic politicians, it’s a win-win.
While appearing to be generous with other people’s money, they provide food, shelter and a few luxuries to the poor, ensuring continued dependency and a source of Democrat votes certain as a Chicago cemetery.
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-NY, predicted long ago a culture of dependency would create multigenerational poverty that would destroy families and communities and disfigure society. He was right.
No matter. The War on Poverty is a Vietnam War era program: Appropriately,the strategy is to destroy the poor in order to save them.
BUDDY ROGERS, A ROGERS RESIDENT, EARNED HIS DOCTORATE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN. HE CONTINUES TO WORK ON BECOMING EDUCATED.
Opinion, Pages 11 on 09/29/2013