War on poverty in 2011?
19th September 2011
Over 46 million people are living in poverty, 2.6 million more than in 2009 and the poverty rate has reached 15.1 percent.
This is the sort of drivel that gets you tenure at Princeton. One would think that a professor of history and public policy at the third best university in the country could look behind the numbers from the Census Bureau and realize that 46 million people are not living in poverty, but merely qualify for the Census Bureau’s rather fanciful notion of ‘living below the poverty line’, i.e. prior to accounting for government benefits. Having failed that threshold, the rest of his article is dreck — and tendentious dreck, at that; it’s obvious what agenda he’s pushing.
Which makes this particular paragraph especially ludicrous:
Despite the enormity of this social problem, American politicians in either party rarely discuss the subject. Since the poor don’t tend to vote in high rates or contribute much in campaign funds, they don’t get a place at the table in Washington, D.C. Yet with the U.S. poverty rate being the highest in the developed world according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, this statistic marks a terrible failure for the nation as a whole.
Funny, you can’t spit on a page of the New York Times without hitting a Democrat politician wringing his hands (or a leftist professor wringing his hands) about the problem of poverty in the U.S. Perhaps the poor don’t tend to vote in high rates — although, with ACORN, those who do get an opportunity to make up for the ones who don’t — or contribute much in campaign funds, they nevertheless seem to be a very handy excuse for politicians looking for every new and clever ways to dip their hands in the wallets of working people.
And this is despite there being a ‘war on poverty’ in this country since the Johnson administration, a war that has cost to date multiple trillions of dollars. It would seem that the failure is not one for the ‘nation as a whole’, but rather a failure on the part of politicians who keep spending money without anything to show for it.