PrairiePundit

It is a lesson that Democrat politicians ignore when formulating policy.

Gary Lieberthal: I know it is not a pleasant topic but let’s take just a moment and think about poverty in this country. Which state do you think has the highest poverty rate? Must be Mississippi or Alabama or one of those Southern states. No it ain’t. The state with the highest poverty rate is…wait for it, CALIFORNIA!!! Yep, our progressive, income redistributing state which accounts for 12% of the country’s population is home to about 1 in 3 of all U.S. welfare recipients. Our poverty rate exceeds 20% when the national average is around 15%. It is not as though California policy makers have neglected to wage their assault on poverty. Since 1992 California has spent nearly $1 trillion on benefit programs. Clearly it hasn’t worked. Then again paying poor people to be poor never does. The reasons are many from welfare policy incentivizing unwed mothers (40% of children born in this state are to unwed mothers), environmental regulations that add hugely to the cost of already unaffordab...

Washington Post: When the poor are forced to the suburbs, getting to work becomes a huge challenge For the poor in the Deep South’s cities, simply applying for a job exposes the barriers of a particularly pervasive and isolating form of poverty. It is going to be a problem in any city where there is an attempt to displace the poor into more affluent neighborhoods.  It tends to create pockets of poverty without addressing the cultural issues.   I saw it in the 70's and 80's with the building of Section Eight housing projects in middle-class areas of Houston.

Thomas Sowell: Opportunity Versus Outcomes Sowell talks about his latest book which examines how and why outcomes differ regardless of the opportunities.  It is brilliant.

Chuck DeVore: Demographers estimate that in less than 30 years America will be “majority-minority,” with the white, non-Hispanic population dipping to under 50 percent. The future has already arrived in California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas. Of those four states, California and Texas have demographic profiles most closely matching our nation’s demographic future. Which version of America’s future provides opportunity for all Americans, the California model or the Texas model ? A state’s poverty level is a good place to start for measuring the effectiveness of state policies that encourage job creation, self-sufficiency, and upward mobility. Since, for a variety of reasons, average poverty rates are higher among minority groups and immigrants, it’s important to both measure overall poverty rates and to compare rates between like demographic groups. The federal government has two measures of poverty, the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) and the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). T...

John Hayward: ... The War on Poverty is the paramount example of such militarized socialist quagmires. Contrary to the copious promises of its early generals that the War on Poverty would be a battle to reduce poverty, its current champions insist that it’s all about making poverty easier to endure – a seamless transition of core reasoning from a clear objective and definite measures of progress, to a fuzzy perpetual mandate that makes the progress of the welfare state impossible to critique. In fact, the lack of progress becomes a supposedly irrefutable argument for spending more money. That’s what despair is all about: no matter how hard we struggle, we will never escape from the quicksand. No matter how much we spend, it will never be enough. Meanwhile, the clients of the welfare state are fed their own steady diet of despair. They’re told life was rigged against them from the start. They are taught success comes only at the expense of the unsuccessful. They’re told what th...

Chuck Devore: When it comes to poverty, the two biggest states, California and Texas, offer a vivid contrast: Results matter more than well-meaning intentions, and work beats welfare. Once again, California has the highest poverty rate in the nation at 23.4%, according to a new Census Bureau report that takes into account the variable cost of housing from state to state as well as noncash benefits such as housing vouchers and food stamps. (The official poverty measure assumes the same costs throughout America.) This broad poverty measure shows that Texas' poverty rate dropped to 15.9%, the national average. Along with the nation's highest poverty rate, California, with one-eighth of America's population, has one-third of the nation's welfare recipients. Its state and local taxes are a whopping 52% higher as a share of income than Texas'. In fact, California could completely eliminate its income tax, the nation's highest, and it would still pull more money from...

Washington Post: Parker: Dems aren’t really fighting for poverty Supposedly they have been fighting against it for 50 years while destroying the black family.

Reihan Salam: Rep. Paul Ryan has been drawing attention to rising poverty levels in the United States, per a new report from Tom Curry of NBC News: “Next year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the War on Poverty. We’ve spent approximately $15 trillion and the question we ought to be asking ourselves is, ‘where are we?’ With a 15 percent poverty rate today — the highest in a generation — and with 46 million people in poverty, I would argue it’s not working very well.” He said, “We shouldn’t be measuring our success in the war on poverty by inputs, by how much money we throw at programs, by how many people we enroll in programs; we ought to be measuring success in the War on Poverty by measuring how many people we get out of poverty…..” This is exactly the right issue for Ryan to be working on. So far, Ryan has been reluctant to lay out a full-fledged anti-poverty agenda. Rather, he has been on an informal listening tour that, one hopes, will culminate in something more fleshed ou...

Byron York: There's an odd imbalance that few have noticed in this presidential campaign. In the midst of a continuing economic downturn, one candidate talks regularly about poverty, and the other doesn't. The one who does is the Republican, Mitt Romney. He's done it for a long time. Go back to Romney's March 30 speech in Appleton, Wis., in which he introduced the charge that President Obama is creating a "government-centered society." "Over 46 million Americans are now living in poverty, more than ever before in our nation's history," Romney said. "In households with single moms, over 39 percent are living in poverty." In speech after speech since then, Romney has included the nation's poverty rate in his case against Obama. "Today, more Americans wake up in poverty than ever before," he said in his address to the Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., on Aug. 30. "Look around you. These are not strangers. These are...

Washington Post: Deborah Weinstein, a longtime advocate for the poor, calls the news that one in seven Americans is living in poverty "a national emergency." But for much of Washington's political class, the shocking new poverty numbers provoked not alarm about the poor but further debate over tax cuts for the middle class. "We know that a strong middle class leads a strong economy," President Obama told reporters in the Rose Garden on Friday, as he used the new census report, which also showed that middle-class income has dipped slightly over the past decade, to continue making his case for limiting the cuts to family incomes under $250,000. ... Weinstein's problem is that Democrats are in control of the government. If the GOP had control of either House of Congress or the Presidency, it would all be their fault and something would have to be done immediately. That is the way the storyline goes, but with the Community Organizer in Chief as Preside...