Democrats' New War on Poverty

Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards both want to declare a new war on poverty, writes Linda Chavez.

Mr. Obama wants to tie the minimum wage to the Consumer Price Index, which would price the lowest-skilled workers, especially young blacks, out of the job market, not to mention increase inflationary pressure on wages.

Mr. Edwards would have the government create 1 million new temporary jobs for the chronically unemployed, despite abundant research that shows these programs have no lasting impact in reducing poverty or increasing long-term employment among the poor.

Oh dear.  All this stuff has been shown to be nonsense time and time again, most notably by Charles Murray in Losing Ground.

So why don’t Democrats propose something that might actually work?

The elephant in the room, of course is family breakdown.  As Chavez relates:

Poverty rates for families headed by a single white woman with children under 18 were 25.3 percent in 2005; for similarly constituted black families, the rate was a shocking 42 percent. But for married couple families, the comparable rate for whites was just 6.1 percent, and for black families only 8.3 percent.

This really isn’t rocket science.  Government welfare benefits encourage family breakup and broken-up families reduced to the mammalian minimum of mother and child are much poorer than mother-father-children families.

Chavez writes that Democrats worry about not being “inclusive” or of being “intolerant” if they “talk up marriage.”

I wonder about that. 

The problem for Democrats goes deeper than inclusiveness and intolerance.  It’s not airy-fairy notions that hold them back from reforming the welfare state.  It is political survival.

Democrats’ whole political support system is built upon patronage and clientage, playing Lady Bountiful and distributing benefits to the tenants on the liberal plantation.  People that have risen out of poverty through work and family find that they don’t need government.  That’s when they stop voting Democrat.  And that’s when all the Democratic government employees find themselves out of a job.

And Democrats know it.