WASHINGTON — Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee spoke to the Federalist Society’s 2013 Nation Lawyer’s Convention and the Heritage Foundation this week about the conservative need to tackle growing poverty in the U.S.
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“Nineteen-sixty-four wasn’t the year Americans started fighting poverty; it was the year we started losing that fight,” Lee said. “To start winning again, conservatives are going to have to lead the way – not simply by offering criticism, but alternatives. Our job is to identify the obstructions that impede Americans’ access to our market economy and civil society and clear them.”
Lee marked the near-50th anniversary of former President Lyndon Johnson’s well-know “War on Poverty” speech by detailing last week’s Census Bureau findings of 49 million Americans living below the poverty line.
Those millions born in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale battle a 42 percent chance of staying there for life, with 30 percent of single mothers living in poverty thanks to the debilitating effects on marriage.
Despite trillions of federal dollars spent battling poverty since the 1960s following Johnson’s famous declaration, the United States’ $15 trillion economy is still home to the third-lowest ranking country in upward economic mobility, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
“All of this might lead some to the depressing conclusion that – 50 years after Johnson’s speech – America’s war on poverty has failed. But the evidence proves nothing of the sort,” Lee said. “On the contrary, I believe the American people are poised to launch a new, bold, and heroic offensive in the war on poverty… if a renewed conservative movement has the courage to lead it.”
Lee criticized the failings of government welfare programs like Medicare and Head Start, which have shown marginal to no long-term improvement in health or education – in fact, both have continued to fall overall across the nation.
The Utah senator outlined prospective legislation – some of which enjoys bipartisan support in Congress – that would make up the backbone of a comprehensive conservative anti-poverty platform, including reforms to welfare incentives and accreditation for higher education, a re-examination of the prison system and improvements to programs like Head Start and Medicaid across individual states.
“Properly considered, then, the war on poverty is not so much about lifting people up. It’s about bringing people in. And so the challenge to conservatives today is to rethink the war on poverty along these lines, to bring into our economy and society the individuals, families, and communities that have for five decades been unfairly locked out,” Lee said.
“The time has come to do something about it. As conservatives, as Americans, and as human beings, we have it in our power – individually, together, and where necessary through government to bring them in,” Lee said.
Related articles
- Where’s the GOP’s anti-poverty agenda? (washingtonpost.com)
- A New Kind of Poverty, Turbo-Charged by Inequality (bigthink.com)
- Bring Them In (lee.senate.gov)