Posted on 01/13/2016 5:20:30 AM PST by Kaslin
A recent forum on fighting poverty, sponsored by the Jack Kemp Foundation and moderated by House Speaker Paul Ryan and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, showed why the Republican Party is America's party of vision.
The forum featured six Republican presidential candidates: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio. Each responded to questions from Ryan and Scott and weighed in with their ideas for fighting poverty.
They delivered a powerful message -- that the most important anti-poverty programs in America are the ideas and values that created the American success-and-prosperity machine from day one.
I am talking about freedom, entrepreneurship, education to provide tools for realizing opportunity, and family, which keeps values intact and individuals in control of their lives.
Our particular challenges of poverty have really been about bringing what we know works -- freedom, tradition and personal responsibility -- to the uniquely challenged minority communities in America.
This was already starting to happen before liberals took over the poverty issue with President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" in 1965. In 1959, the black poverty rate was 55.1 percent. By 1969 it was down to 32.2 percent. As Thomas Sowell has written, "In the period from 1954 to 1964 ... the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled."
Since the launch of the war on poverty and the beginning of massive spending and big government anti-poverty programs, the black poverty rate has hardly moved. Today it stands at 27 percent. What did happen was the collapse of black families after the start of massive government intervention into black life, with a tripling of single-parent black homes since the 1960s. Republican initiatives have pushed back over the years to work against the massive liberal takeover of the poverty issue in America. As former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush points out, "three things will lift people out of poverty: work, marriage, and a high school education, at least." Rather than government takeover of personal lives in poor communities, these individuals need to be empowered so they can truly be free and develop and bring their own skills and abilities to the marketplace.
Republican candidates at the Jack Kemp Foundation forum discussed ideas of how to push back toward this direction. We must be looking at programs that reward work, marriage and family life, and maximize opportunities for poor children to get educated.
Jack Kemp, back in the 1980s, promoted the idea of enterprise zones, to encourage business development in poor communities. Such ideas as the earned-income tax credit, school choice, welfare-to-work programs and vouchers to provide housing choice are all Republican ideas for bringing the power of freedom to poor Americans.
As Speaker Ryan and Sen. Scott recently wrote, we're spending $750 billion annually through more than 80 anti-poverty programs, "yet 46 million Americans are poor today, and the poverty rate has barely budged: from 19 percent in 1965 to 14.8 percent in 2014." These huge, unproductive expenditures need to be redirected to encourage the values and behavior that move people out of poverty.
Jeb Bush is proposing taking the funds from the biggest programs -- welfare, food stamps and housing assistance programs -- and block granting them to states so creative local decisions can be made to use these funds efficiently.
The Kemp forum provided an invaluable platform to shine light on powerful conservative ideas that Republicans have been working on for years to empower poor Americans and undo the destruction caused by liberals. We even saw media coverage by liberal outlets such as MSNBC.
Special kudos to Jimmy Kemp, president of the Jack Kemp Foundation, for carrying on the tradition and great love of America embodied by his late father, my friend Jack Kemp.
The fact is, no amount of rational common sense ideas or talking will ever penetrate the democrat progressive liberal mindset. You, Mr White guy, are the singular problem to all the worlds evils and you must be defeated!
You will not be allowed to sponsor or create any plans that improve the lives of “colorful people.”
Trump has the right idea, attack the democrat/progressive/liberal beast at its heart, and kill it!
Dysfunction is a huge factor in poverty. Dysfunctional people never make it out and dysfunctional families produce kids who will live much of their lives in poverty.
“The War on Poverty is over. Poverty won.”
Love Star Parker
I do try to help the poor, but every time I make direct contact I’m appalled at the relentless stream of poverty-causing choices most of them make. Get dressed, clean up, turn off the TV, and do something productive already!
You know, I’m on SSD right now because of a mental disability (proven and I’m not scamming) and I’m able to get up, sit at my laptop and work on my small business I’m building. I don’t drink, smoke, do drugs or sleep around and sobriety is not difficult. I resent how they just seem addicted to making more of a mess of their lives. I resent how they make a mockery of people with real illnesses and disabilities. I’ve been around a lot of the chronic poor and they can’t seem to stop making messes of themselves.
Yup. There are legitimate poor & needy who we should help. Most aren’t.
I keep coming back to two personal anecdotes.
I once dated a nurse who cared for a chronically bedridden patient. For all his severe ailments and disability, he managed to run a profitable, um, unlicensed pharmaceutical distribution operation.
While fixing a poor family’s couch (wondering how such wear and damage occurred), the kids tore a screen out of a window for no apparent reason.
I’ll help, but recipients of help need to quit wrecking their lives.
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