Senator Mike Lee: 'Bring Them In'

Source:Heritage Foundation- U.S. Senator Mike Lee (Republican, Utah) in Washington.

"It’s always great to join with the Heritage Foundation in any context. But being a part of this Anti-Poverty Forum is a true privilege.  Members of my staff have been here all day, taking copious notes, and hopefully collecting all the business cards and white papers they can get their hands on.

It is of course a tragedy that we have to be here at all. Though the Bible says the poor will always be with us, it’s still hard to accept why, in a nation with a $15 trillion economy, the poor are still with us. 

And yet, as we approach the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s famous “War on Poverty” speech, we all know the statistics. Despite trillions of taxpayer dollars spent to eradicate poverty since the late 1960s, the poverty rate has hardly budged. And just last week, the Census Bureau reported that today, more than 49 million Americans still live below the poverty line.

Today, a boy born in the bottom 20% of our income scale has a 42% chance of staying there as an adult. According to the O.E.C.D., the United States is third from the bottom of advanced countries in terms of upward economic mobility.

A recent study in Oregon found that the Medicaid program – which provides health insurance to the poor – produces basically no health improvements for its beneficiaries. A study last December on the Head Start program, issued by the Obama Administration itself, found that what few academic benefits three- and four-year olds do gain from the program all but disappear by end of the first grade.

We know that poor men and women are less likely to get married and stay married, that 30% of single mothers are living in poverty, and that their children are less likely to rise out of poverty themselves when they grow up.

We know that participation in civil society, volunteering, and religion are deteriorating in poor neighborhoods – compounding economic hardship with social isolation. And we know these trends cut across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and geography.

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.  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...  

From Senator Mike Lee 

"In a speech at The Heritage Foundation, Senator Mike Lee identifies the next steps for Republicans to develop a conservative reform agenda. He also introduces four legislative proposals that are part of the conservative reform agenda that he identifies." 

Source:U.S. Senator Mike Lee (Republican, Utah) at The Heritage Foundation, in Washington.

From Senator Mike Lee 

If you look at President Lyndon Johnson's so-called War On Poverty, that his administration launched in 1965 and say that goal of President Johnson's antipoverty agenda was to wipe out poverty by the year, I don't know, 2013 (just to throw out a year) then of course I agree with Senator Lee here and say that the WOP has been mostly a failure. Poverty was roughly in America 20% in 1965, perhaps higher than that, 1/2 African-Americans in the 1960s, lived in poverty. 

But, if you look at the so-called War On Poverty and say that the goal of the WOP was to fight poverty and make it easier for people in poverty to survive, then there has been some successes: 

hunger is down 

more low-income Americans have access to health care 

affordable housing 

thanks to Welfare To Work from 1996, more low-skilled Americans are part of the American workforce 

and perhaps other examples as well. 

I think the real question here should be where do we go from here and how we move more Americans out of poverty. Not should we expand or eliminate the New Deal and Great Society, but instead how we move more Americans to get themselves out of poverty. And that gets to things like more education, more work, while allowing low-skilled Americans to keep their public assistance, while they're educating themselves and becoming part of the American workforce. 

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