Mark Schmitt and Shelley Waters Boots say it’s time for a new national effort to fight poverty:
It has been 13 years since a Democratic president’s signature on the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 eliminated a flawed program that also provided the only protection against destitution. Yet that act also brought an end to the welfare wars, a long and debilitating period in which poor people were the focus of political conflict and racially loaded demagoguery, exemplified by former Sen. Phil Gramm’s image of a society divided between those “pulling the wagon” and those “riding in the wagon.” Even liberals stepped with trepidation, insisting that they, too, would end welfare as we knew it.
In the years since, absent a high-profile conflict over policy, poverty has once again become invisible. As Michael Harrington wrote in 1962, “That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them.” But there is a sense that the shadows are lifting. Hurricane Katrina’s devastating effects on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast briefly drew into sharp relief the fragility of life for poor families, as well as the inescapable racial dimension of poverty. The Center for American Progress put forward a major initiative in 2007, outlining a goal of cutting poverty in half over 10 years, which showed that mainstream Democrats were no longer on the defensive.