Bush has become famous for his casual disregard of the basic elements of conservative philosophy, a descent into pure cynicism aided and abetted by the degeneration of the conservative movement as a whole into mindless hackery, shallowness, and intellectual dishonesty. Spending has gone up -- way up -- nearly across the board even while tax cuts have been lavished on the wealthy. Less noted is that one very small portion of the federal government's activities really has been curtailed: the spending of money on efforts to help poor people.
It started with housing assistance, primarily a concern in big cities from which virtually no Republican legislators hail. Next on the chopping block was heating assistance, vital in the northern parts of the country but easily neglected by the GOP's Sun Belt leadership. Then came food stamps, cut as part of perhaps the cruelest of many farces initiated by 21st-century conservatism.
The White House called for cuts in farm subsidies -- a good idea for which the right-wing press hailed Bush as a hero of both policy substance and political courage. Then, as had apparently been the plan all along, the congressional budgeters left farm subsidies where they were and cut the agriculture budget instead by quite literally taking food out of the mouths of poor children. Neither the White House nor the legions who praised its courage in taking on the farm lobby issued a word of dissent or disgruntlement.
Most recently, Medicaid has come under attack -- because if poor people aren't going to have houses to live in, the ability to stay warm in the winter, or food for their kids, it hardly seems worthwhile to give them medicine, either.
There is, of course, more to fighting poverty than anti-poverty spending. Work and wages are crucial. And throughout four years of lousy labor-market performance, touted consistently by the right as some kind of boom, wages have stagnated and the poverty rate has risen in each and every year. Having attracted praise in 2000 for attacking congressional GOP efforts to cut the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) -- a key program helping the working poor -- Bush proceeded to do the same thing by stealth. The IRS has redirected its efforts away from catching rich people who cheat on their taxes to denying on technicalities EITC benefits for poor workers who have trouble navigating the complicated thicket of paperwork the program requires.
In a more perfect world, these might be the kinds of things the leaders of the Democratic Party complained about loudly and often. The reality is rather different. Throughout the 1980s, anti-poverty efforts were, thanks to the unpopularity of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, an albatross around the neck of liberalism. Bill Clinton succeeded in lancing the political boil by signing the 1996 welfare-reform bill, which even did some substantive good, but with the issue out of the public spotlight, Democrats have preferred to leave it there. Clinton did roughly the reverse of Bush in his second term, quietly helping out around the margins without making a big deal out of the topic or proposing any dramatic changes to the national approach. Since his departure from the scene, Democrats have followed his lead. No doubt if they had more power, they would do some good. But with the honorable exception of John Edwards, nobody wants to talk about it, and even Edwards' policy agenda last year was rather thin, especially given his eloquent statement of the problem.
Indeed, his famous "two Americas" speech in some ways encapsulates the essence of the Democratic Party's problem. Sometimes, one America was the one where the hyper-rich beneficiaries of the Bush tax policy live and the other was the America inhabited by most citizens -- the one where people work for a living. At other times, one America was the America inhabited by most citizens -- the one where when the mayor says evacuate, you fill up your car and drive out of town, or use your credit card to get a ticket on a bus; the other America, in that telling, is the one where you're too poor to get out of town and the government is too callous or too stupid to help you. Both stories contain much truth, but they're different stories. The former narrative -- mobilizing middle-class resentment at Bushian indulgence of privilege -- is the one might likely to bring wins on election day. But the second narrative -- mobilizing America's vast resource base to improve the conditions of the most unlucky among us -- is the more morally significant one.
National Review Editor Rich Lowry concluded a recent column thusly:
If the tableaux of suffering in the city prompts meaningful soul-searching, perhaps there can be a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban spending (anything is worth addressing the problem of fatherlessness).I have, honestly, no idea what he has in mind. But I'd be willing to listen. Spending money isn't all there is to be said about poverty, but, when well designed, it's part of the solution, and the amount of money in question is very small compared with the wealth of the nation, or the budget of the government. Family structure matters a great deal, too, if you can think of something workable to effect it. Compassionate conservatism is, at the end of the day, a good idea. If Bush wants to atone for his many hurricane-related sins, he'll consider picking up where Lowry left off.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
