CNSNews.com Staff Writer
September 17, 2007
(CNSNews.com) - Blaming poverty on liberalism and the federal government, a conservative activist on Friday said: "It is very sad what the liberals have done with their war on the poor in this country."
"After 40 years of failure, they still insist that they want to expand this war, that they think they should pour more money into this war," said Star Parker, president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education. "Already, over $3 trillion has been spent on the war on poverty, and so far, we've not seen results."
Parker said the war on poverty has really been a war waged by liberals on four fronts -- "war on the family, the war on thought, the war on tradition and a war on religion."
"The poverty that we see today is directly related to people having children outside of marriage and then not working to support those children," she said.
"They started with the war on the Black family, and they totally destroyed this family," said Parker at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., on Friday. "They spread this message of moral relativism and welfare dependency.
"Lots of liberals got hold of the Black community and started convincing them that there is nothing wrong with dependence on government -- we started seeing the Black family destroyed," Parker said. "We saw welfare policy enter in with rules that say don't work, don't save, don't get married, and we'll fix all of your life problems for you."
She added that the result of the war on poverty for the Black community has been that two out of three pregnancies are ended through abortion, and seven in 10 children are born outside of marriage.
"What are the implications on society?" she asked. "Seventy percent of our incarcerated are coming from these broken homes. Family breakdown leads to government dependency.
"The message of rights and entitlements equals control for liberals," said Parker. "The best thing we can do is to gradually start dismantling these massive entitlement programs of the 20th century."
But Sheldon Danziger, co-director of the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan, told Cybercast News Service: "These statements are not consistent with 30 years of research."
"Poverty remains high, not because of a shortage of effective anti-poverty policy options, but because the public and policymakers have not made reducing poverty a high priority," he said.
"The primary reason that poverty persists is not because the research of the war on poverty planners was flawed, but because the economy failed to deliver the benefits of prosperity widely," Danziger added.
"For the past three decades, economic forces have increased financial hardships for many workers and prevented existing anti-poverty policies from further reducing poverty," he noted.
"The evidence on the changing relationship between economic growth and poverty, particularly the stagnation of male earnings, refutes the view that poverty remains high because the government provided too much aid for the poor and thus encouraged dysfunctional behaviors," Danziger said.
Danziger said income inequality has meant that economic growth has had a limited impact on poverty. "Given current economic conditions, income poverty will not be substantially reduced unless government does more to help low-income workers and those who are willing to work but cannot find jobs," he said.
Danziger added that government intervention, through Social Security and Medicare, has proved to be effective in reducing poverty among the elderly, which is at an all-time low.
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