Donatelli: The Administration's Sorry Record on Poverty

"President Obama’s State of the Union address will focus on “income inequality,” writes Frank Donatelli, a Luce Institute board member.

One can understand why he wants to change the subject from the very real problems America faces. His policies have made those problems worse. Obamacare has caused tens of thousands of Americans to lose their health plans and forced them into insurance exchanges that cost more and provide fewer doctor choices. Meanwhile, millions of Americans are still out of work and even more have stopped looking. ...

The president wants you to forget all that and now consider the plight of the poor. Sadly, he hasn’t done a very good job there either. That’s because his own actions as president have made the poor worse off. Reducing poverty has never been a major priority of this administration. It’s hard to point to a single major legislative achievement of his that has improved the lot of the poorest Americans. If anything, he has spent his first five years appeasing the key groups that make up the Democratic Party and his governing coalition.

Donatelli recounts this Administration's initiatives — the economic stimulus spending bill, Cash for Clunkers, the Obamacare nightmare, green energy "investments" to favored corporations, and his disdain for real economic growth initiatives such as the Keystone Pipeline — and concludes:

Economic growth offers a far better correlation to the poverty rate than temporary band-aids like minimum wage increases or unemployment benefits. Low growth for the five years of this administration has corresponded with an official poverty rate rise to 15 percent. It is even higher according to another calculation by the Census Bureau. As Timothy Smeeding, director of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty, notes, “The best policy is obvious. It’s a job that pays decent wages. The answer to poverty is never an income support program.”

This administration represents the triumph of ideology over common sense. Poverty does not exist because some people are successful at the expense of others, which is the most pernicious claim of a president who began his presidency grandly promising to bring people together. It exists because of government policies that ignore job creation and economic growth. The president would have been wise to make that the centerpiece of his speech.