The Conservative Heart Page 7

  In 1951, just 3.8 percent of Americans received some sort of public aid; that’s about one out of every 25 people.25 By 2012, it was 32.3 percent. And while uptake of government help was increasing roughly ninefold, fewer and fewer Americans were working. The percentage of men in the workforce—either working or seeking work—has dropped from 81 percent in 1964 to just 62.7 percent today. We can also calculate the percentage of noninstitutionalized men aged 20–64 who are not working: That figure increased from 6 percent to 17 percent. Of all the working-age men who are neither in prison nor in the military, one in six are now idle.

  So here is the true story of American poverty over the past five decades: fewer paychecks, more welfare checks, and no meaningful increase in earned success. Trillions in government spending have not bought us more hope or more opportunity—only a little less material misery.

  This is precisely what LBJ promised the Great Society would not accomplish. Three months after his speech, as Johnson signed his Economic Opportunity Act in the Rose Garden, he declared:

  We are not content to accept the endless growth of relief rolls or welfare rolls. We want to offer the forgotten fifth of our people opportunity and not doles. Our American answer to poverty is not to make the poor more secure in their poverty but to reach down and to help them lift themselves out of the ruts of poverty and move with the large majority along the high road of hope and prosperity.26

  If all we sought to do was make government assistance and material goods more available to people living in poverty, we’ve performed quite well. America’s free enterprise economy, with an assist from a few effective government initiatives, has made poverty marginally more tolerable. And again, this is not to be taken lightly. Reducing true indigence is a triumph. Erasing the very worst aspects of material deprivation is an accomplishment our society should take pride in.

  But our true goal was nowhere near that materialistic or narrow. Our ultimate objective, as President Johnson stated, was much loftier. America set out to arm every citizen with the opportunity to build a meaningful life that stirs their passions and engages their talents. We never agreed to settle for a little less suffering. We were aiming at the pursuit of happiness well understood. That meant helping people achieve a dignified life.

  But instead of providing struggling people with an escape rope out of poverty, the War on Poverty simply made that unsatisfying condition more bearable. Instead of growing opportunity, it grew the welfare rolls.

  The fact that we have hardly moved the needle on earned success after spending trillions of dollars is not merely a failure of public policy. It is the greatest moral scandal of our time.

  POVERTY ISN’T COMPLICATED—IT’S COMPLEX

  What system could produce such unacceptable results? Were the architects of the War on Poverty diabolical fanatics intent on creating socialism and servitude? Was it all some grand scheme to create a permanent underclass, wholly reliant on government, that would always vote a certain way?

  Of course not. There is not a shred of evidence that LBJ and his team were not genuinely trying to relieve poverty. American prosperity was surging in the wake of World War II, yet millions from inner-city Chicago to the Mississippi Delta were trapped in abject poverty. The president wanted to act. Most of us would have, too.

  And while the approach Johnson chose was deeply flawed, it’s not like his ideas faced real competition from the right. Conservatives were unhappy with the War on Poverty because they correctly saw where it was headed, but they offered no credible alternatives. The strategy of the political right in the 1950s and ’60s was to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop’” (to use William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous phrase). But when it came to fighting poverty, “Stop!” was a losing proposition—as well it should have been.

  “Stop” something that might rescue the most destitute people in Appalachia from hunger and malnutrition? “Stop” something that might help a poor grandchild of slaves rise from poverty and pursue his or her happiness? Conservatives had no moral standing to oppose Johnson’s War on Poverty, because they had no vision of their own to help these people.

  They also, as it happens, had no power. Democrats held the Senate (67–33), the House of Representatives (256–177), and the White House. Johnson was on his way to dismantling Republican Barry Goldwater in the November 1964 election (61 percent to 39 percent). At the federal level, America was essentially a one-party state. A new progressive era was at hand. But as we know, that yielded a War on Poverty that generated little “progress” at all.

  LBJ’s intentions were certainly good, and the goals he envisioned were noble ones. The fatal problem was his methods. They were rooted in profound misunderstanding about what government could and could not do. The failure of Johnson’s policies to achieve his stated ends stemmed from a failure to recognize a crucial distinction: the difference between complicated problems and complex problems.

  Complicated problems are extremely difficult to understand, but they can be resolved with sufficient money and brainpower. And once you find the solution, the problem is permanently solved. You can replicate the solution over and over with a high degree of success. Designing a jet engine is a complicated problem. Figuring out how to build the first jet engine took sophisticated tools, computing ability, and expert engineers. But once engineers figured out how to do it—and designed a jet engine that worked—they could replicate the process and make jet engines routinely.

  Complex problems are very different. They initially seem simpler to understand but can actually never be “solved” once and for all. One example is a football game. You know exactly what success looks like—it’s when your team wins. (In my case, it’s when the Seattle Seahawks win.) But there are so many trillions of combinations of things that can happen on the playing field, so many variables and ambiguities, that even the best data and strategies are dwarfed by the uncertainty that remains.

  Here is a simple example of how complicated and complex problems are confused. Before the 2015 Super Bowl, CBS News ran a story titled “Prediction Machine Picks Seahawks over Patriots in Super Bowl XLIX.”27 It reported on a website called “PredictionMachine.com,” which “uses some of the most advanced analytics available today and analyzes them through a machine they call ‘the Predictalator,’ which is ‘the most in-depth, state-of-the-art sports prediction software ever created.’” The Predictalator crunched all the data—everything from strength of regular season schedule, to injuries, each team’s record against the same opponents, and individual player stats. And it determined that “if the Super Bowl were played 50,000 times, the Seattle Seahawks would come out on top 57.3 percent of the time.” Unfortunately for me, that was not the case in the actual Super Bowl, which the Seahawks got to play only once that year. They lost, 28–24, in soul-crushing fashion.

  The fact that the football game is complex and not complicated is, in fact, why millions of people love watching the game. We have no real idea what is going to happen. Great teams can begin a game almost certain to win and end up losing.

  If designing a jet engine were a complex problem, you’d fall out of the sky most of the time. If a football game were a complicated problem, you’d know the score before it started just by looking at the team rosters.

  This difference is the fundamental reason why the War on Poverty failed. Its architects thought poverty in America was more like a jet engine than a football game. They maintained the conceit that with their big brains and a boatload of taxpayer money, they could smoothly categorize all the facets of poverty and design mechanistic programs to “solve” them.

  This delusion is the central thread that links iconic progressive policies from those of Woodrow Wilson to FDR, LBJ, and all the way to the present day, with proposals from free community college to “Cash for Clunkers.” Anyone who relies on government solutions to fundamentally complex social problems thinks that America is one big complicated problem, fixable through the scientific method.

  This is wh
at the economist Friedrich Hayek termed “scientism.” It’s the conceit that human problems can be solved like a system of equations—as if people were as predictable as the laws of physics. This was the idea behind nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories like Friedrich Engels’s “scientific socialism” and Woodrow Wilson’s “scientific public administration.” The former killed tens of millions of innocents; the latter exploded the size of the federal government.

  Poverty is a dynamic human phenomenon that varies with incentives, imperfect information, and the behavior of the people. This is what central planners’ pride prevents them from seeing. Their boundless optimism in the pseudoscientific state is simply a practical and philosophical error—think of it like fantasy football, but with human lives at stake. The federal government is spending almost $1 trillion a year on eighty different antipoverty programs without moving the poverty rate because bureaucrats don’t get real football.

  This is not to suggest that fighting poverty is a futile endeavor, any more than it is futile for the Seahawks to take the field on Sundays. While there is no one mathematical formula for winning a football game, there are winning teams and losing teams. What separates them? Three things above all: work, culture, and values. And no surprise, these are precisely the elements of success in all complex human endeavors, from business to family life. When we apply those principles to the fight against poverty, we won’t “solve” the problem of poverty—but we can win more often than not, and make real progress in alleviating suffering and need.

  And this is not just conjecture. In fact, for a brief time in our history, we made real progress, doing just that.

  THE END OF WELFARE AS WE KNEW IT—OR SO IT SEEMED

  By the time Leon Dash was chronicling the life of Rosa Lee Cunningham in 1994, Americans were fed up. It had become clear that the War on Poverty had fomented a culture of dependency. That culture was expensive, sure. But more important, it was hurting the people it was intended to help.

  Americans might have been willing to waste money indefinitely, but they were not willing to destroy their fellow citizens’ lives, especially the most vulnerable. There was an appetite for change. And it was at this moment that we enjoyed a rare bright spot in the War on Poverty. It was called welfare reform.

  Awareness of the need for reform had been growing for a long time. I remember as a kid hearing people refer to their welfare checks as their “salary.” Even at a young age, I knew the difference between a salary and a welfare check, and my family saw what confusing the two could do to others. Whether or not they had read exposés like the Washington Post’s, everyone knew the system was bad news.

  After a protracted political battle against the Democratic Party’s left wing, Congress finally passed a series of reforms in 1996. Among other things, the changes imposed time limits on how long people could receive welfare support and required that people work to receive benefits.

  This was not some right-wing counterattack on the welfare state. To be sure, the germ of welfare reform started with conservatives. Some were scholars at think tanks like AEI. Others were practitioners, like Wisconsin governor Tommy Thompson, who proved that reform could help people move toward independence. But at the national level, it took collaboration between Republican legislators and a Democratic president to make reform a reality. Everyone had to risk his or her political capital in order to fight for people and the pursuit of happiness.

  When Bill Clinton finally signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 in the Rose Garden, he invited a special guest to join him. She was Lillie Harden, a forty-two-year-old mother from Little Rock.

  Ten years earlier, Clinton had invited Harden to speak at a meeting of governors and share her experiences making the leap from welfare to work. Clinton remembered how, in front of forty-two other governors, he had asked her what the best thing was about being self-sufficient. “When my boy goes to school,” she told Clinton, “and they say what does your mama do for a living, he can give an answer.”28

  “I have never forgotten that,” Clinton said as he signed welfare reform into law. “From now on, our nation’s answer to this great social challenge will no longer be a never-ending cycle of welfare. It will be the dignity, the power, and the ethic of work.”

  And welfare reform rooted in conservative principles proved to be a success. You don’t even have to take a conservative’s word for it. Here is President Clinton, describing the outcomes on the tenth anniversary of the reforms:

  In the past decade, welfare rolls have dropped substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million today. At the same time, caseloads declined by 54 percent. Sixty percent of mothers who left welfare found work, far surpassing predictions of experts. . . . More than 20,000 businesses hired 1.1 million former welfare recipients . . . child poverty dropped to 16.2 percent in 2000, the lowest rate since 1979, and in 2000, the percentage of Americans on welfare reached its lowest level in four decades.29

  In the three decades before reform, the number of Americans on welfare had never significantly decreased. A single decade after reform, the number had fallen by more than half. Millions of poor Americans were finally experiencing the promise of the Great Society. These supposedly unemployable people were beginning to earn their own success.

  As work increased, so did happiness. One study found that the self-reported happiness of single mothers improved substantially due to welfare reform.30 The changes to this system help explain why the “happiness gap” between single mothers and the rest of the population shrank significantly from 1972 to 2008.31

  It was a great moment for our country. Pragmatic conservative reformers had partnered with a flexible liberal president to stanch the bleeding from ineffective antipoverty policy. And contained in this victory were two important lessons.

  First, government can help the poor when it recognizes that poverty is a complicated problem and not a complex one. The safety net is not hopeless by definition. It does not always turn people into government-dependent drones. Welfare reform showed that the system could be salvaged by requiring work and limiting the duration of benefits, except for those who truly could not work. Government must work with human nature instead of trying to override it.

  Second, it was clear that the right kind of reform could meaningfully improve the quality of life for many of the country’s most vulnerable. Those who made the transition from welfare to work did not merely achieve a reduction in their material poverty. They took a dramatic step toward the holistic human flourishing that the country’s leaders had promised when they launched the Great Society. They were, in Johnson’s words, finally moving “with the large majority along the high road of hope and prosperity.”

  Welfare was becoming what it was always meant to be—temporary help, not a permanent condition. And this is still what Americans want it to be. In 2009, the year Barack Obama took office, one poll asked whether Americans agreed with the statement, “Able-bodied adults that receive cash, food, housing, and medical assistance should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving those government benefits.” That view was supported by 92 percent of liberals and 97 percent of conservatives, by 96 percent of Democrats and 97 percent of Republicans.32 In a polarized age when right and left agree on little, such consensus is remarkable.

  Optimists assumed that welfare reform was permanent and that the principles of work-based safety net programs would migrate to other programs for the poor. The 1996 changes focused primarily on one program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which was renamed Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). That program reached just 4.2 percent of American households in 1983, and just 2 percent by 2011. Clearly this is only a small corner of the massive web of programs that provide food, housing, and cash assistance to the poor.

  Surely the success of welfare reform would inspire politicians to apply the same lessons in other areas. Right?

  Wrong. Instead of spreadin
g work-based reform, it was stopped through a reactionary backlash, led by those who never made peace with welfare reform in the first place. Scientific public administration reared its head once again.

  WELFARE AND POVERTY TODAY

  It happened in 2008: the perfect storm for public policy. America entered its worst economic recession in seventy years. Housing prices fell approximately 30 percent.33 For millions of Americans whose wealth was tied to their homes, this amounted to a collective loss of $6 trillion.34 The stock market, as measured by the S&P 500 index, fell by 57 percent.35 And the net worth of all U.S. households declined by $16 trillion—a 24 percent drop.36 Almost nine million Americans lost their jobs.37 Six years later, the U.S. economy had still not returned to full, prerecession employment.

  Amid these economic nightmares came the election of President Barack Obama, who had the aim of implementing traditional progressive policies through a newly energized federal government. With the House and Senate also in Democratic hands, Obama could make good on his word. He passed a massive economic stimulus spending bill, encouraged a Federal Reserve that added unprecedented amounts to the money supply, regulated the financial system in broad new ways, and brought huge parts of the health-care system under a new degree of government control.

  Welfare spending also massively increased under the Obama administration. From 2009 to 2013, welfare spending totaled $3.7 trillion, according to one Senate report.38 That is almost five times what the federal government spent on transportation, education, and NASA combined over that period. And all the while, the administration was attempting to undo the bipartisan work requirements of welfare reform. Since the 1996 law was passed and signed, the states had been required to have at least half of their adult welfare recipients in qualified “work activities.” But in 2012, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services asserted for itself the brand-new authority to issue waivers to this requirement whenever it saw fit.