The Conservative Heart Page 8
More important than anything else, though, the administration was turning its attention away from poverty per se and instead toward the old progressive bogeyman of income inequality. Indeed, the president spoke less about the poor than his predecessors. A 2013 analysis by one researcher at Georgetown University found that President Obama mentioned the poor less than any president in decades.39 In his public statements and official communications on social class, he mentioned the poor only a quarter of the time he mentioned a social class; in contrast, Ronald Reagan talked about the poor in two-thirds of his public pronouncements.
Instead, the conversation was turned toward the income gap between rich and poor Americans. The president declared income inequality a “defining challenge of our time”40 that “undermines the very essence of America.”41
Like any great narrative, the administration’s inequality story had villains: wealthy people and conservative Americans. In an extraordinary series of attacks, Mr. Obama repeatedly accused ordinary citizens who disagreed with his ideology of not caring about the people his own economic policies had left behind.42 He called Republicans’ ideas “thinly veiled social Darwinism,” painting their goals as “pulling up those ladders [of opportunity] for the next generation.”
With comments like these, the president was not just disagreeing with conservatives; he was saying we are morally bankrupt. We don’t care about people who are out of work. We don’t care about people born into poverty. We don’t care about people in need.
Conservatives across the country were indignant at their president’s ad hominem attacks. But armed with neither a substantive antipoverty agenda of their own nor the moral language to accurately attack the administration’s failure, they lacked a productive outlet for their frustration.
It is bad enough that in the face of absolute deprivation, the focus would be on relative poverty in the form of inequality. But it is the height of irony—and evidence of catastrophic government ineffectiveness—that inequality actually increased over the course of the Obama administration. In fact, the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer.
Consider the facts. The top half of the economy has, in fact, recovered from the Great Recession in fine style. Since January 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has more than doubled in value. The year 2013 brought the largest annual increase in the S&P 500 since the late 1990s. And the rewards of this sustained market surge were mostly reaped by a select few.
According to New York University economist Edward Wolff, the top 10 percent of American earners now own 81 percent of stocks and mutual funds, 95 percent of financial securities, 92 percent of business equity, and 80 percent of nonhome real estate.43 As a result, economic growth that is ginned up through investment markets (by, say, creating money) will prove to be extremely regressive. And sure enough, a whopping 95 percent of the real income growth from the economic recovery flowed directly to the much-regretted “1 percent.”44 (Skeptics may note that this last finding belongs to Emmanuel Saez, a left-leaning economist who collaborates with famous French economist Thomas Piketty.)
During the recovery, Americans in the top 5 percent (with average incomes of more than $320,000) were the only group of U.S. households to see their average inflation-adjusted incomes rise between 2009 and 2013. All other income groups experienced a decline in real income over that period.
And how about the bottom 20 percent of U.S. households? That group of earners was hit the hardest during the recovery. Their real incomes fell by 7 percent on average from 2009 to 2013, the largest percentage decline of any group.45
Predictably, dependence on the government by the poor has increased massively. The number of Americans receiving food stamps has increased dramatically.46 Today, one in seven Americans are so poor that they require food assistance to bring home enough for their children to eat.
At the same time, the number of people on government disability insurance has surged by 20 percent. This is not because of an unprecedented epidemic in workplace accidents, but rather because disability effectively serves as permanent unemployment for millions of desperate Americans. These Americans are not getting rich. The average monthly benefit was $1,165 in 2015, or an annual income of about $14,000.47 People are so desperate today that many have given up on finding work and are willing to live in what amounts to permanent poverty-level subsistence.
While the tide of dependence for the poor has crept forward, work has receded. As we have already noted, the labor participation rate, which measures how many citizens are working or seeking work, fell to 62.7 percent in October 2014. That’s the smallest fraction since the days of the Carter administration. Millions have given up hope of ever finding work again, and have dropped out of the labor force entirely, which has the perverse effect of appearing to lower the official unemployment rate. A sarcastic tweet from one New York Times reporter put it perfectly: “We are basically ‘recovering from the recession’ by reducing the share of Americans who participate in the labor force. Hurrah!”
According to an analysis by the Associated Press, the unemployment rate for the top 20 percent of the income distribution in America (those earning $150,000 or more) was 3.2 percent in 2013, three years after the end of the recession. Statistically, that is considered full employment. For the bottom 20 percent (those earning less than $20,000) the unemployment rate was over 21 percent.48 The average unemployment rate for African American teenagers has risen to 33.2 percent.49 And none of these figures includes people who have given up looking for work and dropped out of the workforce. Only those who are actively looking for jobs but can’t find them are counted as “unemployed.”
To put all this in perspective, in 1932—the very worst point of the Great Depression—the national unemployment rate was 22.9 percent.50 So for those in the bottom of the economy today, the employment rates of the Great Depression are virtually indistinguishable from those of our economic “recovery.”
And what has happened to income inequality? A central theme in each of the president’s campaigns, this is one metric by which a committed egalitarian progressive might judge this administration. Economists calculate income inequality with a measurement called the “Gini coefficient”—a number from 0 to 1, where zero denotes perfect equality, and 1 would be complete inequality (think of only one household with 100 percent of all income). Since January 2009, the Gini coefficient for U.S. household income has moved from less than 0.47 in 2009 to 0.48 in 2013. That’s right, income inequality is getting worse.
The facts are clear. We have a robust and growing economy for high-income Americans. But for those at the bottom, the opportunity to work, rise, and earn success is disappearing. The administration’s ostensibly pro-poor, tough-on-the-wealthy agenda has led us toward a new American Gilded Age. We are increasingly becoming two Americas. In one America, there is practically unlimited opportunity and prosperity. In the other America, where those at the bottom reside, we are still in the depths of the Great Depression.
Instead of real solutions and genuine hope, those stuck at the bottom today have been offered class resentment and presidential sloganeering about the evils of rich people and political conservatives.
WE NEED A BETTER SOLUTION
Let’s review. After five decades and immense sums of money, our government seems content with making poverty a little less insufferable. Today, yet another White House is promising different results using the same old policy tools. And the poor are falling further behind.
Given these results, why does America keep returning to this stale, ineffective playbook? It’s not as though voters are crazy. Rather, it’s that everyone knows we must do something to help struggling people, and the old ideas appear to be the only ones on offer.
Conservatives have been quick to criticize the welfare state, and those critiques are often justified. But importantly, our alternatives have generally been almost nonexistent. This is not even close to sufficient. It’s little wonder that Americans actually believe it
when President Obama claims conservatives don’t care about the little guy. One typical survey, conducted in September 2013 by the Huffington Post and YouGov, found that 51 percent of Americans thought the GOP was most interested in helping the rich. Twenty-eight percent said the middle class. Only 7 percent said the poor.51 In October 2010, the Democrats held an 11-point lead over Republicans as the party “more concerned with needs of people like me.” By October 2014, that lead had nearly doubled to 21 points (54 to 33 percent).52
It’s hard to convince people to give you the reins of power when more than half think you don’t care about them. And more specifically, it’s impossible to convince them you can revamp the welfare state when only fewer than one in ten think you will put poor people’s interests first.
Five simple facts capture the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in today:
1. Our nation is leaving the vulnerable behind, and Americans rightly find this unacceptable.
2. The War on Poverty has not been successful, and the last seven years have made things dramatically worse.
3. Americans know these facts and are instinctively skeptical of conventional large-government welfare policies.
4. While conservatives have criticized those outmoded policies, they have offered little in the way of alternatives.
5. Americans have concluded this is because conservatives don’t really care about the poor.
A half century of conventional wisdom has failed in the fight against poverty. The materialistic, mechanistic view of human development that a big-government approach presumes makes holistic solutions impossible. The only way to set things right is for conservatives to show we care and offer a new vision for the country. This new vision must be guided by the optimism of opportunity. It must declare peace on a prudent, reliable safety net for those who truly need it. It must harness the tools of private entrepreneurship, acknowledge the profound value of hard work, and echo the moral clarity of the Good Samaritan.
Where can we find such a vision? Not in a university classroom. Not even in a think tank. We can find it, it turns out, from men who used to live on the street.
Chapter 3
PUSHING THE BUCKET:
How Honest Work Ennobles and Elevates Us
Dallas Davis grew up with an absent father, an alcoholic mother, and no role models. By the seventh grade, he dropped out of school. At the age of fifteen, he had already left home and joined a gang. His life revolved around drugs and alcohol—and doing whatever it took to acquire them.
To a young teenager with few options, this lifestyle probably once looked like a glamorous escape. But it was soon unmasked as a deadly trap. Dallas ended up living on the streets of New York. During the freezing cold winters, he sought refuge in churches, in abandoned buildings, and eventually in Grand Central Terminal. It was there, under the grime-covered constellation of stars that decorate the station’s ceiling, that Dallas accidentally discovered the path to a better life.
One especially frigid day, Dallas lay huddled under a blanket in a corner of the terminal when a strange man walked up to him. He introduced himself as George McDonald, a name that was already familiar among the Grand Central homeless. A gruff, working-class Catholic, George had spent hundreds of nights handing out sandwiches to the people who called the terminal home. Local regulations didn’t exactly smile upon this pastime: Feeding the homeless had gotten George arrested four times.
Dallas was stunned by the gesture. “I had already just about given up on life,” he explained later.1 “I was dirty, stinking, nasty and disgusted with myself.” But when George spoke to him, “[w]hat I saw in his eyes was not just kindness or compassion, but recognition. He recognized that I was a human being.” George extended a simple courtesy to homeless men and women that hardly anyone else did. He treated them like real people.
That was a lot. But it wasn’t enough, as George learned from another homeless person, a woman known simply as “Mama.” On Christmas Eve in 1985, when he was distributing presents along with the usual meals, George presented Mama with a gift-wrapped scarf and wished her a Merry Christmas.2
It was the last time George would see her alive.
When the terminal closed around 1:30 a.m., the transit police forced the homeless out into the sub-twenty-degree night. Mama curled up next to a subway grate and waited out the hours until the terminal reopened. She made her way back inside and lay her weary body down on a wooden bench in the main waiting room. A few hours later, as children across the city leapt out of warm beds and tore into their presents, a police officer found Mama on that bench.3
She had died—a nameless “Jane Doe” for the city—still clutching the scarf George had given her.
When George heard about Mama’s death, the news pierced his heart. Handing out sandwiches and small gifts was great as far as it went, but it didn’t go far enough. People needed a sandwich to get from today to tomorrow. They needed dignity to build a real future. And that meant they needed not just to accept charity, but to give their own efforts and be valued for them.
And so, after much thought and discussion, George and his wife, Harriet, went big: They started a homeless shelter and job training organization for men called the “Doe Fund” in Mama’s honor. Homeless men—many coming straight from prison—would live in a converted Harlem schoolhouse; learn to work and earn; stay clean and sober; and graduate, ready to enter society as value-creating, values-conscious individuals. The Doe Fund’s objective was not merely to help homeless people survive from day to day. It was to empower them to reclaim their lives through the dignity of real, valuable, honest-to-goodness work.
The Doe Fund was up and running the next time Dallas Davis met George McDonald, in 2009.
Dallas did not come straight from Grand Central, however. Like many other men enmeshed in taking and selling drugs, he had gone to prison. Now he was about to be released, and he realized he had nowhere to go. His family wanted nothing to do with him, and his old associates would send him spiraling right back into old habits.
That’s when Dallas saw a prison flyer advertising the Doe Fund’s “Ready, Willing & Able” program. He remembered his encounter in Grand Central Terminal and the dignity with which George had treated him. And so, when he got out of prison, Dallas begged his counselor for a referral. She arranged an interview at the Doe Fund’s Harlem Center for Opportunity.
Even to a program that specialized in hard cases, Dallas’s record looked rough. He had been kicked out of previous shelters and programs after getting into fights and returning to drugs. As a result, Nazerine Griffin, the director of the Harlem Center, was looking skeptically at the ex-con who sat across from him in a shirt and tie.
But “Naz,” as he is known, wasn’t just a Doe employee. He was also an alumnus. A drug dealer who had become his own best customer, just a few years earlier Naz had found himself lying facedown on the pavement, hiding from police beneath a parked car. He made his way into a drug treatment program, but had no place to go upon completion except one of the city’s homeless shelters. It was a depressing place that, in his words, “warehoused human beings,” with no way out.
In a search for better options, he found his way to the Doe Fund, and was an early graduate in 1998. Eleven years later, his job was screening applicants for this very program.
Naz is tough, as Dallas soon learned. “Are you ready to change your life?” he asked forcefully. “Are you truly willing to put the work in?”
Dallas told Naz he was ready. But even in these hard questions, he detected something different from what he had experienced before in his life. “I had been through so many institutions in my life—jails, group homes, drug programs. They always told me what they could do for me. But this was the first time I was told what I could do for myself.”
Naz took him at his word, and admitted Dallas, giving him his shot at a fresh start. After orientation, Dallas was assigned to “push the bucket” as one of the Doe Fund’s “Men in Blue.” This was and stil
l is the first rung of the ladder for new entrants. Each day, Doe Fund trainees don bright blue uniforms, grab brooms and buckets, and clean 150 miles of New York City streets and sidewalks.
Dallas initially hated the idea of such work. But lo and behold, “It turned out I didn’t mind it at all. In fact, I kind of liked it.”
That might sound implausible, but anyone who has ever found moments of peace in an ordinary task can relate. Pushing the bucket gave Dallas time to think. It gave him the chance to form concrete goals he could meet and exceed. It gave him a reason to set his alarm every morning. “Before long,” Dallas says, “I started realizing I wasn’t just picking up trash from the streets. I was picking up values, morals, and principles. I was picking up self-esteem. And then when I would look back at the block I had just cleaned, and would see what a great job I had done, I realized that I had picked up pride.”
Over the next few months, Dallas did all the big routes. He pushed the bucket in Harlem River Park, in East Midtown, on Madison Avenue and even Park Avenue. He became a familiar face to commuters. “I remember seeing well-dressed people on their way to work . . . walk by me and say, ‘Hi, Dallas!’ These well-dressed people on Park Avenue—speaking to me!”
When he was homeless, people would avert their eyes and pass Dallas as quickly as possible. Now the commuters on his Park Avenue route said hello, and some even knew his name. Of course, it should embarrass New Yorkers that it took a blue uniform for Dallas to be treated with a shred of respect. But Dallas was thrilled.
That winter, New York was hit by a huge snowstorm that paralyzed the city. While most were huddled in their homes, Dallas and his fellow Men in Blue ventured out into the frozen city. They swapped their brooms for shovels and started clearing the streets. Dallas could not believe how far he had come. “We were out there making paths for the elderly, for the children, for people to get to work. Here we were, people who had slept in the garbage, in train stations, under bridges—those who society once thought couldn’t accomplish anything. We were the ones bringing the city back to life.”