Poverty Is Still Off the Agenda

President Clinton’s ambitious domestic agenda reveals once again the gulf between his promise and his policy. The mall-tested, bite-sized proposals in his State of the Union address kicked his already stratospheric popularity ratings up a few more points. Liberals applauded enthusiastically; conservatives denounced the revival of “tax and spend, big government” policies. Yet the president’s program is a striking surrender of liberal hopes to conservative assumptions.

The president offered liberals much to fight for: protecting patients, raising the minimum wage, passing the Hate Crimes Act, money for schools, teachers, day care, civil rights enforcement, Jesse Jackson’s program for seeding “untapped markets here at home,” paying U.N. debts, ratifying the test ban accord and much more.

Activists are also relieved by his pledge to keep Social Security and Medicare whole, thereby undermining the privatization plans peddled by the president’s allies in the conservative Democratic Leadership Council. And once again, the president will use Medicare and Social Security to fend off Republican calls for tax cuts that greatly favor the rich.

Yet, after the applause fades, when what Newt Gingrich called the “cannibals” of the Republican right are put back in their cages and Washington gets on with its business, the president will have left himself in a staggeringly conservative box.

A Democratic president tells the American people that the most successful economy in 30 years will generate $4.4 trillion in surplus revenues over the next 15 years. We have a historic opportunity to redress unmet needs.

Then, he calls for using 77% of that surplus to pay down the national debt to a level not seen since before World War I. Another 11% would go to seed private retirement accounts, a Wall Street boondoggle that inevitably will benefit middle-income savers over low-income strugglers. The remainder will go to the Pentagon, which requires a Cold War budget when the Soviet Union is no more.

As a result, domestic initiatives are limited to demonstration projects to show that we care and are funded by robbing Peter to pay Paul. There is no mention of the one in five children who are raised in poverty. No proposal to ensure that all have a healthy start--adequate nutrition, health care, child care, access to Head Start. Trillions in surpluses are projected, but poverty remains off the agenda.

Contrast that with Lyndon Johnson 30 years ago. Then the Kerner Commission, convened after riots rocked American cities, called for a major war on poverty. Unable to get a tax increase through Congress, Johnson pledged that the “growth dividend” generated by the strong economy could pay for major new efforts.

Sadly that growth dividend--and much more--was squandered in the jungles of Vietnam. It took three decades struggling with stagflation, oil shocks and Reagan’s supply side debacle to come out the other end. Now, once again, a Democrat is in the White House; revenues are rising; the budget is in surplus.

But the president proposes paying down the national debt, a position previously reserved to a dwindling band of Calvin Coolidge nostalgists.

The president’s tactical posture is understandable, given the Republican threat to cut taxes. But it is indefensible and possibly dangerous. If childhood poverty cannot be addressed now, when can it be? If the Democratic Party does not call for action, who will?

It is dangerous because the U.S., as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has warned, is an island of prosperity in a troubled sea. One third of the world’s economies are in recession. As the global crisis washes up on these shores, U.S. manufacturers are already in recession; the economy is likely to need a spur, not a bridle. In such conditions, it is perverse for Democrats to extol debt reduction, while Republicans sound like John Maynard Keynes, calling for a tax cut to stimulate growth.

The president is the master of the political stage. He has outlasted Newt and outmaneuvered the Republican reactionaries. Yet his clever tactical retreats threaten to become strategic surrenders. At the very least, liberals, people of conscience, church and community activists must begin to call once again for making equal opportunity a reality, not a slogan.

America abides the worst childhood poverty of any industrial country. That may be a conservative legacy, but it is a national shame.