Bush Pitches Poverty Plan

President Bush on Sunday declared America’s war on poverty “only half-done” and delivered an impassioned pitch for his plan to increase government funding for religious organizations that perform social services.

Bush characterized his faith-based initiative as the next step in the evolution of Washington’s long campaign to combat poverty, launched by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and overhauled by welfare reform legislation in 1996.

“Welfare as we knew it has ended, but poverty has not,” Bush said to graduating students at the University of Notre Dame in his first commencement address as president. “For the task ahead, we must move to the third stage of combating poverty.”

To accomplish that, he said, religious groups must be allowed to compete for government funds on an equal footing with secular counterparts. Bush has created within the White House an Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and has sent to Congress legislation that would carry out his plan.

“Government has an important role. It will never be replaced by charities,” Bush said. “Yet government must also do more to take the side of charities and community healers and support their work.”

In his opening remarks, the president lavishly praised Notre Dame for its “great tradition of social teaching” and said that the Catholic university is “an ideal place to report on our nation’s commitment to the poor and how we are keeping it.”

The commencement address was the first of three Bush is scheduled to give this week. Today, he is to speak at his alma mater, Yale University, and on Friday, at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

In delivering what senior White House aides described as “a call to arms” to rally the “armies of compassion,” Bush paid tribute to two of his Democratic predecessors: Johnson and Bill Clinton.

He said Johnson’s groundbreaking anti-poverty initiatives “had noble intentions and some enduring successes” but also produced unintended consequences.

The president hailed the welfare reform act, signed by Clinton in 1996, for having cut welfare rolls in half. Yet he noted that more than 12 million U.S. children remain trapped in poverty and offered a sometimes stinging critique of the nation’s efforts over the last four decades to assist the downtrodden.

“The welfare entitlement became an enemy of personal effort and responsibility, turning many recipients into dependents,” Bush said. “The war on poverty also turned too many citizens into bystanders, convinced that compassion had become the work of government alone.”

The president said that “most states are seeing the first wave of welfare recipients who have reached the [1996] law’s five-year time limit” and must drop off the rolls permanently.

“The hardest problems remain: people with fewer skills and greater barriers to work. People with complex human problems, like illiteracy and addiction, abuse and mental illness. We do not yet know what will happen to these men and women, or to their children. But we cannot sit and watch, leaving them to their own struggles and their own fate.”

The answer for “the third stage of combating poverty,” Bush said, is his faith-based initiative.

“Some critics of this approach object to the idea of government funding going to any group motivated by faith. But they should look all around them. Public money already goes to groups like the Center for the Homeless and, on a larger scale, to Catholic Charities,” Bush said.

“Do the critics really want to cut them off? Medicaid and Medicare money currently goes to religious hospitals. Should this practice be ended? Child care vouchers for low-income families are redeemed every day at houses of worship across America. Should this be prevented? Government loans send countless students to religious colleges. Should that be banned?

“Of course not. America has a long tradition of accommodating and encouraging religious institutions when they pursue public goals. My administration did not create that tradition, but we will expand it to confront some urgent problems.”

Bush said he intends to convene a White House conference this fall to encourage corporate America to give more to charities, including those run by religious organizations.

He also promised to include in next year’s budget a funding increase for low-income home ownership programs such as Habitat for Humanity. The budget request would increase from the $25 million proposed for 2002 to $75 million for 2003, he said.