When discussing government welfare programs, and specifically the "War on Poverty", you'll often see liberals and conservatives disagree over how effective it was at helping the poor. Sometimes you'll even see conservatives claim that poverty has not improved since then at all, by pointing to some poverty statistics while ignoring the distinction between relative/absolute poverty, cuts to those anti-poverty programs, increased immigration of poor people since those programs started, the fact that the benefits of many of these anti-poverty programs are not even counted against whether to count someone as poor in the cited statistics, the nuance between counting income or consumption, etc.
Then when discussing the plight of the US poor today, and especially when discussing the significance of increased inequality since around the 1970s, which is almost about the same time period as looking at America after the "War on Poverty" programs were put into place, the roles reverse. Liberals will sometimes try very hard to show that the poor have not had any improvement since then, and conservatives will sometimes try very hard to show the opposite, often by pointing out the same considerations they ignore when trying to show that the War on Poverty did not result in the poor being any better off.
I thought about this yesterday when reading a conservative book that seemed to make this contradictory switch within the very same book. People are funny.
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