This post by Karen Dolan at The Hill for all the world looks to me like my story of the three merchants. Or the cat and rat farm. The author’s claim is that we can greatly reduce poverty permanently by maintaining measures put in place on an emergency basis when the lockdowns for COVID-19 were imposed indefinitely:
The U.S. Census data for 2021 demonstrates that poverty is a political choice. We chose during the pandemic to take it head-on relatively effectively. Now we must reaffirm that choice.
Repeat after me: perpetual motion does not work. It might appear to work in the short term but it does not work.
The author has failed to notice the inflation and the hardships created by it that the Fed is presently contending with or the hardships that are being created by raising interest rates. Those are at least in part a consequence of too much spending subsidized by expanding the money supply, i.e. issuing credit to ourselves for the spending.
All of that said I agree with the author’s claim that poverty is a political choice. More than 2,000 years ago Aristotle maintained that politics was the “master science” in that it was the underlying explanation in all human actions.
The author might consider that poverty has been chosen as the lesser evil. There are many, many ways of reducing poverty. For example, not bearing children until one has completed high school and is married are known ways of combatting poverty. Today it is fashionable to condemn that observation as anti-woman and racist but the condemnations do not make it less true.
We should also keep in mind the observation that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. That pertains to poverty as well. The decision to attempt to strike a balance between encouraging poverty and making the lives of the poor less burdensome is a political one as is the decision on where the proper balance resides.
We could raise taxes so that revenue pays for anything which we might wish to spend. Our failure to do that is a political decision, based, in part, on the trade-offs involved.
