Wasn’t it Ronald Reagan who said something like, “we declared war on poverty, and poverty won?”
I believe so . . .So what we actually need to do is to declare war on the notion of poverty as a condition in which Americans stay.
People were wiped out by Katrina, financially - but by now I venture that most of them are in about the same circumstances as they were before the storm hit. More in debt, probably, but living about the same lifestyle and with about the same prospects.
Thomas Sowell points out that the "income quintile" distribution so beloved of "liberals" is singularly unedifying because in the real America the same individual's income will vary - mostly increasing - over their working lifetime.And certainly that is a desirable thing, giving room for hope for all. But even if everyone had the same income trajectory, starting out at age 20 earning $30,000 annually and retiring with an income of $80,000, the liberals' beloved "bottom quintile" of income would still exist - and have only half the income of the "top quintile." In the real America, much like the "liberal" wet dream America of identical prospects for all, the bottom quintile of the income distribution is loaded with young people just starting out. And of the people who were in the bottom quintile ten years ago, more are now in the top quintile today than are still in the bottom quintile.
Sowell calls the idea that policy should be crafted according to the conditions of the few who remain permanently in the bottom quintile the "wino veto" of policy which is realistic for American society generally.
So actually it was not so much that poverty won, but that the idea of "poverty" as a permanent condition has been so successful for "liberals."