Clinton Dodges the War on Poverty President Clinton's poverty tour last week was supposed to call attention to the needs of Americans at the bottom of the income ladder. But what it really highlights is our government's complete indifference to the problem of poverty in America. Talk is cheap, and so is the Clinton administration when it comes to doing anything for the poor. This is a case where numbers speak louder than words.
History repeats itself, as the saying goes, first as tragedy and then as farce.
But the President's counter-productive role on this issue did not end with welfare reform. He is now committed to paying off the national debt over the next 15 years, and the budget surpluses that he is counting on assume that we will cut scores of billions of dollars of spending from Federal anti-poverty programs. Of course most of these proposed cuts are just posturing to counter the Republicans, who are even less interested in helping the poor, and they will probably never happen. But by placing the economically irrelevant national debt as top priority, and agreeing to Republican demands to increase military spending, the President guarantees that the foreseeable future will hold no hope for America's poor. Yet few people were concerned that this debt would choke off growth, and of course it did not.