Here’s what Libby Schaaf said at a news conference last week, in justifying her expansion of Oakland’s guaranteed income scheme: “We know that poverty is a policy failure, not personal failure.”
Excuse me, but who is this “we” she refers to? Because it doesn’t include me.
You don’t have to be a sociologist to know what causes poverty; you just have to use your common sense. Among the many causes of why a person is poor may well be the kinds of structural or policy issues that progressives such as Schaaf point out: inequality and marginalization, poor healthcare, lack of education coupled with inferior schools, a tax system that favors the rich, the legacy of prior discrimination, and insufficient jobs, or jobs that barely pay enough to live on.
The Left loves to focus on these causes, many of which can be addressed through increased funding in areas that impact poor people. This is the legacy of the Left: it always has had an interest in investing in the poor, whether it was F.D.R.’s social welfare programs of the 1930s, L.B.J.’s War on Poverty of the 1960s, or Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which has brought healthcare insurance to millions of struggling Americans.
On the other side of the political spectrum is the Right. They prefer to focus on individual initiative and personal accountability, the inference being that many people are poor because they have made faulty life choices. The Right instinctively rebels against government attempts to alleviate poverty because such “misguided welfare programs” (in Reagan’s words) demotivate people from working and consign them to lives of dependent infantilism.
I came across a poll in which Republicans were twice as likely to say that people are poor because of individual failings as to say the reason is lack of opportunity, which is the Democratic position. I think any reasonable person would agree that there are truths on both sides. Clearly the system is rigged toward the wealthy and more comfortable. The tax laws protect the rich and exploit the middle class, making the transfer of generational wealth easier for the already-prosperous. The Left understands that the distortions of unbridled capitalism promote social and economic inequality and must be redressed.
But isn’t it just as clear that individual failings are also part of the story? And if this isn’t recognized—as Schaaf refuses to recognize it—then we’re that much farther from solving the problem. I know I’ll probably get criticized for saying this, but there are a lot of people out there, of all races and ethnicities, who think that going to school and playing by the rules is for losers and suckers. There’s a bias against cooperating with the system, against hard work, against wanting to get a good job, against participating in a culture that, according to these people, is rigged. Being rebellious can be fun when you’re young, but continued rebellion against societal norms seems a likely path to an adulthood of poverty and struggle, if not imprisonment and death.
Extremism is the problem. On the Right, we find extremists in Red states and districts, where people favor the Bible over science, are hostile to the rights of Gays and women, and have an aversion to non-Christians, especially those with dark skin. On the Left, we find extremists in cities like Oakland, where a good part of our current catastrophic situation (encampments and crime) is directly attributable to years of irresponsible “social justice warriors” running the city (into the ground, as it turns out). And, yes, that includes Libby Schaaf: it’s shocking how she chooses to pretend that personal responsibility has nothing to do with poverty.
If I had a magic wand, and could, with a single wave, accomplish one thing to make America better, it would be to make extremists on both sides disappear!