You want real progress? Then vote for conservatives. For further information, you progressives who read the Globe and Mail will have to find the article in the “Report on Business” section of your newspaper, apparently. (That way, they won’t ever see this article because as we know, they go right to the “Arts and Feelings” section and recycle the rest).
An article appearing at the CTV.ca web site (in their “Business” section, which is strange inasmuch as it has nearly nothing to do with business) and in their sister newspaper the Globe and Mail (in their “Report on Business” section), suggests reason number 743 why the “progressive” political message is suspect.
‘Progressive’ politics not so progressive
Neil Reynolds, From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
OTTAWA — Which American families with children increased their earnings most in the past 15 years – the poorest or the richest? For most people, the answer comes as a surprise. For “progressive” people, it comes as a shock. The answer? The poorest.
Divided into five groups with the same number of families in each, the highest-income group reported 50-per-cent higher earnings in 2005 than in 1991. Moving down, the next three groups reported 20-per-cent higher earnings.
At the bottom, the poorest group recorded 80-per-cent higher earnings. Adjusted for inflation, these families – the poorest 20 per cent of families with children in the United States – achieved by far the highest percentage earnings gains.
And these poor families mostly increased their incomes the old-fashioned way – by working more.
In 1991, these families had income of $12,400 (U.S.) a year. They collected $6,100 from “earned income” – wages; $4,000 in cash payments from various welfare programs; and $2,000 from such sources as gifts, inheritances and interest income. They collected another $300 in “earned-income” tax credits, a federal rewards program that compensates people who lose welfare payments when they work longer hours, earn more wages and no longer qualify for welfare.
By 2005, these families had income of $16,800, an increase of 35 per cent. They collected $11,000 from wages, an increase of 80 per cent, and received $700 in cash welfare payments, a decline of 82.5 per cent. They collected $2,700 from other sources – and, reflecting the movement from welfare to wages, $2,400 as earned-income tax credits. Now they earned almost twice as much in wages and got only half as much income from the government.
The U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the federal research agency that produces independent economic analysis for the Senate and the House of Representatives, published these conclusions last month in a report that dispels some of the popular mythology of worsening economic inequality in the U.S. – mythology now emerging as demagogic fodder for the 2008 presidential election campaign.
Writing last week in The Washington Post – “The Rise of the Bottom Fifth” – Brookings Institution economist Ron Haskins called this return to work by poor families with children “the biggest success in American social policy in decades.” The CBO numbers, he said, should make Republicans proud: “Low-income families with children increased their work effort, many of them in response to the 1996 welfare reform law that was designed to have exactly this effect.”
[…]
The fashionable American left, identifying itself as “progressive,” is now ascendant in the Democratic Party as the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards demonstrate. In a major campaign speech last week, entitled “A Progressive Vision for America,” Mrs. Clinton asserted that she considered herself “a thoroughly optimistic and modern progressive.”
[…]
Conservative Republican Newt Gingrich is arguably the chief architect of U.S. welfare reform, through his Contract with America in the mid 90s, when Republicans took control of the House.
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
Contact Mr. Johannesen about this article using this form. Please refer to article's title.
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