People are noticing that Bush, who had gushed about the evils of poverty in New Orleans after the Katrina disaster, has gone strangely silent on the issue.
Bush had the opportunity to renew the nation’s attention to poverty after his rousing speach in Jackson Square. Instead, he has gone quiet as soon as the immediate crisis passed and instead has encouraged politics that worsen poverty in the country, not make it better:
*Bush’s Office of Management and Budget contemplates projections involving steep cuts to programs like Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, job training, and tax credits to minority-owned programs.
*The number of people living below the poverty line has increased sharply since the beginning of the Bush administration. In 2000, 31.6 million people were considered poor; in 2004 the number had increased to 37 million, or almost 13% of the entire population. This lies in contrast to years of decline in the poverty level during the Clinton administration.
*Bush continues to oppose an increase in the minimum wage, stuck at $5.15/hour for almost a decade. Unfortunately, inflation has not stopped during that period, so that anyone making the minimum wage is effectively much poorer than they were ten years ago.
*Bush’s “forward looking strategy on poverty,” according to the Heritage Foundation, has been to “raise work levels, reduce out-of-wedlock childbearing, and promote marriage.” (Oh I see..preventing gay marriage reduces the poverty level. Who would have thought?! Out of wedlock births have been increasing in recent years, not decreasing, according to experts. Who knows what “raising work levels” means in an era when many good manufacturing jobs are being shipped off to China.)
It seems like Bush only cares about poverty as long as it’s the crisis of the moment, and is content to just give tax breaks to the rich when people aren’t looking. Or maybe he just knows that the poor tend to vote Democratic.
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