NEWT GINGRICH ON 'OUR WAR ON POVERTY'

Rethinking the War on Poverty When President Lyndon Johnson announced the “war on poverty” 50 years ago this week, most television broadcasts were still black and white. Ford’s most popular car that year was the Galaxie, and it looked like this. The 1964 model came with seat belts included for the first time; they went across your lap, at least if you were in the front seat. The Mustang, Ford’s iconic car of the decade, did not even exist yet. The big winners at the Academy Awards that year were My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins. The third James Bond movie, Goldfinger, also came out in 1964, and the plot’s gadget of note was the laser, a brand new technology which wowed audiences. On the day of Johnson’s speech, the Beatles had not released an album in the U.S., and Gilligan’s Island had not debuted on TV. Virtually all Americans still dialed each other using rotary phones. The very first touch-tone systems, in fact, were introduced just weeks before Johnson’s first State of the Union address, the speech in which he announced his anti-poverty initiative. Needless to say, very little that we think of as modern existed in 1964. There were no personal computers. There were no cell phones, no smartphones, and no tablets. There was no Internet, no GPS, and no real cable television. The world has changed profoundly in the half-century since Johnson declared a war on poverty. In that time, as Peter Ferrara points out, the welfare bureaucracy has spent more than $16 trillion on means-tested entitlements. For each American living in poverty, we now spend $17,000 annually on these programs. And after 50 years of this strategy, there are still nearly 50 million Americans living in poverty today, and President Obama calls “inequality” is “the defining issue of our time.” The war, he says, is “far from over.” He’s right: 50 years in, we’re still far from winning the war on poverty. But what does he--what does the left--propose to turn the tide? A small hike in the minimum wage, (when only about one third of one percent of Americans lives under the poverty line earning minimum wage). They want some higher taxes on the rich, a few new bureaucracies at most. In other words, the same ideas we’ve been trying for the last 50 years--programs whose most notable achievement is trapping millions of Americans in dependency. The best response to these proposals may be a half century old itself: Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech, which he, too, delivered in 1964. “Do they honestly expect us to believe,” he asked, “that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we're spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have—and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs—do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic?” It didn’t. And none of the same old, timid ideas we’re hearing from the left to mark this anniversary will do that either, of course. We owe it to the least well-off Americans to develop a completely new approach to the war on poverty. Instead of recycling bureaucratic proposals from the era of black and white television, it’s time to rethink fundamentally how it is possible to help the poor in this very different world. Outside of government, solutions are increasingly personal, digital, and decentralized. We have lots of smart new tools we could apply to this challenge. Shouldn’t we do so? For example, as I discuss in my new book, Breakout, inexpensive smartphones with adaptive learning software similar to Khan Academy (which I described in a newsletter last week) could help empower the poor with materials tailored for their needs and abilities. Another pioneer in online education, Udacity, offers a free online course called “How to Build a Startup,” walking prospective entrepreneurs through the process of founding their own company. Udacity is experimenting with offering it in prisons. These are just the earliest hints of how the changes of the past 50 years could (and should) transform our approach to poverty. Let me know in the comments what ideas you have for rethinking how we help poor Americans. It’s past time to replace the policies that have abandoned so many of our fellow citizens to a diminished future. Your Friend, Newt P.S. I will be on Arsenio Hall tonight with my Crossfire co-host, Van Jones. Find out how to tune in here. Autographed copies of Callista's new children's book, Yankee Doodle Dandy, and my new book, Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America’s Fate are now available in the Gingrich Productions store. Order both books today! Click here to order autographed copies of Yankee Doodle Dandy Click here to order autographed copies of Breakout