Last week I wrote a bit about the rising percentage of Americans living in poverty.
Today, William Raspberry points out that this is the fourth straight year that poverty has risen. He uses the backdrop of the disaster in New Orleans to put the issue in perspective.
He writes:
The easy thing is to blame the politicians -- as both Curtis and Goldmark implicitly are doing.
But politicians like being reelected. And the one sure bet is that the politician who proposes that we sacrifice our personal convenience and pay higher taxes in the long-term interest of society will be turned out of office.
To put it another way, the politicians do what the voters want done.
It occurs to me that a real-time video of the inundation of New Orleans -- not of the hurricane itself, but of the disappearing barrier islands, misapplied engineering and political inattention -- might, if played back very slowly, provide a visual approximation of the potential effects of global warming on the lower-lying coastal areas of the world.
And maybe if we could videotape the growing chasm between rich and poor and the persistent increases in our nation's poverty and play that back at high speed, we might be shocked into doing something sensible about reducing poverty and inequality in America.
He's right. Politicians more frequently win elections promising to "streamline government" or "reduce waste," than by promising to harness greater public resources to fight poverty. Of course waste is bad, but we need to begin re-thinking what types of big things we, as Americans, can do together in the public sector to make this a better country for everyone who lives in it. As voters, we're suffering from a small, parochial, short-term mindset.
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