Keeping the Poor in Poverty

School choice, lower taxes, job creation: These, and not welfare payments, are what would really help the poor.

In his autobiography, former British prime minister Tony Blair recounts the political epiphany that caused him to break with the old-style class-warfare–based Labour Party that he had grown up with. “In a sense they wanted to celebrate the working class,” he writes, “not make them middle class.”

In many ways, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats appear to have the same attitude about the American poor.

They talk frequently about the poor. They lavish programs upon them. (Last year the Obama administration increased spending on means-tested and other anti-poverty programs by $120 billion, to a total of just under $600 billion.) But they seem curiously indifferent — if not actually hostile — to proposals that might actually reduce poverty in America.

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