Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 3, 1990 TAG: 9007030369
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JACK KEMP
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Traveling across the country, I've seen thousands of low-income people and families eagerly seeking change. Despite eight years of economic growth and opportunity, too many Americans still suffer the tragedies of poverty and homelessness, and look toward their future with a sense of hopelessness and despair.
Helping these people who have been left out of the unprecedented economic expansion is not only a moral imperative for our nation, but is also a winning and decisive political strategy. Redistribution of wealth is the debate of yesterday. Today's debate is over how best to tap and unleash the wealth of talent and potential in low-income people and their communities: "empowerment."
Whether people label this strategy "bleeding-heart conservatism," capitalism with a social conscience, or populist conservatism - it's the right thing to do, the right time to do it, and conservatives are the right people for the job.
Kimi Gray, chairperson of Kenilworth-Parkside Resident Managemnt Corp. in Washington, D.C., said recently that her residents, and public housing tenants across the country, may be registered Democrats, but they work with Republicans because Republicans are "the ones who seem to understand that we do not want to stay a poor and permanent underclass."
Our current welfare bureaucracy creates and perpetuates poverty. Examples abound. A mother on welfare in Milwaukee managed to save up about $3,000 so she could send her daughter to college. But because that was more money than welfare rules allow, the welfare agency took her to court and prosecuted her for fraud. She was fined $15,000 and given a one-year jail sentence, suspended. Since she didn't have $15,000, they took her entire $3,000 savings account. Guess what? She now spends every cent she gets, and she must rely on government subsidies to pay for just about everything.
In America today, a welfare mother has to earn $15,000 to $18,000 to bring home the equivalent of the average tax-free welfare payment. A study by Christopher Jencks and Kathryn Edin discovered that a working mother with two children earning $5 an hour would, in effect, take home minus-45 cents per hour. She actually loses money by going to work!
That's the bad news. The good news is that government policies can change. The forces that cause poverty can be reversed. In that spirit, let me outline some ideas for an agenda of empowerment:
We must expand resident management and "urban homesteading" programs to help low-income people acquire their own homes, and enjoy the pride and dignity of ownership.
The Bush administration has set a goal of creating more than 1 million new homeowners by 1992 through our Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere initiative.
Congress should pass the HOPE legislation, which includes Individual Retirement Accounts for first-time homebuyers, low-income housing tax credits, housing vouchers (comparable to food stamps, which families use to pay their rent), and other important measures for empowering the working poor.
Congress should approve the administration's Shelter Plus Care program to expand community-based mental health facilities, drug abuse treatment, job training, and day care. This program will help homeless Americans get shelter, transitional housing, and vital support services.
There is the challenge of creating jobs. Along with planting a billion new trees in the '90s, we ought to plant the seeds of millions of new minority enterprises.
Virtually every survey shows that the major problem for inner-city entrepreneurs is the absence of seed capital to start a business. A dramatic reduction in the capital-gains tax has been shown to double the number of small company start-ups, and create millions of new jobs.
This, coupled with greater utilization of Enterprise Zones (inner-city areas where business owners receive special tax and regulatory relief), will unlock existing capital and help to fund a whole new generation of budding entrepreneurs in America's inner-cities.
A new version of tax reform is needed to benefit families, including the president's child-care tax credit. This would remove low-income families from the tax rolls and dramatically increase the after-tax income of welfare mothers and unemployed fathers who go to work.
To enhance educational opportunity, we need to expand parental choice and free-market competition through "magnet" schools, education vouchers and tuition tax-credits.
We can win the war on poverty; we have to remember, however, that the real wealth of America comes not from our physical resources but from our human resources. Not from things, but from ideas. Our greatest assets are the minds yet to be educated, the businesses not yet opened, the technologies still to be discovered, the jobs waiting to be created.
by CNB