My colleague Joe Coletti does indeed set the record straight and I
commend him on doing so. But one thing needs to be pointed out. When it
comes to public policies related to poverty the goals of the big
government (dare we say socialist) left and the goals of we at the JLF
are different. We are against poverty and want to construct policies
that will allow people to move from poverty to prosperity. If one looks
at the range of policies typically proposed by the leftists who claim
to be advocates for the poor, none of them are designed to lift people
out of poverty but to maintain them in their poverty. For example,
increases in the minimum wage will never lift people out of poverty. At
best it will make a few low income people slightly more comfortable in
their impoverished state while making others, the very low skilled who find themselves unemployable at the higher wage,
a lot worse off. The same is true for the EITC. The program might be an
ok way of slightly easing the burden of the working poor, but it will
ultimately do nothing that will make the working poor more valuable in
labor markets and therefore lift them into the ranks of the non-poor.

The best way to make poor people richer and at least lift them
into the middle class is to advocate policies that promote overall
economic growth, job creation, and capital formation. (To those
leftists lurking on the Locker Room today: it is a well-known principle
in economics that increased capital investment leads to higher wages.
See any introductory economics textbook.) This would include reducing
taxes for everyone and eliminating the double and triple taxation of
investment income, including capital gains taxes and corporate income
taxes.
It would also include removing the barriers to
entrepreneurship. Historically, poor people in this country have moved
into the middle and upper classes by starting and running their own
businesses. This was the story of early 20th century
immigrants–Italian, Jewish, Greek, Irish, etc. They came here with
nothing, but faced a world of very low taxes and few restrictions on
entrepreneurship. The goal of most of the left is to shut almost all of
this down with environmental regulations, carbon trading programs, high
marginal tax rates, land use planning regulations (which drive up land
prices), etc. Of course all of this creates more poverty, which will
give them more reasons to devise more programs to maintain the poor.
This also means continuous funding to maintain and expand the poverty
pimp bureaucracies that have developed around these programs.

The real difference between us and our adversaries on the left
is that we really don’t like poverty and we want to get as many people
out of it as possible. We also know that this has never been
accomplished and cannot be accomplished through coercive wealth
transfers–progressive taxation, minimum wage laws, etc., but must be
accomplished through
wealth creation. If actions are any indication, leftists seem to have
no problems with poverty per se, as they rarely if ever support
policies that have been proven to lift poor people out of poverty.
Maybe the whole idea is to feel good about caring for the poor–with
someone else’s money, of course.