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Up From Poverty
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12053 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1987 |
3,488 Words |
| Author
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Jack Kemp
Jack Kemp is a Republican congressman from New York and a
presidential candidate. |
ON THE ROAD TO ECONOMIC FREEDOM
An Agenda for Black Progress
Edited by Robert L. Woodson
Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1987
13 pp., $16.95
Perhaps no other problem in this century has been so discussed and debated, but also so continuously vexing, as poverty in America. Those on the political Left have looked to government for the solution to poverty, while the Right has tended to blame government in every case. In my view, we need to go beyond these views. The poor may be always with us, but their number can be put on a steadily declining path, as it was for most of our history, if our market economy and democratic system are expanded to encourage greater entrepreneurship, wider opportunities for private sector jobs, strong families, and standards of right and wrong. Often, the incentives grafted onto our system reward the opposite.
The current welfare reform proposals in Congress are a good example of these political dynamics. Liberal welfare reform bills just tinker with child care, welfare benefit levels, and job training requirements. But sweeping reform of the entire system is needed to eliminate powerful disincentives against families, new jobs, work effort, and childbearing within marriage. Somehow, the debate gets sidetracked from fundamental principles.
A broader, fresh look at our economic and social system is needed, and On the Road to Economic Freedom, a collection of essays by a new generation of black thinkers and activists, provides one road map out of the intellectual void. Their rallying theme is that progress against poverty can be achieved by mobilizing the strengths of the black community itself.
A New Generation
These authors believe cries of racism and repetition of black statistics about black poverty are counterproductive to black progress. They believe that blaming racism and inadequate spending as the causes of poverty places the solutions to black problems out of the hands of blacks themselves. Nothing could be more calculated to frustrate the will and ambition of black Americans than telling them that they can do little about their own condition, that the real problems lie with society, with environment, with white racism, with government--matters beyond their immediate
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