TAPPED Weighs In on the Poverty vs. Inclusion Debate

Both Mark Schmitt and Ezra Klein weigh in on the debate—here's Schmitt's conclusion:

That said, I think there's a lot to say for an "inclusionist" perspective. Defining the problem as poverty is limiting, in part because lifting a family above the poverty threshold -- $16,600 for a family of three -- is a very small accomplishment. It takes much more than that -- in the form of cash income, time, and security -- to really be able to participate in the economy or in society. And I think that we need to find ways to talk about policy and programs in ways that show them as part of the broad social contract. Back during the welfare reform fights of the mid-90s, I always wanted to find ways to talk about welfare not as a program for a defined class of "welfare recipients," but as the last layer of the safety net that supports all of us. But neither right nor left could escape the idea that there are welfare recipients and there's the rest of us.

The CAP report includes some inclusionist elements. For example, it proposes indexing the minimum wage to the average hourly wage, rather than to inflation. (It's not indexed at all now, but most proposals to do so key it to inflation.) That would be a great innovation. We might also move toward redefining poverty as a relative measure—40% of median income, let's say —rather than the "basket of goods" approach designed a half-century ago. When the Blair government set a goal of reducing child poverty by half, it is based on this relative goal rather than a fixed one.

But on the idea that simply putting a different name or different frame on policy ideas that are essentially anti-poverty ideas, I'm in sympathy with Halpin. There's a little too much made of the cult of framing. The right didn't discredit the Estate Tax by framing it as the "Death Tax," the Estate Tax was unpopular no matter what you called it. Social inclusion might be a good way to think internally about what we're trying to accomplish, but poverty has the advantage that it is a tangible, defined thing, real goals can be constructed around it, and of course as Halpin points out, it has centuries of moral resonance. And it may well be, as Ruy Teixera's examination of public opinion suggests, that a decade after welfare reform, and with the right-wing noise machine running out of air, people don't automatically think "undeserving" when they hear the word "poor."

And Klein's:

But there's something to be said for making inclusion a complementary, rather than substitute, end goal. If we just transferred funds so the incomes of everyone in poor urban areas registered at a dollar above the poverty line, the problems would not be solved. The marginalization and isolation of these communities—and, for that matter, of the poor from the mainstream of American life—is distressing on many levels, and costly on more. Research commissioned by CAP and conducted by a trio of eminent economists found that child poverty costs the country nearly a half-trillion dollars yearly. But this drag comes from lost productivity, increased crime, and poor health, problems that are related more directly to social exclusion than low incomes. Fixes will have to include everything from better education to more economically mixed housing.

So here's my takeaway: You have to engage the poverty fight. Particularly in the aftermath of welfare reform and Katrina, when poverty fighting means something different to the public than "giving money to undeserving black people." But the Left would do well to begin thinking more seriously about social inclusion as a policy goal, if not as a political framework (I don't think the middle class paqrticularly wants the poor included in their neighborhoods). I can't say I'm tremendously familiar with the Inclusionist.org folks, but their focus on "reframing" the poverty debate worries me, particularly when they recommend poverty-fighters focus on "powerful alternative frames" and suggest such midseason trades as "reducing inequality, rebuilding the middle class, and promoting social inclusion." That strikes me as far too reflexively fearful of conservatives, and far too likely to end up actually "rebuilding the middle class," which is an important goal, but not synonymous with reducing poverty.

A couple of quick thoughts in response (more later when I have time).

First, as I discussed in a prior post, the data cited by Teixeira doesn't support the pro-poverty case as much as it may appear—and the more compelling communications research in my view is that of the Economy that Works for All Project, research that actually looked at completing frames and not just snapshots of public opinion. (I've got a hunch Teixeira's own views on this are more nuanced that he presents them in the CAP piece—here's what he had to say in an article in the Atlantic that he co-wrote with Joel Rogers in 2000: "The failure of activist government to get that escalator [to the middle class] moving again, together with its apparent concentration on the problems or rights of others (minorities, the poor, gays, even criminals), has persuaded forgotten-majority voters that government is more a part of this values-experience disjunction than the solution to it. The direct and long-lasting result is the sour and skeptical attitude toward government that has become so common today.")

Second, Schmitt notes that "poverty has the advantage that it is a tangible, defined thing, real goals can be constructed around it", but that only means that social inclusion is in the same position that poverty was in the early 1960s when the War on Poverty was declared and government decided it had to figure out how to define and measure the concept of poverty. Here's one example of a set of measurable goals that I could see grouping under the heading of social inclusion: 1) increasing the share of the population with incomes above 50 percent of median income; 2) increasing the share of workers with jobs that pay more than $11 an hour (or some other figure); 3) increasing the share of the population with health insurance.