MuskogeePhoenix.com, Muskogee, OK

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April 26, 2009

THE PEOPLE SPEAK: Welfare won’t fix poverty in America

I firmly disagree with the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Edelman, and her recent assessment that more needs to be spent on education programs to combat poverty.

It is not money that is needed. Rather, it is empowerment. Trillions of dollars have been spent to combat poverty since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society began in the 1960s. In Oklahoma, according to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, nearly $11,000 is spent per student in our public classrooms.

Yet with all this spending, poverty as a percent of the population has remained unchanged. Edelman mentions blacks as more likely than whites to be incarcerated as evidence of our system failing. I argue that this example demonstrates the failure of wealth redistribution.

Since the 1960s, black families have been decimated by a welfare system that encourages absent fathers, abortion, wealth envy and victimhood. This same welfare system has enslaved blacks and whites to dependence on government.

What is needed to liberate families from the stain of poverty is individual educational empowerment in the form of universal school choice. School choice would be the first effective shot fired in the war on poverty. Health, education, crime and economics would all radically change in our poorest neighborhoods if we were to advance true school choice. We need a government dedicated not to “programs” but rather to individual empowerment.

Phillip W. Smith

Oklahoma City



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