The Conservative Heart

by Arthur C. Brooks

  By the way, this is emphatically not a question that is limited to particular racial or ethnic groups. As my AEI colleague Charles Murray shows in his research, the same problems and pathologies afflict poor white people as other impoverished communities. All of the best research on the topic shows that this is a question of economic marginalization and the associated deleterious social effects.

  Many elites today presume that low-income Americans are somehow unworthy of the same cultural principles to which we hold ourselves and our own families. We are told that it is unfeeling and unkind to hold everyone to the same standards, regardless of how much money they make. But in fact, it is condescending relativism that is unfeeling and unkind. Conservatives must promote and defend the time-tested stores of personal and social meaning—faith, family, community, and earned success through work—for everyone.

  A LITTLE BIT OF HELP

  The number of Americans who are genuinely needy is growing. A 2010 analysis from the National Center on Family Homelessness found that child homelessness spiked by a staggering 38 percent during the Great Recession years.8 And a team of public health researchers stunned readers of the journal Health Affairs in 2012 when they released new life expectancy findings. Even as medical advances have increased the average national life span, the scholars found that low-income white females with fewer than twelve years of education have actually seen their life expectancy drop—and sharply—since 1990.9

  In addition to cutting short life expectancy, poverty also inhibits brain function. In 2013, the Washington Post described the results of a study published in the journal Science10: “[p]overty consumes so much mental energy that people struggling to make ends meet often have little brainpower left for anything else, leaving them more susceptible to bad decisions that can perpetuate their situation. Poverty is the equivalent of pulling an all-nighter,” one of the researchers explained. “Picture yourself after an all-nighter. Being poor is like that every day.”11

  Another equally troubling study found that being raised in poverty actually measurably diminishes brain activity in children, starting at a very young age. As soon as early infancy—well before, I would note, oft-discussed solutions like free pre-K or Head Start would kick in—a lack of opportunity and earned success in a baby’s family diminishes how well their brains can work.12

  Conservatives who are moved by these facts naturally reach for their checkbooks—and deliver in a big way. Here are a few facts about charitable giving I found while researching my 2006 book, Who Really Cares:

  •Households headed by a “conservative” give, on average, 30 percent more dollars to charity than households headed by a “liberal.”13

  •This discrepancy is not an artifact of income differences. On the contrary, the average liberal family earns an average of 6 percent more per year than the average conservative family, yet still gives less away. Conservative families gave more than liberal families within every income class, from poor to middle class to rich.

  •These differences go beyond money. Data from 2002 suggest that people who identified as “conservative” or “extremely conservative” made up less than one-fifth of the population but provided more than a quarter of all blood donations. If liberals and moderates gave blood like conservatives do, the blood supply in the U.S. would instantly jump by about 45 percent.14

  Clearly, conservatives are generous with their own money. But we also know that we cannot solve all problems of poverty and need through private charity. We can and should give even more, and must continue to lead by example. But even in this remarkably charitable country—where voluntary giving alone exceeds the total gross domestic product of nations such as Israel and Chile—private donations cannot guarantee anywhere near the level of assistance that vast majorities of Americans across the political spectrum believe is our moral duty.

  Consider that the total that Americans give annually to human service organizations to assist the vulnerable comes to about $40 billion.15 Now suppose that we could spread that sum across the 46.5 million Americans receiving food assistance, with zero overhead and complete effectiveness. It would come to just $860 per person per year.

  Or take the incredible donation levels that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2011. The outpouring of contributions exceeded $3 billion, a record-setting figure that topped even the response to the attacks of September 11, 2001.16 But even this historic episode raised enough to offset only 3 percent of the costs the storm imposed on the devastated areas of Louisiana and Mississippi.17

  Voluntary charity simply cannot get the job done all on its own. That is why we need a government safety net—and why most conservative leaders and thinkers have defended the safety net for the indigent.

  Not so sure of that last claim? Here is a pop quiz: Who wrote the following words?

  There is no reason why in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has attained [some] security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom . . . some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody. Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which [few] can make adequate provision.18

  Was it Franklin Roosevelt? Ralph Nader? Senator Elizabeth Warren? Not by a long shot. It was the iconic conservative libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek. That passage is featured in his seminal free market text, The Road to Serfdom. And Hayek is not alone in his support for the social safety net for the truly poor and needy.

  Here’s another:

  We’re a humane and a generous people and we accept without reservation our obligation to help the disabled, the aged, those unfortunates who, through no fault of their own, must depend on their fellow man.19

  That’s Ronald Reagan, talking about the safety net in his inaugural address as governor of California.

  Hayek and Reagan recognized the moral truth that a real social safety net is one of the great achievements of our free market system. Free enterprise has made America so prosperous that, as a society, we can afford to take care of our brothers and sisters who simply cannot take care of themselves—and to provide temporary help to those who are down on their luck and need a hand up.

  Hayek and Reagan also easily distinguished between “some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing”—a core safety net for the truly indigent—and the sprawling, rent-seeking tangle that is today’s welfare state. This is why the right must champion a true, sustainable safety net while condemning an ever-expanding system for redistributing income more broadly and establishing greater state control over the economy.

  That is precisely what Reagan went on to say in his inaugural address. “We seek reforms,” he explained, “that will, wherever possible, change relief check to paycheck. . . . This is not being done in any punitive sense, but as a beginning step in rehabilitation to give the individual the self-respect that goes with performing a useful service.” This was essential, Reagan said, because “[t]here is no humanity or charity in destroying self-reliance, dignity, and self-respect . . . the very substance of moral fiber.”

  Pope Francis made the same point recently about the importance of work to human dignity: “There is no worse material poverty, I would emphasize, than that which makes it impossible to earn a living and deprives someone of the dignity of work.”20

  The pope knows and the future president Reagan knew that a welfare check cannot replace a paycheck. This is why, even as we support a strong social safety net, we must help as many as possible escape it. Conservatives must stand proud as the only force in American politics that simultaneously defends a sustainable safety net for people in genuine need and works hard to make it unnecessary.

  Unfortunately, America is headed in just the opposite direction today. Our entitlement programs are becoming more and more central to people’s lives, and less and less financially sustainable. Since January 2009, the number of Americans recei
ving food stamps has increased by 45 percent. And millions more are on the edge of the precipice. Between 2009 and 2011, nearly one in three Americans slipped below the poverty line for at least two months.21 At this moment, nearly half the country is living paycheck to paycheck, without enough savings to get by if they lose their jobs.22

  The reason for this is not some novel desire for dependency. Americans did not abruptly start raising their children to hope that one day, when they grew up, they could depend on government to eke out a subsistence-level income. As we have seen, the reason for growing dependency in America is the lack of opportunity for those at the bottom.

  So what is the proper conservative response to this growing problem of dependency? Here is the wrong answer, and one that some conservative leaders advocate: Cut food stamps!

  Trying to reduce dependency by taking aim at relatively uncontroversial pieces of the core safety net is both a moral and political mistake. Most poor Americans don’t want to be on food stamps. They want to work. They simply can’t find jobs in an environment when unemployment levels among poorly educated, low-skilled workers rival the worst of the Great Depression. And millions more are walking an economic tightrope, not currently poor but constantly worried that they might slip and fall. When some conservative politicians vote to cut food stamps—which are not a significant long-term deficit driver by any means—these Americans see conservatives snipping away at the safety net below them.

  Instead of cutting the safety net, conservatives should be the guardians who protect it, limit it to the truly indigent, and infuse it with work. This entails fiscally conservative policies designed to prevent insolvency and austerity. The largest long-term threat to the core safety net is not wild-eyed conservative budget-cutting, but rather out-of-control entitlement spending on programs for people who aren’t really poor. The unchecked fiscal profligacy that some on the left cheerlead may leave us unable to fund even the most fundamental parts of the safety net for those who truly need it.

  Doubt it? Look at Europe’s suffering periphery. When an economic meltdown left Greece no choice but to cut spending dramatically, the subsequent austerity hit the poor hardest. In 2012, the world was shocked when a seventy-seven-year-old retired pharmacist shot himself in the head in the central square of Athens, leaving a note saying that he could not bear the idea of “scavenging in dustbins for food and becoming a burden to my child.” His note blamed austerity measures that shrank the social safety net.23

  This tragedy was not an isolated incident. The New York Times reported in 2012 that “the number of suicides reported in Greece over the past three years has risen sharply, a trend experts attribute to repercussions of the debt crisis, including rising unemployment, now at 21 percent, and deepening poverty.”24 Other reports found similarly alarming trends in homelessness and food insecurity across the Eurozone, as the most vulnerable people suffered the most in the wake of austerity. The lesson is clear: Fiscal profligacy risks insolvency, which results in austerity, which in turn leads to the shredding of the social safety net for those who actually need it.

  We cannot put poor people at such risk. Wasting money on foolish domestic boondoggles, on special subsidies to corporations with special access, and on entitlements for people who don’t actually need them is no longer a viable option. It’s easy to promise a safety net. But committing to one and then actually seeing it through? That takes fiscal discipline, here and now.

  That’s real compassion—and real conservatism.

  To summarize, the conservative orientation toward the safety net should have three key parts. First, as we all know, there is nothing wrong in concept with true safety net programs targeted at genuinely needy people. The implementation of SNAP, housing supports, and Medicaid are certainly imperfect, but their existence is nothing to regret. Americans should take pride in a limited, sustainable net that helps our most vulnerable neighbors. Second, however, these policies absolutely must be designed, administered, and adjusted to help those truly in need, not the rest of us. Third, the safety net’s ultimate purpose cannot be to make some Americans’ perpetual subsistence in poverty a slightly less miserable experience. Our goal must be to help the poor lead lives of dignity, independence, self-reliance, and above all, work.

  A WHOLE LOT OF HOPE

  There are two very different kinds of help. There is help that destroys hope and help that engenders it. Many government initiatives accidentally promote the wrong kind. Too often, the material relief supplied by government implicitly tells its recipients, “You can’t do it, so we are going to carry you.”

  Our message to the poor must be precisely the opposite. We need to convey the constructive, practical kind of hope that we learned about in the last chapter: “It can be done—and you can do it.” And delivering this message in earnest requires the third plank in the new right’s social justice agenda: opportunity.

  Conservatives already think of opportunity as the sine qua non of our cause. Nothing inspires us more than a Horatio Alger story, a tale of someone who started with nothing and climbed to the top. Therefore, I submit, nothing should trouble the political right more than the fact that the ladder of socioeconomic opportunity seems to be losing its lowest rungs.

  How can a conservative social justice agenda reverse these trends and expand hope and opportunity for all? An opportunity society has two basic building blocks. First is an education system that creates a base of human capital. Second comes an economic system that rewards hard work, merit, innovation, and personal responsibility. So conservatives must passionately advance education reform and relentlessly work for a free enterprise that is accessible to every American.

  Meaningful progress toward social justice cannot be made in sclerotic education systems that put adults’ job security before children’s civil rights. The centuries-old model that governs American schools too easily resists the innovations that upgrade the rest of the economy.

  Per-pupil federal education spending has skyrocketed to nearly three times its 1970 level, according to data compiled by Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute.25 What has this massive inflow of new resources bought us? A sizable increase in our school systems’ employment rolls—but no detectable increase in our children’s test scores in reading, science, or math.

  And this fecklessness is not evenly spread across America. Our broken bureaucracies systematically ship the very worst product to our most vulnerable kids. Washington, D.C., consistently ranks near the top in per-pupil education spending, yet only half of the city’s public school students are proficient readers.26

  Similar stories characterize cities all around the country with poor populations. And anyone who believes that a barely literate high school dropout is running a fair race in America is deluding himself. If you don’t start out with a decent education—if you were never taught adequately to read and write or add and subtract—you are starting the race of life hundreds of yards behind and are very unlikely to be able to get ahead. Equally delusional is many politicians’ blind faith that funneling more dollars into the existing statist apparatus is not just heaving more money down the well.

  It’s not as if we have no idea how to improve this situation. Decades of research and experimentation have shown how charter schooling, vouchers, and other innovations can benefit needy children. In one rigorous study, scholars from Harvard and the Brookings Institution found that school vouchers in New York City significantly increased the proportion of African American students who went on to attend college.27 Research from Stanford shows that access to charter schools reduced New York City’s black-white achievement gap by 66 percent in reading and a stunning 86 percent in math.28 A Harvard economist has found that Boston’s charters produce similarly massive improvements.29

  My AEI colleague Frederick Hess has spent decades reviewing these results, and his conclusion is unambiguous: “For poor parents trapped in dangerous and underperforming urban school systems . . . school choice works.”30

  Similarl
y, we have a wealth of information on the best ways to teach disadvantaged children and recruit, retain, and reward the best teachers. In one recent study, prominent economists from Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, San Diego found that creative ways of linking teacher pay to student performance can push up test scores among working-class students.31

  Why do these and countless other lessons go unheeded on a national scale? If we know that school choice and pay-for-performance work, why aren’t we implementing these solutions everywhere? Simple: They upset the status quo. In California, more than 295,000 teachers and nearly 25,000 administrators work in a K–12 education sector that consumes more than 40 percent of the state’s entire general fund.32 Fundamental, disruptive innovation might mean a significant inconvenience for a huge number of well-organized grown-ups. And by definition, the families and communities who would stand to benefit the most have little time and money to spare on costly political battles.

  This is a classic public-choice problem. Only a crusade for social justice will stand a chance at winning this fight. The public schools in this country are failing millions of kids. Are we going to be the generation that tolerates this? Are we going to continue to tolerate school systems that put the interests of adults ahead of children?

  Next, there’s higher education. America’s stiff, one-size-fits-all college system stands in the way of success for too many young Americans.

  Between 2006 and 2011, the median inflation-adjusted household income fell by 7 percent. The average real tuition at public four-year colleges increased by more than 18 percent during that period.33 The average tuition for just one year at a private university in 2011 was almost $33,000.34 While America has been fixated on the costs of health care, college costs have been increasing about twice as fast.35