RUSH: Now, this next sound bite, this has made some news. It has nothing to do with Iraq. Senator Kennedy was asked if welfare reform has worked.
KENNEDY: Your figures are wrong in terms of child poverty.
CHRIS WALLACE: I’m not —
KENNEDY: Your figures are absolutely wrong as we’ve had increase now in the last five years of the number of children that are living in poverty in the United States of America increased by 1,700,000. We have 36 million Americans that are going to bed hungry every night. Thirty-six million Americans and 12 million of those are children! We’ve had the total number of people that have fallen back into poverty during this Bush administration. We have five million more people that are dropped back into poverty.
RUSH: This is not inane; this is
Why doesn’t somebody ask Senator Kennedy, “Look, you’ve had the war on poverty since 1965, senator, and according to all, all the statistics, the same number of people are in poverty today as were in poverty when the program began.!” I remind you of this, and we had the statistic last week. It’s the result of a scholarly paper, “The Mismeasure of Poverty,” by Nicholas Eberstadt, who had a piece recently in the Policy Review magazine. He made the point that people living in poverty today have the same lifestyles that the
You add that to the fact that the current people, current poverty… Robert Rector at the Heritage Foundation has done great work on this, too, and I’ve been citing it since the late eighties. Ever since it’s been one of the liberal arguments, bones of contention with me that I’m cold-hearted and cruel because I have no sympathy for the poor and so forth, which of course is not what we’re discussing. What we’re discussing here is just what is poverty in this country. Is poverty where you own your house? Is poverty where you own at least a car? Is poverty where you have air-conditioning? Because that’s the description to handle most people in this country who are below the poverty line. When you learn that people in poverty in America today have the same lives that middle class Americans had 40 years ago, it tells you a lot about how much progress we actually have made in improving lifestyles for every American.
This figure of 36 million people go to bed hungry every night? Maybe they don’t need dinner, who knows, but that is