Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why Establishment Thinking About Containing China Remains Far from Serious

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allies, American Enterprise Institute, Asia, burden sharing, China, Daniel Blumenthal, defense budget, East Asia, entitlements, foreign policy establishment, free-riding, Japan, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, RealClearPolitics.com, South Korea, taxes, tech transfer, Trade

Congratulations to the American Enterprise Institute’s Daniel Blumenthal for coming up with some genuinely new insights into the U.S.-China balance of power and especially its relationship with the evolving economies of the two countries. Unfortunately, Blumenthal’s new essay for RealClearPolitics.com also shows that gaping blind spots remain in establishment thinking about the China challenge its members claim to be analyzing seriously.

For the purposes of this post, let’s grant Blumenthal’s mainstream assumption that it matters greatly to the United States which great power dominates East Asia politically. I disagree, but the point here is that if America does want to fend off a China challenge, greater policy changes will be needed than Blumenthal and other conventional wisdom-mongers seem ready to contemplate.

The author’s main theme is that the United States has no legitimate reason to doubt its economic capacity to prevent China from becoming Asia’s kingpin, and his new wrinkle involves measuring economic power by looking more at national wealth, and less at national economic growth. Since the U.S. wealth levels are both much greater than China’s, and since the gap has just resumed growing according to statistics he cites, America can easily afford the military forces needed to put China back in its place. And he blames China’s recent and impressive catch-up on this score on Americans’ recent (Blumenthal doesn’t specify the time frame) political decision to skimp on military spending while continue to devote exorbitant sums to entitlement spending – which has indeed long dominated the budget outlays (along with, as he’s noted, interest payments on the resulting ballooning national debt).

According to Blumenthal, Americans and their leaders as a result have chosen to elevate “the intergenerational transfer of wealth” over national security. Strictly speaking, he’s right. But other interpretations of national priorities seem just as legitimate.

For example, as the author briefly notes, the U.S. population is aging. So a major national retirement funding challenge will face even the most defense-minded politicians. That doesn’t let American leaders or the recipients of these entitlements off the hook in terms of making sacrifices needed to safeguard national security. But it’s bound to raise the question of whether the burden of sacrifice should be limited to middle class Americans. The great increase in national wealth mentioned by Blumenthal makes clear that the nation has many other resources on which it can draw to fund a bigger military – especially since the private economy’s wealth has led the surge. In other words, why not tax the rich or corporations more heavily to pay for new personnel and weapons?

One obvious rejoinder is that modest levels of taxes on wealthy Americans and on American companies are needed to ensure the economic growth needed to keep national wealth levels robust. But even accepting the doctrinaire trickle-down economics underlying this assumption, should upper-level individual incomes and business profits be completely exempted from any responsibility to pay for the military? If so, why? And wouldn’t that policy greatly loosen the relationship between national wealth and military capability emphasized by Blumenthal?

The author also neglects another big pool of resources that can be brought to bear on countering China: the wealth of America’s regional allies. Stunningly, after decades of American pleading for greater burden-sharing, countries with a far greater stake than the United States in resisting Chinese regional domination continue free-riding on U.S. defense guarantees. Why should American entitlements recipients see any reduction in benefits before Japanese and South Koreans pay at least as much for their own security (relatively speaking) as the much more geographically distant United States does? And their contributions could be immense. Japan alone, for example, is the world’s third largest national economy (behind the United States and China, respectively). 

Finally, as with nearly all the rest of the establishment, Blumenthal completely neglects the opposite side of the U.S.-China defense resources equation: The decisive extent to which American economic policy continues enriching China, and therefore continuing to enable it to afford lots of both “guns and butter” (as economists and political scientists have dubbed military and social spending). Thanks in part to literally trillions of dollars of earnings from the trade surpluses it’s long run with the United States, the Chinese pie keeps expanding strongly (that’s the economic growth whose importance Blumenthal softpedals). As a result, more new resources are generated for whatever priorities or combination of priorities the Chinese government chooses.

Even worse, as I’ve long noted, recklessly lax tech transfer policies on America’s part have for decades given the Chinese much of the knowhow needed to turn out increasingly advanced weapons and other military systems. Some signs of official concerns about this outflow have appeared in Washington lately, but U.S. leaders (and the rest of the establishment) remain woefully behind the curve.

When America’s East Asia security strategy stops bolstering the Chinese threat it depicts as such a huge concern, when it insists that local countries act like they have at least as great a stake in remaining independent of China as does the United States, when the wealthiest Americans are required to devote more of their recent immense windfalls to the common defense, and if all of those changes still leave China closing fast on the combined forces of the United States and its neighbors, it would become legitimate to ask Main Street Americans to start shouldering greater burdens. Until then, the U.S. working and middle classes will be entirely justified in demanding that the nation’s Asia strategy pass a minimal seriousness test first.

Im-Politic: The Polls Say “Let Trump Be [Campaign-Version] Trump”

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2016 election, ABC News, budget, conservatism, discretionary spending, entitlements, Freedom Caucus, healthcare, Im-Politic, Immigration, independents, NBC News, Paul Ryan, polls, poverty, Republicans, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, Washington Post

They’re only polls and we all should remember how badly most polls blew their calls in the last presidential election. But two new surveys from the Washington Post and ABC News on the one hand, and the Wall Street Journal and NBC News on the other, are signaling to me anyway that Donald Trump has made a major mistake so far in his young presidency in tilting so markedly toward the keepers of the orthodoxy (especially the most doctrinaire versions) in his own party. Instead, he should have been focusing all along on developing a promising new American political center of gravity that he started defining (in his own imitable way) during his campaign.

As widely observed during the 2016 elections, Mr. Trump was anything but a conventional conservative – at least as the term has been understood for the last quarter century. Yes, he made frequent nods toward cutting taxes and regulations, as well as to balancing budgets (objectives that of course aren’t always consistent). He also expressed some support for social conservative positions like further restricting abortion and appointing “strict constructionists” to the Supreme Court. But as also widely observed, if that mix of views was what voters in the Republican primaries and general elections really wanted, they would have voted for an orthodox conservative.

Instead, Mr. Trump trounced his opponents even though he at least as often promised to protect massive federal entitlement programs heavily relied on by the middle class and senior citizens; to guarantee adequate healthcare for non-seniors who can’t afford it; to preserve government support for Planned Parenthood’s provision of non-abortion-related women’s health services; to uphold the rights of gay, lesbian, and transgender Americans; and of course to ignore free market dictates when they seemed to undermine public safety and prosperity by fostering unrestricted trade and immigration.

Undoubtedly, much of candidate Trump’s appeal also sprang from simple, nonpartisan voter anger at the failures and self-serving priorities of the bipartisan national political establishment. But Mr. Trump did the best job of all last year’s presidential hopefuls of identifying the combination of specific grievances that created this anger: notably, over those jobs and incomes lost to Americans Last trade and immigration policies, over those related dangers posed by terrorism and leaky borders, and over the astronomical costs and risks of fighting seemingly futile foreign wars and defending free-riding allies.

The president’s Inaugural Address – which declared his intention to fix these problems with America- and Americans’- First policies – unabashedly proclaimed that President Trump would govern like candidate Trump.

Yet although the president has by and large kept his immigration promises, and approved some (limited) measures to combat foreign trade predation, his domestic policy proposals look like they’re right out of the Chamber of Commerce and Moral Majority playbooks. Nowhere has this development been more obvious than in his endorsement of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s healthcare plan, and in his release of a budget outline that, outside of defense spending, libertarians should be swooning over.

Late last month, I ventured that the president’s support for the “Ryan Care” proposal was a head fake: He had knowingly backed a measure so draconian that he knew it would fail, in order to establish some orthodox conservative street cred with Congressional Republicans and thus enlist their support for the pivot to greater moderation he had planned all along. Something like this scenario could still unfold; according to press reports, even the hard-core anti-government House Freedom Caucus members are growing more amenable to a compromise proposal that would preserve many of the more popular provisions of President Obama’s healthcare reforms.

But Mr. Trump’s continuing insistence on a federal spending blueprint that either eliminates or greatly slashes funding for medical and other scientific research, Chesapeake Bay cleanup, and food and heating aid for the poor, is not only plain bizarre, especially since the dollars involved are trivially small. It’s also politically inexplicable, because there’s absolutely no evidence that these are viewed as priority savings among any important Trump constituencies.

And that’s where the new polls come in. As per the headline results, Mr. Trump’s popularity at this point in his presidency is much lower than the ratings of most of his predecessors early in their first terms. In fairness, the Post-ABC survey also shows that the president would beat his chief 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, in the popular vote if a new election was held – showing that he’s even more popular versus the Democratic nominee than on election day.

But the both polls showed the president’s support tightly concentrated among his own core voters and Republicans generally. Even accepting the claim that rapid partisanship by Democratic party leaders is proving effective in limiting Mr. Trump’s appeal to their rank and file, it’s still a sign of trouble for the president that his ratings among self-described political independents is markedly on the wane according to the Journal-NBC findings (falling to 30 percent) and low (38 percent) according to the Post-ABC survey.

One main reason: The Washington Republicans President Trump is apparently still courting are even less popular than he is. The Journal-NBC poll reports that many more Americans are dissatisfied with the Republican-led Congress nowadays than in February, and Ryan’s approval ratings are even lower. Moreover, the Republican-led Congress and the Speaker, in turn, are less popular than the president even among voters identifying as Republicans.

None of these results necessarily bodes ill for the Freedom Caucus. Its members don’t care for Ryan, either – allegedly for being too moderate. But many of the latest measures of Americans’ views of major policy issues do. For example, the Journal-NBC poll found that, since February, the share of respondents agreeing that “Government should do more to solve problems and help meet people’s needs” shot up to 57 percent. Even more independents (59 percent) endorsed this position. The share of total respondents believing that “Government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals plummeted to 39 percent.

More pointedly, the Post-ABC poll showed Americans opposing the Trump budget proposals by 50 percent to 37 percent overall, and independents disapproving by an even wider 52 percent to 35 percent margin.

The Journal-NBC survey also found record shares of Americans viewing “free trade” and “immigration” positively – at 57 percent and 60 percent, respectively. But the abstract nature of these questions could well have tilted these answers. One reason for supposing so: The Post-ABC poll reporting that, by a strong 73 percent to 22 percent, Americans favor “Trump pressuring companies to keep jobs in the United States.” Among independents, the results are an even better 75 percent to 19 percent.

So the recipe for Trump political success seems pretty clear: Dump the Freedom Caucus under the Trump Train on the budget and healthcare; preserve (and even boost to some extent) discretionary spending programs that strengthen the economy’s foundations and provide for the needy; keep the campaign promises on entitlements so highly prized by the middle class; and take bolder measures to Buy American and Hire American (as one new set of trade-related Trump jobs programs is called).

Keeping the focus on these priorities, along with a well thought out infrastructure program, should attract and keep enough backing among Republicans and independents to offset any losses in Freedom Caucus ranks, both in Congress and at the grassroots level (where they seem modest in number). Adding new policies to combat predatory foreign trade practices, moreover, should please organized labor enough to bring into the fold many union members and leaders plus the Congressional Democrats they strongly influence. An extra bonus – this program could well give President Trump the political leeway he needs to stay his course on immigration (which of course has seen a softening of his views on the so-called Dreamers).

Often in American history, calls to “Let [name your favorite politician] be [name that same politician]” have reflected core supporters’ naive beliefs that campaign promises can easily be turned into policy by the office-seekers they elect. But as is so often the case with the current president, Letting Trump be Trump, could confound the political conventional wisdom.

Following Up: Democrats’ Safety Net-Heavy Policies Still Missing the Mark for Trump Voters

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2016 election, Center for American Progress, Democrats, Economic Policy Institute, Elizabeth Warren, entitlements, Following Up, manufacturing, middle class, Mitt Romney, Neera Tanden, private sector jobs, progressives, safety net, Trade, Trump, Welfare State, working class

A little over a week ago, I wrote that much of the American Left was way off-base in believing that working class Americans who supported Donald Trump’s successful presidential run had voted against their economic interests. My thesis: These Trump voters were (rightly) much more interested in the family wage private sector jobs his campaign was promising rather than the various forms of welfare that Democratic candidates were strongly suggesting were adequate substitutes. And revealingly, compelling confirmation for my claim arrived just this week – in my email box!

The evidence came in the form of fund-raising pitches from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Center for American Progress CAP). Yes, it’s true that such solicitations aren’t the same as detailed policy papers. It’s also true that both organizations have in the past supported at least some of the trade policy overhauls emphasized by Mr. Trump as vital to job creation in the genuinely productive sectors of the U.S. economy – especially manufacturing. It seems that their interest in new trade policies continues to some extent. And it’s true as well that funding appeals are practically by definition aimed mainly at core or likely supporters – so they don’t necessarily reflect the full output of thinking of these think tanks.

Nevertheless, as a result, fund-raising pitches almost by definition reveal much about these core backers’ priorities, and those of an organization. And in both the EPI and CAP emails, creating more good jobs via trade was a concept conspicuously absent, while what I’ve described as cleverly disguised (even when necessary or desirable) welfare measures were front and center. And here’s a fact that goes far toward clinching the case that the Left remains largely clueless re helping the “ninety-nine percent” it claims to champion. These think tanks in many ways represent the two main wings of progressivism and the Democratic party– what have been called the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton camps.

Take EPI’s pitch – which came in the form of a note from Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Warren certainly identified a big problem faced by working class voters and bearing much blame for the neglect they obviously feel: “A lot of people in this country work hard, but they aren’t building any security—and they are angry about it.”

Warren continued:

“They’re angry that bonuses go up for CEOs while their own paychecks are stuck in the same place year after year. They’re angry that basic costs like housing, health care, and childcare have skyrocketed. And they’re angry about a tax system that benefits the rich and powerful.

“They’re angry because our economy and our government work for those who have already made it big, but don’t work for them.”

And in my view, she correctly identified a goal that needs to be achieved for greater and more broadly based American economic success: “Our top economic priority must be improving the lives of working people in this country—because everyone in this country should have a fighting chance to build a future.”

But what did Warren emphasize as the policies most needed to help the working (and middle) class? “[F]ighting to raise the minimum wage to a living wage [and expanding] Social Security for millions of Americans…” along with addressing “the gender and race wage gaps….” The words “trade,” “offshoring,” and “globalization” simply don’t appear.

The appeal for the Center for American Progress came from its president, Neera Tanden. You might be familiar with Tanden from the presidential campaign. As a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter, she’s been a fixture on many of the Sunday morning talk shows. She was also one of the most prominent Democrats embarrassed by the hacked and leaked emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.

Tanden’s email yesterday was titled “Defend Our Economic Security” – and therefore seemed full of promise. I thought that it might deal with neglected issues I’ve written profusely about, like the weaknesses that have emerged in the American defense manufacturing base, or the recklessness of permitting the nation’s best tech companies transfer much of their best (and defense-related) knowhow to China.

No such luck, however. Tanden’s focus instead was on “the issues that matter most to working families” – which of course is laudable. But as her letter makes clear, CAP is most concerned with “how the American middle class has been squeezed by the rising costs of health care, child care, higher education, housing, and retirement” and the greatest challenge it sees is preventing President-elect Trump and the incoming Republican-controlled Congress from cutting the government programs that have helped the middle (and working) class cope with these rising costs.

Again, I have no objection to ensuring the continued health of many of these programs, or entire safety net. But in CAP’s apparent view, they’re ends in and of themselves. I also understand the need to demonize political opponents in fund-raising literature. It’s a tried and true way to fire up the donor base.

But the organization doesn’t seem interested in policies to foster the types of private sector jobs that would enable Americans to reduce their burgeoning reliance on these measures. That notion is also difficult to find at the Economic Policy Institute. Both institutes may be right in viewing a safety net-centric economic game plan as a winning political formula. And if they were, in an ironic way, they’d be confirming one of former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s biggest verbal mis-steps during the 2012 election – his suggestion that 47 percent of Americans are welfare state takers.

But one of the clearest lessons of the 2016 election is that the masses of working class voters who opted for Mr. Trump aren’t buying it. All of which presents the Democrats – who have styled themselves as the Party of the Common Man – with a dilemma that’s not only momentous, but possibly existential.

Im-Politic: A Preview of Trump-ism without Trump?

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2016 election, amnesty, attrition, Contract for the American Voter, Democrats, deportation, Donald Trump, entitlements, establishment, healthcare, Im-Politic, Immigration, immigration magnet, independents, Jobs, NAFTA, Obamacare, Peggy Noonan, politics, Populism, Republicans, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Wall Street Journal

Throughout this circus of a presidential campaign, I’ve emphasized the importance of distinguishing between Donald Trump’s myriad personal failings and the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign positions – which I remain convinced can form the basis of an urgently needed, sensible, and therefore, enduring new American populism. This week, substantial support for this proposition has come from Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan and, more surprisingly, from Trump himself.

In an October 20 essay, Noonan – long one of the most effective critics of the corporate-funded Republican establishment that Trump thoroughly trounced during the primaries – described the pillars of “Trump-ism without Trump” with her usual wit and grace. Among the highlights:

>He “would have spoken at great and compelling length of how the huge, complicated trade agreements created the past quarter-century can be improved upon with an eye to helping the American worker”:

>He “would have argued that controlling entitlement spending is a necessary thing but not, in fact, this moment’s priority. People have been battered since the crash, in many ways, and nothing feels stable now”:

>And he “would have known of America’s hidden fractures, and would have insisted that a healthy moderate-populist movement cannot begin as or devolve into a nationalist, identity-politics movement.”

The only matter on which I believe Noonan is seriously off-base is immigration. I certainly agree with her that Trump should have “explained his immigration proposals with a kind of loving logic—we must secure our borders for a host of serious reasons, and here they are. But we are grateful for our legal immigrants….” The problem is with her apparent belief that “In time, after we’ve fully secured our borders and the air of emergency is gone, we will turn to regularizing the situation of everyone here….”

As I’ve written, this popular (with both wings of the establishment) version of amnesty inevitably will supercharge America’s “immigration magnet.” The perceived likelihood of eventual legalization can only bring millions more impoverished third world-ers to the nation’s various doorsteps. It’s inconceivable that even a President Trump would take the measures needed – which would surely involve some use of force – to keep these masses, and especially the women and children, at bay.

The far better, indeed only realistic, approach is one that Trump himself has unfortunately barely mentioned: a stout refusal to legalize in any form accompanied by a strategy of attrition – i.e., encouraging illegals to leave both by boosting efforts to keep them out of the workplace, and by denying them (and their anchor children) public benefits.

But it’s almost like Trump was listening. Two days later, he came out with a “Contract for the American Voter” that echoed much of Noonan’s column. He promised that in his first hundred days in office, he would announce his “intention to renegotiate NAFTA or withdraw from the deal,” along with withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. Both measures should draw strong support from Democrats and independents. In addition, Trump would designate China a currency manipulator, and order an inventory of predatory foreign trade practices.

On immigration, he omitted any reference to blanket deportation of all illegals and instead focused on starting to remove “the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country and cancel visas to foreign countries that won’t take them back”; to de-fund Sanctuary Cities; and to “suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered extreme vetting.” Especially in the political climate that would result from a Trump victory, would most Democrats on Capitol Hill fall on their swords to prevent any of this?

And what did Trump vow re entitlement reforms? The phrase doesn’t appear at all in the Contract, although the list of legislative proposals does include the repeal of Obamacare and replacement with a system (described only generally, to be sure) that could well appeal to most Republicans and many independents, and that in combination with other measures mentioned could bend the national healthcare cost curve down further.

Couple these ideas with Trump’s support for a big infrastructure build-out and repair program; his broadly non-interventionist foreign policy stance combined with a big (job-creating) defense buildup; new government ethics reforms that seek to halt the corrupting revolving door between government and private sector; and any kind of serious middle class tax relief, and it looks to me like a (mandate-sized) winning formula – for a politician who can pass the interlocking personality, character, and temperament tests.

Can such leaders emerge from the current political system, as I recently asked? Are American politicians who rise up through this system simply too beholden to special interests, or too thoroughly imbued with the “If you want to get along go along” ethos to favor rocking any big boats? I still can’t say I know the answer. But I’m as confident as ever that unless and until this kind of candidate emerges, American politics is going to remain one very angry space.

Following Up: Why Mass Immigration Can’t Solve the U.S. Entitlements Crisis

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2016 election, amnesty, Bernie Sanders, Branko Milanovic, Donald Trump, entitlements, Following Up, Global Inequality, Immigration, inequality, New York magazine

The (overwhelmingly one-sided) Donald Trump-Bernie Sanders-fueled debate on trade policy that’s broken out in the Establishment Media lately has been so heated that it’s eclipsed even immigration as a hot button presidential campaign issue. Not even Trump’s release of crucial details for his illegal immigration-stopping wall has managed to push trade out of the spotlight. It’s almost as if mainstream journalists and the elites they so often coddle have given up on pimping for Open Borders policies as America’s only non-racist, non-xenophobic immigration policy options.

All the same, who can reasonably doubt that pro-amnesty media propaganda will stage a comeback, especially if Trump shows signs of surmounting his current troubles and cruising again toward the Republican nomination? (Democrat Sanders nowadays is far from a maverick on immigration issues.) If immigration returns to the fore again, it will be worth remembering that one of the world’s leading economists has just punched big holes in one of the Open Borders’ backers’ main economic claims.

As noted in a September, 2014 RealityChek post, mass immigration supporters have taken to arguing that major inflows of newcomers are needed in large measure to help America deal with its looming entitlements crisis. The idea is that because the native-born U.S. population is aging so rapidly, and because so many immigrants are so young – and enterprising – their future earnings potential is the nation’s best bet for responsibly financing the immense wave of baby-boomer retirements that’s already begun.

As I also argued in that post, however, although immigrants who come to the country with high levels of skills and education are good candidates to play this essential role, the same cannot possibly hold for most illegal immigrants and many legal newcomers – who come with none of those attributes. For it’s becoming abundantly clear that America is becoming an economy and society with not only record levels of economic inequality, but an increasingly rigid class structure.

That is, the American Dream is far from completely dead, but Americans who are born poor are ever more likely to stay that way. And why should low-skill, poorly educated immigrants be an exception? Ironically, I added, the inequality crisis has become so apparent in large measure because of research from self-styled progressive analysts who favor more or less Open Borders. In addition, it was great to be able to point to a recent article in establishment organ Foreign Affairs that similarly debunked the portrayal of mass immigration as an economy saver.

Now, more reasons to doubt this pro-amnesty meme has just come in from Branko Milanovic, a former senior World Bank economist now with the City University of New York.

In his new book on Global Inequality, Milanovic has documented three major economic and social reasons for thinking that yawning rich poor gaps in the United States are here to stay, but that they will keep growing wider. As Milanovic explained in an interview in New York magazine: 

> “the share of total income going to capital compared to labor has been increasing” – and its wealthy Americans who dominate income generated by capital (i.e., the return on investments like property or stocks);

> in a new development, many wealthy Americans are now earning income both from their investments and from their labor – e.g., in very high-paying jobs in finance or technology companies; and

> these economic out-performers are increasingly marrying each other, and thus boosting the odds that both their wealth and their natural gifts will be inherited by their children. Interestingly, according to Milanovic, a major engine of this homogamy is the huge increase in the result of highly educated women.

Milanovic also cites a fourth reason to expect widening U.S. inequality – a political system increasingly of, by, and for the wealthy. In fairness, though, however formidable, this obstacle to a more equitable society seems less intractable than the three economic and social factors.

The author also cites reasons for supposing that America’s rich-poor gap might start narrowing once again. But their impact seems unlikely to predominate any time soon. And given the power of the inequality drivers Milanovic describes, nothing seems likelier to swamp the pro-equality forces if they ever do start gathering than a sizable new wave of impoverished, barely literate immigrants. Not to mention the pressure they themselves will place on the nation’s public purse.

Im-Politic: Impoverished Thinking About Anti-Poverty Programs

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entitlements, Im-Politic, poverty, transfer payments, Washington Post, welfare, Welfare State

What’s the main purpose of an anti-poverty program? The best answer I can come up with is “enabling recipients to live lives of reasonable well-being without the need for government assistance.” Keep in mind that I’m not talking here about welfare programs. There’s always going to be some overlap, of course, but what I’m getting at is the distinction between beneficiaries who are capable of self-sufficiency and those who aren’t.

Strangely enough, though – if this Washington Post article is representative – the goal of greater earnings power doesn’t seem to be much on the minds of the academics, other policy analysts, and politicians who dominate the national debate on the subject. Instead, if they’re to the right of the political center, they seem preoccupied with proving that all government transfer payments (even including entitlements like Social Security) do absolutely no good whatever, by any criteria. And if they’re on the left, their goal seems to be defending these programs against any and all criticisms.

The Post piece reports on academic research claiming that the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs is often understated because the federal government surveys that help gauge progress tend to suffer two major flaws. First, the target populations are harder to glean any answers from, for a variety of logistical and other reasons. And second, the answers often given significantly understate the levels of assistance beneficiaries receive.

According to University of Chicago public policy professor Bruce D. Meyer, the information gap is so big that “When the numbers are corrected, we see that government programs have about twice the effect that we think they do.” And as Post reporter Roberto Ferdman explains, ignoring the surveys’ shortcomings

“can have a profound effect on policy discussions concerning the two.

“On the one hand, it makes it look like the poor are doing much worse than they are. The official poverty rate now is higher it was three decades ago, but by almost any measure the poor are better off than they were then. Meyer believes that a more accurate gauge would show that things are better or, at the very least, not worse.

“On the other, it does government assistance programs a great injustice, by making them appear less effective than they actually are.”

I’m all for developing the best quality data and basing policy decisions on them. But the debate depicted above is entirely beside what should be the point. Who seriously doubts that big enough government checks or enough food stamps etc. can bring and keep recipients above whatever level of living standards is officially defined as the poverty line – and indeed can do so indefinitely? In other words, does anyone dispute that giving low-income folks enough money can make them better off, at least materially? Is skepticism about this proposition really the main basis of conservative attacks on the Welfare State? And is “proving” the affirmative really the best defense its defenders can raise?

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the answer to both questions is “Yes.” Which would make a wager that America won’t be meaningfully alleviating poverty any time soon an awfully safe bet.