Americans seem worn out and despondent following the dirty political fights and escalating theatrics of unreasonableness practiced in recent years on both sides of the aisle in Washington, D.C. I, for one, believe that when divergent thought is shared, a well-conceived product is the result. However, when there is no mechanism to facilitate the healthy dialogue that is the conduit for divergent thought, the sure result is extremism – and we all lose.
What is the price of being wrong and who will pay that price? Unfortunately, “Oops” is not going to be good enough if we don’t get things right. Getting it right depends on us holding fast to the ideals of “We the People” as prescribed by our forefathers in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.
I suspect that most Americans do not realize that a national crisis looms as Democrats and Republicans battle over the heads of the lower classes. Several presidents have attempted to build security for the masses, now defined as the more than 85 percent of Americans who earn less than $100,000 per year. Franklin Roosevelt launched his “New Deal” in 1933. Lyndon Johnson declared the “War on Poverty” in 1964. Today, Barack Obama is leading the charge with the Affordable Care Act.
Fifty years later, it can be written that the War on Poverty has underperformed against its founding vision. Currently, an estimated 46 million Americans live below the poverty line, while another 4.1 million job-seekers languish among the long-term unemployed. Wealth distribution continues to skew. As the incomes of the wealthy grow, the income of the typical American family continues to fall as it has every year since 2007, when the Great Recession began. This does not suggest people are poor because others are rich.
Actually, any promise to eradicate poverty in the U.S is one that can’t be kept. That’s because poverty is a byproduct of a fully functioning free market system that stratifies the population within it – some at the top, some at the bottom and the masses in between. No amount of social programming, welfare or government subsidy can eliminate poverty. After all, someone has to do the jobs that pay barely more than minimum wage. In America, we are motivated to work in pursuit of the hope that we will one day attain the American Dream for us and our children. Our tie to rugged individualism motivates by persuading us that if we just work hard enough, we can grasp it.
While initiatives like the War on Poverty were well-intentioned, I suggest a fresh perspective and a new plan of attack that begins with answers to three questions.
The first: How do we get a maximum number of citizens innovating and laboring in our economic system? This question is highest order because it focuses on what is best for the collective America.
The second: How do we maximize the potential of each person to advance in a free market system? This is important because we want to inspire our countrymen to pursue self-growth with vigor. Unquestionably, the promise of social and economic mobility is motivating.
Question three: What is the floor of citizenship for those who engage in work but fall to the bottom of the earning scale? The answer matters because as a nation we need to ensure that succeeding generations begin with an adequate economic base that deters civil unrest.
While government must lead in building a society strong enough to withstand collapse in a slavishly competitive global marketplace, we must not defer ownership of our communities to the government, as if it exists apart from us, The People. The failure of a democratic society is the shared fault of its citizenry. There is no monarch to blame.
Rod Jones is president and chief executive officer of Grace Hill Settlement House.
