How Conservatives Fight Poverty
Religion & Liberty Online

How Conservatives Fight Poverty

At Public Discourse, Ryan T. Anderson reviews Lawrence Mead’s From Prophecy to Charity: How to Help the Poor:

The loudest voices in our national debates about political economy tend to be libertarians and social welfare statists. To our detriment, most public policy discussions are filtered through these two lenses. At the same time, we tend to conflate the policy issues facing our nation as if they were one and the same.

But consider the range of America’s political-economic challenges: How to balance our budget; how to reform the major entitlements of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; how to get the economy growing again; how to increase employment; how to increase social mobility; how to help the poor.

Though related, these issues are profitably examined one at a time. Poverty, for example, is undoubtedly linked to our debates about government regulation, taxes, and budgets. It is certainly tied to our debates about income inequality, social mobility, and unemployment. But poverty in America is not primarily about any of these issues. And political commentators of all stripes perform a major disservice when they mesh them together.

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Joe Carter

Joe Carter is a Senior Editor at the Acton Institute. Joe also serves as an editor at the The Gospel Coalition, a communications specialist for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and as an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College. He is the editor of the NIV Lifehacks Bible and co-author of How to Argue like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator (Crossway).