Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/051892/05189930.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 5KB | 114 lines

                                                                                THE ADMINISTRATION, Page 37

Bleeding-Heart Conservatives


How Jack Kemp and friends, after the L.A. riots, are pushing a
reluctant Bush to lead a new market-oriented war on poverty

By DAN GOODGAME/WASHINGTON


    President Bush told reporters last week that the Los
Angeles riots "vindicated" a critique of federal antipoverty
programs he had made a year earlier at the University of
Michigan -- the very place where Lyndon Johnson had launched the
Great Society in 1964. "Programs designed to ensure racial
harmony generated animosity," Bush had said in his Michigan
speech. "Programs intended to help people out of poverty invited
dependency."

    This provocative analysis was supported by the steady rise
of poverty despite the fact that taxpayers spend $220 billion
a year -- $6,500 for every poor adult and child in the country
-- to fight it. Before that speech and since, Bush has avoided
the issue, seldom addressing it in public or in his
arm-twisting of lawmakers. But since Los Angeles erupted, a
handful of conservative activists among his advisers, led by
Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, have been urging the President to
fight for new market-oriented, antibureaucratic approaches to
poverty -- including programs that Bush himself had
halfheartedly proposed in previous budgets. As William Bennett,
the former drug policy director for Bush, observed, "If you're
going to denounce a set of programs that we've already spent
$2.5 trillion on, you'd damn well better have an attractive
alternative." Suggestions from these "bleeding-heart
conservatives" include:

    PRIVATIZATION OF PUBLIC HOUSING. Kemp has long worked to
convert housing-project tenants into homeowners with a stake in
their community. Bush has paid only lip service to the program,
known as hope. Congress last year approved it in principle, but
denied it serious funding and required, in a typical
cut-the-baby-in-half compromise, that another housing-project
unit must be built for each one that is turned over to tenant
ownership. The White House budget office has calculated that
this scheme would cost about $100,000 a unit, and that tenants
as well as taxpayers would be better served by a simple system
of vouchers that the poor could use to buy or rent housing from
private owners.

    TAX INCENTIVES. Kemp wants to eliminate capital-gains
taxes and reduce levies for businesses that locate in inner-city
"enterprise zones." Conservatives also would increase the Earned
Income Tax Credit, to make even minimum-wage jobs more
attractive than living on welfare.

    WEED AND SEED. Attorney General William Barr and Budget
Director Richard Darman have pushed a scheme that would "weed"
career criminals out of inner-city neighborhoods through massive
sweeps by federal and local lawmen, and would continue to pacify
these areas with intensive "community policing." These
neighborhoods would then be "seeded" with social programs such
as drug treatment, youth recreation and job training. Sixteen
cities are set to receive $1 million each under the pilot
program this year, and Bush has requested $500 million more in
his budget now before Congress.

    EDUCATION CHOICE. Bush has encouraged school districts to
let parents choose among various public and private schools,
and thus foster accountability. Poor parents like education
choice, but many school bureaucrats and congressional Democrats
despise it. Conservatives are urging Bush to take on publicly
opponents of school choice who educate their own children in
private schools. Example: Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy.

    WELFARE REFORM. Poor mothers who take a job or marry a man
with a job stand to lose cash benefits from Aid to Families
with Dependent Children, and health care for their families
under Medicaid. While some hard-liners would abolish AFDC
altogether, some conservatives, including Stuart Butler of the
Heritage Foundation, would reduce benefits for unmarried mothers
and those who remain unemployed after their children enter
school, while increasing benefits for poor women who marry and
work.

    PUBLIC SERVICE JOBS. Once disdained as a relic of the New
Deal, the idea of hiring the poor, at least temporarily, to
plant trees or patch potholes is gaining among conservatives.
Grudgingly aligning themselves with many liberals on this issue,
they have concluded that there simply are not enough private
jobs available during times of slow economic growth, and that
the benefits to the poor, in work experience and dignity, would
outweigh the costs.

    At a series of Cabinet meetings last week, Bush was warned
by some of his more cautious advisers, led by Treasury
Secretary Nicholas Brady, that a full-court press for
antipoverty programs would entangle the Administration in a
bidding war with the Democrats. But Bush sided with Kemp and the
other reformers -- in part because private polls and focus
groups showed that his hesitant initial response to the riots
had undermined his reputation for decisive leadership in a
crisis. Still, some advisers doubt that Bush will make passage
of conservative antipoverty programs a real priority, given his
neglect of them for the past three years. Said one White House
official: "The burden is on us to show that we will fight for
this."