Newt's Stamp-Out-Poverty Plan

The already mythic confrontation between Newt Gingrich and moderator Juan Williams at the Republican debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., was the most riveting four minutes of the presidential campaign so far. "Can't you see that [your recent comments on the work ethic of poor people are] viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans but particularly to black Americans?" Williams asked. "No," Gingrich responded, with a snarky shrug. A surprisingly substantive discussion ensued. The former Speaker was accorded a standing ovation at the end, but Williams stood his ground and acquitted himself well. It was that rarest of arguments: both men were sort of right.

Williams was certainly right that Gingrich likes to send not-so-subliminal racial signals to the overwhelmingly white base of his party. Calling Barack Obama "the greatest food-stamp President in American history" is a pure dog whistle to the melanin-deprived. Food-stamp use does stand at historic levels, but that's a consequence of a fierce recession that Obama didn't cause. You could, in fact, argue that the recession was caused by the collapse of a housing bubble that had been inflated by Gingrich's deregulatory Congress (and exploited by Gingrich's former paymaster, Freddie Mac). By his own standards of invective, Gingrich could be called the "greatest subprime-mortgage politician in American history."

Williams and other liberal critics are on shakier ground when they point out that blacks represent a minority of those receiving antipoverty entitlement funds. African Americans, who are 12.6% of the population, represent a disproportionate percentage of the people receiving food stamps (22%) and temporary welfare payments (34%) and attending Head Start programs (28%). The debate about why African Americans are disproportionately dependent has a long and gory history. It certainly involves institutionalized racism, but it also has a strong component of personal behavior--a culture of poverty and family breakdown--that has been an unintended consequence of government beneficence.

Indeed, the Brookings Institution study that Rick Santorum continually cites is pretty conclusive about the behavioral causes of poverty. The study found that if you do three things--graduate from high school, don't have children until you're married, and work--your chances of winding up poor are 2%. But those results apply to all races. Whites and Hispanics have been rapidly falling into the same patterns as blacks in those areas, says Ron Haskins, a co-author of the study. The out-of-wedlock birthrate has more than doubled in the past 30 years, from 18% to 41%, with almost all the increase coming from whites and Hispanics. (The black out-of-wedlock birthrate remains a staggeringly dreadful 70%.)