The original draft of this email was sent to Washington Post national political reporter Annie Linskey and copied to her editor and an editorial page colleague.
Dear Ms. Linskey,
Early in today’s lengthy story, “Inside Biden’s decision to create a new social program,” you chose to quote, unchallenged, Biden administration leftists’ dismissive wisecrack about the “cost police.” This suggests you and your editors agree with the leftist notion that sober adults who, like the late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, argue against runaway government borrowing-and-spending are somehow heartless kill-joys who hate poor kids.
But if The Post weren’t so quick to take sides and ignore history, a moment of more objective thinking might otherwise have led you to ask administration officials this perfectly fair question: How do well-intentioned, bigger-bureaucracy, but still-might-fail plans for alleviating childhood poverty today justify the resultant crippling debt of tomorrow that will limit economic growth, job opportunities and upward mobility for the very same children who’ll then be adults in what should be their prime working-and-earning years?
There have been ups and downs over the past 60 years, but the U.S. rate of childhood poverty has stubbornly remained fairly consistent since the onset of LBJ’s Great Society more than 50 years ago (see nearby chart). In fact, the rate had been plummeting in the years preceeding that explosion of anti-poverty government spending programs. As Jim Crow segregation waned in the wake of 1954’s landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, more minority families were able to access education and job opportunities, and fewer of their children suffered the pangs of poverty. Then progressive government intervened. Many tens of trillions of tax dollars have been generously redistributed to needly families since. But the persistence of childhood poverty suggests that still another round of additional redistributions aren’t necessarily the answer; that perhaps the government-enabled breakdown of the nuclear family and a steadily receding sense of personal responsibility across American culture may have more to do with it.
In any case, progressives’ costly, well-intended dreams of doing good today must always be tempered by the prospect of unintended nightmares tomorrow. And The Post should do a much better job of reporting the need to balance the two. Reflexively advocating an ever bigger government with evermore costly and intrusive influence on individuals’ lives does not necessarily put policy makers or journalists on the side of the angels.
Darren McKinney, Washington, D.C.