Poor and Isolated

For a very long time, fighting poverty has been a kind of boutique issue for conservatives. The 2016 election season has been no different: Over the past few months, the candidates for the GOP presidential nomination have devoted most of their time and attention to tax reform, Obamacare, and the threats posed by Iran and Russia. A few candidates, Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio most prominent among them, have emphasized the importance of upward mobility, but it’s not unreasonable to say that the plight of low-income households has not been at the heart of the debate.

In fairness, it’s true that there’s not much we can do about persistent poverty if the economy as a whole isn’t growing (hence the importance of tax reform), if the rising cost of federal health expenditures crowds out everything else government does (a problem that Obamacare makes much harder to solve), or if the world is burnt to a crisp (which is rather more likely to happen if America retreats from the world).