TCSDaily offers a good look at the contrast between Bush and Webb the other night on the issue of poverty.

Last night, President Bush’s State of the Union address and Senator James Webb’s Democratic response provided a useful juxtaposition of views. Among other things, it showed how the parties’ positions on poverty have changed.

To wit, President Bush’s proposals tend to target various aspects of what might be called absolute poverty. By contrast, Sen. Webb is interested in relative poverty.

. . .While the president is interested in dealing with specific aspects of poverty and deprivation, he is not interested in the position of poor people relative to others. Senator Webb is. “When I graduated from college,” remarks Senator Webb, “the average corporate CEO made 20 times what the average worker did; today, it?s nearly 400 times.” Or again, “Wages and salaries for our workers are at all-time lows as a percentage of national wealth.” In each case, the statistic he cites is a ratio: the average worker’s wages compared to those of the CEO; wages and salaries compared to national wealth. That the average worker is much wealthier in absolute terms than he was thirty years ago does not seem to interest Webb much: what matters is that his relative wealth has decreased.

. . .The irony is that Sen. Webb calls for “measure[ing] the health of our society not at its apex, but at its base. Not with the numbers that come out of Wall Street, but with the living conditions that exist on Main Street.” Quite right. But President Bush said not a word about Wall Street. He is interested in job creation, health care, and foreign aid. It is Sen. Webb who thinks the state of the nation depends on how the elite are faring.

To those who know and follow the Democrats class warfare agenda, this is nothing new. Why one citizen should be concerned about the income of another citizen is not something Democrats ever bother to explain, but they operate under the assumption that it is so. The reason they can’t explain it is because there is no explaination, only a hope to play off peoples envy to gain votes.

 Print This Post