Well, not necessarily, Newt; it depends on what the "War On Poverty" was really intended to accomplish:
The liberal approach to the "war on poverty" has been a resounding failure, and successful conservative solutions over the last 50 years have proven that Republicans are best placed to tackle poverty, says former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
In an exclusive interview with Newsmax TV, the former 2012 Republican presidential candidate says that during the half-century after President Lyndon Johnson famously declared a war on poverty, it is precisely because liberals have presided over a massive expansion of the welfare bureaucracy that America still has not won the war.
"When [Republicans] followed principles of hard work, low taxes, limited regulation, encouraging small business, encouraging people to learn and to get a job, it's worked dramatically," said Gingrich, author of the new book "Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate."
"During the years that the Republicans were actively involved when I first became speaker, we worked on things like welfare reform, capital-gains tax cuts, economic growth. We actually had 5.5 million people leave poverty in that period while under Obama; 3 million additional people moved into poverty. So what we learned is that big government can't solve the problem of poverty because it has exactly the wrong tools and exactly the wrong principles."
Newt is right, as far as he takes it. The welfare state is, indeed, the worst means of combatting poverty humanly imaginable, because it does indeed employ all the wrong tools and exactly the wrong principles.
Newt's mistake is that he is proceeding from a false assumption: That the left actually wants to fight poverty. Clearly that is not, and has never been, the case. To the contrary, the purpose of the "War On Poverty" is to breed poverty and create a permanent dependent underclass to serve as a huge Democrat constituency to keep Democrats in power forever.
We're back to that intra-Right debate between the "incompetence" school of thought versus the "conspiracy" school of thought, and why most Republicans still fail to grasp the kind of war the country is really in. To assert that the "War On Poverty" is a "failure" is to assume that liberals genuinely want to lift the downtrodden out of poverty and into the middle class. It gives them the benefit of the doubt. The problem with that mindset is that when it became clear that the WOP had failed back in the seventies, logically libs should have admitted something along the lines of, "Well, this didn't work, so let's try something else". That's what a "pragmatic moderate" would do, yes? "Whatever works"? That's what the munificent Sun-King of "moderate pragmatism" claimed in 2008.
But that isn't what they did. Instead, they insisted that the problem was underfunding. If we just spent enough on the welfare state, it would magically start working, the welfare rolls would evaporate, everybody would be rich, there'd be a chicken in every pot, and we'd all live happily ever after. So upward, ever and eternally upward, went welfare spending, and yet the results never changed. To the contrary, the ranks of the poor ballooned.
And, interestingly enough, every expansion of the impoverished population also correlated with economic reversals. Whereas strong economic growth proved to be a consistent economic palliative. Yet libs have fought like demons against any and every pro-growth (i.e. anti-poverty) policy, measure, and program. Because, you see, in the Church of the Poisoned Mind, only multiplying poverty by taxing fewer and fewer rich and middle class families in order to subsidize poverty can combat poverty.
I'm a strong believer in Occam's Razor, which teaches that the simplest explanation is usually the most likely. It was garishly self-evident decades ago that the Left's approach to "fighting poverty" only produced more of it, while the conservative approach of freeing the market to generate its own prosperity so that that rising tide can lift ALL boats is the most effective anti-poverty treatment ever conceived. Yet Democrats adamantly and blindly condemn the latter and insist upon the former.
Thus, either leftwingnuts are so collectively retarded that they are almost a sub-human offshoot of the human genome, or they know exactly what their so-called "War On Poverty" does and they stick with it because it is their ticket to permanent political power and everlasting avarice and aggrandizement.
I think if Republicans started coming right out and saying this, throwing the ideological gauntlet down to the Left by legitimately questioning their motives, hitting them where they absolutely live - their moral supremacism - instead of timidly tip-toeing through the technocratic tulips as Speaker Gingrich does here, a lot of LIVs and NIVs might get their eyes opened. Because clearly, having the facts on our side isn't enough. We have to cut the Dems' balls off as well.
To date the "War On Poverty" has only been waged on one side. It's long past time that it this conflict became bona fidedly two-sided.
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