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N.Y. TIMES
AS the predominantly black, disproportionately poor community of Ferguson, Mo., erupted in protest after the shooting death of Michael Brown, critics excoriated President Obama for his failure to empathize. Michael Eric Dyson, for example, called the president’s statement about the case on Monday a “stunning epic failure.”
Mr. Obama’s defenders point to his second-term commitment to issues that touch the lives of poor communities of color, especially his initiative to assist young minority men, My Brother’s Keeper. But what both sides are ignoring is the president’s first-term record.
A true measure of a president’s priorities lies hidden in plain sight in his budget proposals. Under that standard, Mr. Obama has been more committed to communities like Ferguson than any Democratic president in the past half century.
By looking at what percentage of the budget presidents propose to spend to fight poverty, we can compare their degree of commitment.
While Mr. Obama advocated for the Affordable Care Act as a way to assist poor African-Americans, for example, we can’t put that on an effort scale and compare it to President Bill Clinton’s advocacy for his health care plan. Our method also avoids the problem of accounting for forces beyond presidents’ control.
Using this method, we find that President Obama attempted to deliver far more than his counterparts. The Congressional Budget Office’s inflation-adjusted numbers show that Mr. Obama sought to spend far more on means-tested anti-poverty programs than other first-term Democratic presidents. The targeted needs include food, housing, education, health care and cash.
Mr. Obama earmarked 17 percent of his budget for these needs, versus Mr. Clinton’s 12 percent and Jimmy Carter’s 8 percent. These presidents all faced economic challenges, although of different degrees and strength. Each was committed to the needs of the poor and the disadvantaged. But Mr. Obama made good on that commitment far more concretely.
No president gets all he requests, but the outcomes speak well for Mr. Obama, too. Christopher Wimer of Columbia University found, for example, that tax and transfer policies lowered the poverty rate by only 1 percentage point in 1967, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, but by almost 13 points in 2012.
Did Mr. Obama plan to spend more simply because he had more mouths to feed? No. Even after accounting for the higher numbers of poor people caught in the Great Recession, Mr. Obama’s record outshines his predecessors’. His proposed first-term spending per poor individual was $13,731 to Mr. Clinton’s $8,310 and Mr. Carter’s $4,431, in 2014 dollars.
Mr. Obama even exceeds Mr. Johnson, whose budget priorities amounted only to $111 per poor person. (Because Mr. Johnson was the first postwar president to tackle poverty issues with so many new programs, it is not surprising that his proposed funding levels were low at the start.) The same pattern shows up in spending per poor family. Mr. Obama allocated $67,132, Mr. Clinton $39,820, Mr. Carter $20,790, and Mr. Johnson $546, again using 2014 dollars.
Nor is Mr. Obama simply a big spender across the board. His spending on the Department of Agriculture, for example, was lower than Mr. Clinton’s and Mr. Carter’s, removing food stamps and adjusting for inflation.
A final test of priorities is how much a president proposes to spend compared with his immediate predecessor. By that yardstick, Mr. Obama does well too. The percent change in anti-poverty spending per poor individual is highest for Mr. Clinton relative to the first President Bush (27 percent), and lowest for Mr. Carter, who actually spent slightly less than Gerald R. Ford. Mr. Obama’s increase relative to George W. Bush was a respectable 17 percent. When it comes to the poor, Mr. Obama does not appear a failure, much less an epic one.
So why does Mr. Obama elicit fiery condemnation for lacking empathy? His first four State of the Union speeches provide several telltale clues. These are a president’s showcase, watched, in recent years, by up to 52 million viewers. What did Mr. Obama signal to those millions?
First, he rarely mentioned poverty. Listeners had to hunt for words like “poor” or “homeless.” His average poverty word count is seven, lower than Mr. Carter’s nine and Mr. Clinton’s 23. Second, the little he did say was drowned in a wave of words aimed at the middle class, like “average earner.” His ratio of middle-class-related words to poverty-related words was nearly 3 to 1.
When he did mention the needs of the poor, he tiptoed around them. His ratio of direct mentions of poverty to indirect mentions was 1 to 3. Contrast that with Mr. Clinton’s 8-to-1 ratio. Even Mr. Carter’s was higher than Mr. Obama’s (1 to 2). By favoring words like “vulnerable” and “unemployed” so heavily, Mr. Obama nearly gave up the bully pulpit.
While critics are right to chastise Mr. Obama for his pallid rhetoric on race, at least as president, they are wrong to say that he does not care about poor communities of color. Mr. Obama has been spending without saying. He should get at least as much credit for the former as vilification for the latter.