Compassion for the Poor is Meaningless Unless it's also Effective

At Heritage.org

…“As Christians, we believe the moral measure of the debate is how the most poor and vulnerable people fare,” argues a statement on Circle of Protection’s website. “Funding focused on reducing poverty should not be cut.”

Protecting the status quo, however, isn’t in the best interest of the poor. Americans spend a trillion dollars a year on more than 70 federal antipoverty programs, double what we spent in the late 1990s. Meanwhile the poverty rate has remained largely unchanged since 1970, and intergenerational dependence on government welfare is common.

The measure of our compassion for the poor should not be how much we spend on federal antipoverty programs. Compassion must be effective.

We ought to define success by how many escape dependence on welfare to pursue their full potential as human beings. To measure our commitment to the poor by the number of dollars spent on antipoverty programs is to diminish human dignity.

 

Why should we flatten poverty to a merely material problem? Why should we delegate our personal responsibility for the poor to impersonal government programs?

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