Erik Loomis sounds the intellectual garbage alarm:
Evidently Kristof is only interested in poverty if he can personally fly in and rescue women from sex slavery. Otherwise, he’s happy to channel the arguments of Gilded Age social Darwinists…
Indeed:
Nick Kristof: Profiting From a Child’s Illiteracy:
THIS is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability. Many people in hillside mobile homes here are poor and desperate, and a $698 monthly check per child from the Supplemental Security Income program goes a long way — and those checks continue until the child turns 18.
“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.” This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency….
THERE’S no doubt that some families with seriously disabled children receive a lifeline from S.S.I. But the bottom line is that we shouldn’t try to fight poverty with a program that sometimes perpetuates it….
There is not a single--successful--antipoverty program that does not "sometimes" perpetuate it. Kristof is calling for the elimination of all antipoverty programs. But he does not know that because, as he says:
I’m no expert on domestic poverty…. I don’t want to suggest that America’s antipoverty programs are a total failure…
A simple change to the New York Times's op-ed columnist policy: have an editor ask each of them "do you know what you are talking about?" before publishing...
