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Gaffe gives Romney chance to redesign safety net

Edward L. Glaeser

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February 10, 2012|By Edward L. Glaeser

(chris carlson/associated…)

LAST WEEK, as he attempted to emphasize his focus on middle-class America, Mitt Romney uttered these unfortunate words: “I’m not concerned about the very poor.’’ That statement may have nicked Romney’s aura of inevitability and contributed to his triple drubbing Tuesday by Rick Santorum - whom no less than Bono has described as “a defender of the most vulnerable.’’

In the awkward aftermath of his comments, Romney insisted that if the safety net “needs repair, I’ll fix it.’’ But he has said next to nothing about what that might entail. It’s entirely possible to make the safety net more effective and less expensive - by consolidating programs, improving incentives, and rethinking our current combination of cash support and in-kind transfers - and it’s high time for Romney to articulate a Republican master plan to do so.

Time and again, Republican presidential candidates have argued that fiscal probity is not mere heartlessness. The last President Bush advocated “compassionate conservatism,’’ and his father saw “a thousand points of light’’ created by socially active community organizations. Richard Nixon responded to Johnson’s War on Poverty by emphasizing markets and a new federalism. Under Nixon, the nation began to move toward housing vouchers, an alternative to vast public housing complexes. This shift in emphasis was implemented by Romney’s own father, the first Republican secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Even a cursory application of Romney’s well-honed managerial intellect would tell him that, today, our anti-poverty programs are spread across too many distinct departments, with too much bureaucracy and too little coordination. The Temporary Aid for Needy Families program, which cost $17 billion in 2010, resides at Health and Human Services. So does Medicaid, which cost $290 billion. At HUD, we spent $18 billion dollars on tenant housing vouchers. At the Department of Agriculture, we spent about $70 billion on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - food stamps - and another $17 billion on child nutrition. The Internal Revenue Service, meanwhile, oversees the Earned Income Tax Credit or EITC.