Brain Trust - Jennifer Marshall

The Heritage Foundation's Jennifer Marshall believes that budgets are moral documents...just not in the same way as religious leaders on the left do.

 

Budgets are moral documents. What do you mean by that? 

This is something we're hearing quite a bit, particularly from religious leaders on the left.

 

What they're trying to do with those four words is...as a measure of our nation how much we give to the poor.

 

We can't have a thriving free society without strong families.

 

It does an injustice to human dignity to measure our compassion by how much government gives to the poor.

 

The poverty rate has hung at about the same rate for the last four decades.

 

On the other hand we've seen massive family breakdown. The rate of unwed births has soared to over 40%...When the war on poverty started, that was a single digit number.

Shouldn't we start talking about effectiveness? 

Absolutely. I'm so glad you brought this up.

 

We have delegated our responsibility, our personal responsibility to care for the poor, to the government.

 

Instead, the way we should be measuring success is how effective it is.

 

Compassion must be effective - not just what we put in to a program, what comes out

If government can't do something, should we allow them to keep on doing it with more money? 

Government can provide a safety net for people with great material need.

 

Instead of trying to redistribute wealth...let's start targeting that ladder.

 

Let's find out what the needs are...rather than developing a welfare state that is cyclical.

 

That is antithetical to the American dream and the freedom we enjoy.

Why is it easy to be tempted with more money is better for the poor? 

It sounds right...but we have to be more careful.

 

What's fundamentally happening here - it's a misdiagnosis of the problem. It diagnoses poverty as a lack of material possession.

 

So it's not so much the material living conditions, but it's the other aspects.

 

It's the absence of fathers.

We've spent $16.5 trillion in our war on poverty. Do you have hope that we can fix this? 

There are several things we need to do to fix this. I do have hope.

 

One thing is the moral responsibility of not handing down a load of crushing debt to future generations.