More than a week after streets in Baltimore erupted in violence, President Barack Obama planned to discuss the roots of the unrest there, which he says include a lack of opportunity for inner-city youth and laws that make it difficult to escape a cycle of crime.
Obama will join prominent policy experts to discuss the roots and potential solutions to poverty on Tuesday morning, part of a larger conference sponsored by Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Thought.
The panel, moderated by The Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, also includes Harvard Public Policy Professor Robert Putnam and Arthur Brooks, the president of the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute.
The gathering came as a response to Pope Francis’ call for the church to better serve the world’s poorest people. Obama has publicly praised the renewed attention the pope has placed on combating poverty, and the two discussed the issue when they met last year at the Vatican.
More recently, Obama has cited the pervasive and seemingly inescapable cycle of poverty when discussing the origins of violence in places like Ferguson and Baltimore, where large protests exploded after black men were shot by police officers.
Speaking in late April — as buildings smoldered in Baltimore following a night of violent protests — Obama said if Americans are serious about solving problems in inner-cities, they should focus on more than simply reforming police forces.
“If we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could,” he said, pointing to improving education and reforming criminal sentencing laws as examples. “It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant.”
It wasn’t until recently that politicians in Washington began talking in depth about the causes and potential solutions to poverty, though the problem has long plagued vast swaths of America.
In 2008, when he was running for president, Obama pledged to end childhood hunger in America by 2015, a goal that now seems all but unattainable. The combined forces of the worst recession in decades and stagnant wages have led to yearly increases in the number of Americans on food stamps.
Last year the Census Bureau estimated nearly 50 million Americans lived in poverty — including almost 20% of American children. Those figures, however, represented a decline in the poverty rate from mid-recession highs.
A Census report later in the year found that out-of-pocket medical expenses are causing 11 million Americans to fall into poverty. Conversely, benefits from food stamps, tax credits and social security are keeping roughly 40 million Americans from falling below the poverty line.
The White House points to a slate of programs introduced by Obama that are meant to combat poverty, including new grants for high-poverty areas, the “My Brother’s Keeper” program for young minority men, and raising the maximum Pell grant for higher education.
“The President doesn’t treat this conversation as one to be had only every few months surrounding the latest tragedy captured on camera and replayed on the news,” wrote Jerry Abramson, the President’s director of intergovernmental affairs, in an email to Obama supporters Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Republicans — led by Rep. Paul Ryan — have also taken on poverty as an agenda item. Ryan, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, embarked on a listening tour in poor neighborhoods across the country and sought to include poverty-combatting items in the GOP budgets he prepared as chairman of the House Budget panel.
Critics complained, however, that government spending programs Ryan’s budgets cut — including job training initiatives — are actually preventing more Americans from falling into poverty.
Ryan defended his plans Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation.
“It’s not a function of pumping more money into the same failed system because we’ll just get the same failed result. It’s rethinking how we actually attack the root causes of poverty. All we do these days effectively is treat the symptoms of poverty,” Ryan said.