Should we fight the "war on poverty" all over again?
Well, yes. That's the recommendation of a group of liberal and conservative poverty scholars, who spent months discussing and arguing to see if they could find common ground. They did. Their new report — "Opportunity, Responsibility and Security" — lays out a plausible strategy for confronting poverty. The study was co-sponsored by the left-leaning Brookings Institution and the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
Recall that the first war on poverty, begun by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964, fell far short. In 2014, the official poverty rate (the share of people under the government's poverty line of cash income) was 14.8 percent, up slightly from 1966's 14.7 percent. By some other measures, which include non-cash government benefits (food stamps, Medicaid), poverty has declined. But clearly, there are still lots of poor people.