A couple of weeks ago, law professor Jonathan Turley devoted one of his columns to this seeming anomaly — that the Left somehow gains from its own failures. The headline of his column was “The worse it gets, the better it is: American leftism is thriving on its own failures.”
The theme of the piece is that the failure of a policy of the Left is never admitted to be a failure, but rather is only seen as a reason that the taxpayers haven’t yet devoted sufficient resources to the issue, and therefore the answer is to double down and spend yet more money on the failed policy. Turley provides several examples of the phenomenon, in the areas of immigration, health care, public education and housing. My reaction is, I’m glad that someone besides myself is finally noticing. However, Turley has barely scratched the surface, and indeed omits to mention some of the very biggest examples.
I don’t mean to fault Turley for the examples he has selected, which are good ones. But really, how about the poverty scam? This one is not a policy failure of mere billions of dollars, or even hundreds of billions; it now runs into the trillions per year. I have covered this subject repeatedly over the years. (Two examples are here and here.). The gist is that the government spends these huge sums — now over $2 trillion per year if you include federal, state, and local spending — supposedly to fight and cure poverty, and yet somehow the measured rate of poverty never goes down significantly. And then the persistence of poverty is used as the argument why the spending must be increased yet again in the next cycle. From my October 2018 piece at the link:
[D]espite spending a large multiple of what ought to be sufficient to end measured “poverty” once and for all, instead the government publishes poverty statistics that indicate that poverty has not decreased at all. Where did all the money go?
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