Letter: Liberals have long had ideas for fighting poverty

Editor,

In Dane Roberts' column, "No one to blame for Katrina," he states that "liberals are filled with venom for the current administration but bereft of constructive ideas." The basis for this statement is that the only author at the New York Times that offered a constructive idea to ease poverty is their conservative op-ed writer David Brooks.

I take issue with these statements for a number of reasons, primarily because liberals have had sensible solutions toward poverty for quite a while now that actually worked. Looking at recent history and statistics from the Census Bureau, one would see that the poverty rate decreased from 15 percent in 1992 to 11 percent in 2000. This is a change of about 8 million people moving out of the poverty bracket and came during the Clinton years. This would seem to imply that liberals have policies toward cutting down poverty that actually work.

From 2001 to today, the years of President Bush, there has been an increase in poverty from that 11 percent to about 12.7 percent and increasing. This would imply that neoconservatives do not have policies towards poverty that cut it in any meaningful way.

I would also like to point out that since President Bush has been in office, both the middle class and the poverty class have decreased in their buying power, while the buying power for the rich has increased tremendously. The rich continue to get richer while the poor continue to get poorer.

Roberts also contends that liberals do not offer constructive ideas because they are not sexy. I contend that liberals do offer many constructive ideas, especially toward poverty, protecting the environment, energy alternatives and creating a more equal society. The problem being that whenever we open our mouths about these subjects we are accused of being socialist or communist.

Perhaps it is not as sexy to think about all the people affected by poverty everyday, to think about all the people that were unable to evacuate from New Orleans or Mississippi because they could not afford a car or gas. The fact is that liberals have had all of these ideas on their agenda for years and years and years. Perhaps Roberts takes issue with these policies because they are not new, but they are universal.

I think Roberts does bring up a valid argument in that Democrats need to renew their focus on these issues and their policies instead of focusing on their hatred of President Bush. Anger has become such an issue over Bush's term as president due to the administration doing, most of the time, exactly what we do not want. Nevertheless, we need a renewed focus on policy and ideas.

Angelo C. Baca

UNM student