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Morning Bell: What The Poverty Advocacy Complex Costs You
This Monday the Senate voted 83 to 7 to strip funding for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) from this year’s housing and transportation appropriation bill. The move came after upstart website BigGovernment.com posted videos showing ACORN employees in multiple cities across the country conspiring to help under cover reporters avoid taxes for criminal enterprises.

Despite the swiftness with which the Senate acted, this is hardly the first time ACORN has been accused of illegality. Last fall when ACORN was investigated for vote fraud in a dozen states, the New York Times reported that an internal ACORN legal memo raised “questions about whether the web of relationships among its 174 affiliates may have led to violations of federal laws.”

The Times reporter who wrote that story, Stephanie Strom wanted to pursue the story further, but she was discouraged by her superiors at the Times and gave up after blistering phone conversation with then-candidate Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Strom revealed in an email: “I’m calling a halt to my efforts. I just had two unpleasant calls with the Obama campaign, wherein the spokesman was screaming and yelling and cursing me, calling me a rightwing nut and a conspiracy theorist and everything else.” Explaining why she wanted to pursue the story further in another email Strom wrote:

The real story to all this is how these myriad entities allow them to shuffle money around so much that no one really knows what’s getting spent on what — and for the charities like the housing orgs, that’s a problem. Charitable money cannot be spent on political activities. It’s a big no-no that can cost charitable organizations their exemptions....

... * Over the next decade (2009-2018), President Obama will spend $10.3 trillion on welfare programs. This includes cash, food, housing, medical care and targeted social services for poor and low income Americans. Of this spending $7.5 trillion will be federal spending and $2.8 trillion will be state government matching contributions to federal welfare programs.
* President Obama will spend twice as much on welfare as Clinton did, after adjusting for inflation. Over the next decade welfare, spending will amount to around $300,000 for each person currently living in poverty, or, on average, $1.2 million for a poor family of four.
* President Obama will spend more on welfare in a single year (FY2010) than Bush spent on the Iraq war during his entire presidency.
* Total cost of the War on Poverty since its beginning in 1964 has been $15.9 trillion. By contrast the total cost of all other wars in our nation’s history has been $6.4 trillion.
* If total welfare spending were divided equally among all poor persons, each would get, on average, $16,800 in welfare benefits.
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