We need national town hall on poverty

Republicans and Democrats are fighting like old married couples over an issue that wouldn’t even be on the forefront of the political agenda and would not be there if we had effective national leadership. I’m talking about the SCHIP (the State Children’s Health Insurance Program) battle, which wouldn’t have become a battle if we’d gotten serious about another war we launched more than 40 years ago.

Believe it or not, the SCHIP battle is tied in closely to several other fights that Democrats and Republicans started long ago and have yet to resolve: the fights over ending poverty (the so-called War on Poverty) and the battle over immigration. SCHIP, meanwhile, is set to expire next week, and President Bush is threatening to veto a renewal of the program that congressional Democrats propose. Democrats want to insure not only the 6 million or so children currently in the program but add some 4 million more. Conservative Republicans claim it would insure not just needy children, but children of the middle class.

Sure it’s a tearjerker. No one wants to see children go without health care, no matter their families’ economic status. But we as a nation must step back during this face-off to ask what we can do to prevent future generations from becoming uninsured. Let’s use the SCHIP debate to have a national town hall on why we as a nation have failed to eradicate poverty more than 40 years since the War on Poverty began. If there were no poverty, the numbers of children lacking health insurance would dwindle considerably.

There are three major factors that perpetuate poverty in America.

The first is lack of education.

The second is massive legal immigration (80 percent of legal immigrants lack a high-school education) and illegal immigration (made up largely of uneducated people).

Federal deficit

The third and much more recent factor is Bush’s massive mishandling of the federal deficit. As we go deeper and deeper into debt, our dollars become less valuable, imports become much more expensive and low-income consumers get pushed to the brink of poverty.

Let’s start with the third item. It must be said that the expansion of federal funding for children’s health insurance is by far NOT the most costly item forcing the United States into record deficit territory.

Just this month the treasury secretary asked once more to raise the debt ceiling (the amount the United States can borrow, mainly from abroad) beyond its current $8.96 TRILLION (with a T) level. When Bush took office, the federal debt was $5.7 trillion.

Bush’s military spending and tax cuts are the demons pushing us toward financial disaster.

But Congress, which could be acting as a buffer against his spendthrift proclivities, seems incapable of getting spending under control. Unless our political leaders can curb their fiscal licentiousness, the last thing they ought to be considering is more spending.

On immigration, first I’d like to state that immigrants, like native-born Americans, are good people.

I am the proud granddaughter of a Cuban citizen. But mass immigration (both legal and illegal) and its expansive impact on our budget and on our quality of life must be considered separately from the economic plight of individual immigrants.

Children of immigrants

The fact is, many of the lower- and even middle-class kids who will benefit from an expansion of the SCHIP program are the children of immigrants. The progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported last month: “Non-citizen immigrants were much more likely to be uninsured (45 percent uninsured) than native-born citizens (13 percent).”

The best way to provide health insurance for all American children is to eradicate poverty. An educated populace can fend for itself and is far less dependent on government handouts for family basics (such as health insurance) than an uneducated one. Congress and the president should re-direct the money they would otherwise spend on handouts to education programs.

We need to enforce border control and eradicate illegal immigration. We need, simultaneously, to change legal-immigration policy so that we selectively allow in newcomers who contribute to our economy, instead of relying more heavily than the general populace on government supports.

X Erbe is a TV host and writes this column for Scripps Howard News Service. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.