I’m actually very proud of the work that I have been doing on poverty in the past year and earlier in my life. And what I sought to do a year ago was, knowing that the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty was coming up and knowing that those results are just like you said—the highest poverty rate in a generation, 46 million people in poverty, child poverty as you said, deep poverty is the highest on record—we should ask ourselves, “Is what we are doing working?” And we should say: “No, it’s not.” . . .

So we, in the House Budget Committee, decided to go out and find out what . . . does the federal government do? How much are we spending? And what are the outcomes? What literature is out there that analyzed these programs—like audits, Inspector General reports, and GAO reports? and then get a good accounting on what it is we’re doing to measure the status quo. Because you can’t reform these programs if you don’t even know what they’re doing. And so my argument is, if we take a look at the status quo, there are a couple of takeaways: Number one, we have been measuring our poverty-fighting efforts based on inputs—based on how much money we spend on programs, not based on outcomes: How many people are we getting out of poverty? Number two, we need to have a different approach that goes at severing the root cause of poverty. Go address the root causes of poverty, and don’t just treat the symptoms of poverty and try to make poverty more sustainable. Because the goal here, like you just said, is to break the cycle of poverty. . . .

The point I’m trying to make is we have to drop this idea that government is the only needed thing here. Government has a huge and important role to play in fighting poverty, but it’s not the only role. Civil society, charities, people have got to step up to make a difference here so that we can get people in poverty on an on-ramp, a bridge, to a better life, and so we can break the cycle so that kids are not growing up in multi-generational poverty, which has been plaguing this country.

The last point I’ll make is this: that government has inadvertently created all these barriers to work. I was just going through these CBO documents that say just because of Obamacare, the equivalent of 2.5 million less jobs will be done by the end of the decade because of the disincentives to work because of this health-care program. Employers are cutting the work week from 40 hours to 29 hours because the work week is now 30 hours full time, not 40 hours. So there’s one law where the government said cut people down from 40 hours to 29 hours. That doesn’t help you get out of poverty. This law is saying, “If you go to work, you’ll lose more.”