Bernie Sanders to a meeting at the evangelical Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell:
“Are you content? Do you think it’s moral that twenty percent of the children in this country, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, are living in poverty? Do you think it is acceptable that 40 percent of African-American children are living in poverty?
“In my view, there is no justice, and morality suffers, when in our wealthy country, millions of children go to bed hungry. That is not morality. I think when we talk about morality we are talking about ail God’s children, the poor and the wretched. They all have a right to go to a doctor when they are sick. I want you to search your hearts. Millions of people in this country are working long hours for abysmally low wages. You have got to think about the morality of that, the justice of that”.
I have some problems with the statistics he is quoting. I believe Sanders’ figures come from the US census bureau, which doesn’t factor in government programmes that help the poor. Since one of Sanders’ solutions to poverty is to increase the generosity of government programmes; poverty would not decrease under the definition he is using. In addition to this, the poverty statistics don’t factor in regional variations in cost of living. The relatively low wages of the southern states don’t seem so bad once you factor in how cheap things are there. In fact, the state with the highest cost of living adjusted poverty rate is California (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_poverty_rate)- a state with a Democratic governor and legislature. This doesn’t excuse the cuts Republicans have made to government programmes, but Sanders’ message is often overly simplistic, and doesn’t take into account inconvenient truths (though to be fair, no one is any better.)
But a more important point is that I don’t believe the phrasing of those rhetorical questions is fair. If he is trying to challenge the Liberty students, why is he asking whether they care about poverty? Of course they care, everyone cares. The only debate is how we reduce the poverty we all abhor. Sanders should’ve talked less about why poverty is a problem, and more about why his solution to it will be more effective than the Republicans’ solutions.