Hillary Clinton's poverty plan is woefully inadequate

Seventy percent of the poor are either children, elderly, carers, disabled, or students. How will more jobs help them?

Hillary Clinton's indirect way of helping the people who need it most.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Carlos Barria)

With Donald Trump's endless cavalcade of nonsense, and the endless attention to Hillary Clinton's minor email transgressions, policy issues have gotten virtually no attention during this campaign — and poverty policy least of all. That changed a bit this week when Clinton, to her credit, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on Wednesday outlining her plan to reduce poverty. There's just one problem: It's lame.

The problem, at root, is the same one Paul Ryan has with his various anti-poverty ideas — a wildly disproportionate focus on work, and a corresponding lack of attention to the welfare policies that could seriously cut poverty.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Ryan Cooper

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.