Finding Common Political Ground on Poverty

If you have been paying any attention to America’s paralyzed politics, you are not going to believe this.

Even as substantive legislation in Washington remained largely bogged down by bitter partisan mistrust, some of the leading thinkers on opposite sides of the ideological divide — experts on the right who have advised Republican policy makers alongside left-leaning scholars who have Democrats’ ear — came together to champion an increase in the minimum wage.

They didn’t stop there. In a report published in December by the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, they also recommended attaching a job requirement to the food stamp program, to compel poor people to work. They strongly endorsed marriage, as well as birth control.

They called for increasing the earned-income tax credit for adults without children. They also proposed more federal investment in early childhood education and community colleges. They defended a common core in education.

To pay for it all, they recommended culling corporate boondoggles and individual tax expenditures that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy, like farm subsidies and the mortgage interest tax deduction. And they urged reducing Social Security benefits for affluent Americans.

These folks do not often agree. The group included Robert Doar of the conservative American Enterprise Institute and Lawrence Mead of New York University, who believe that welfare should come with stiff work requirements to discourage dependency. They sat across from Sheldon Danziger of the Russell Sage Foundation and Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University, who believe in a cash safety net of last resort, at least for families with children.

“Everybody had to swallow very hard to put their name on that,” acknowledged Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, who was part of the 15-member group.

It is easy to dismiss the exercise as a futile effort to find a minimum common denominator between disparate opposites. The report is not likely to make its way into legislation any time soon. But, the experts hope, the next administration might turn its attention to poverty and find a set of viable ideas on the shelf.

The collection of proposals — from promoting strong and stable families to improving the quantity and quality of work — actually adds up to a coherent approach to improving an anti-poverty strategy that has fallen far short of its goals.

This raises a tantalizing prospect. Is it possible that combating America’s entrenched poverty — the deepest among advanced industrialized nations — may have finally become salient enough for the left and right to break through the ideological gridlock?

“The report took us longer than we thought,” Mr. Danziger told me. “But everybody agreed that even though there were things in it we didn’t like, the package together would be better than the status quo.”

A dose of skepticism is probably wise. Preserving the bipartisan balance — drafted over the course of 14 months, with New York University’s Jonathan Haidt in the role of ideological mediator — required a lot of vagueness that would never survive the rough and tumble of the real political arena. Touchy subjects like race were mostly left off the table. And though bipartisanship may have committed both sides to work from the same facts, it did nothing to alter how each side weighed them.