The American Spectator

The tragic truth is that at the end of segregation, the great moment of opportunity for African-Americans, we had a failure of government and a failure of culture. The rise of big bureaucracy in the Great Society starting in 1965 combined with the rise of a counterculture which despised middle class values and which taught the poor patterns and habits of destruction — and those two patterns of bad bureaucracy reinforcing bad culture have led to a disaster.

br> Gingrich offered as a successful example of real change the 1996 reforms of the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (AFDC), which he led the Republican Congress to enact. Those reforms sent the program back to the states with block grants of the Federal funds, under a requirement that welfare be provided in return for work by the able bodied. p>With the states keeping the savings from finding jobs for the poor, but paying for any higher expenses, they dramatically reduced the old AFDC rolls by close to 60% nationwide, a bigger success than even the reform advocates, going back to Ronald Reagan, would dare to predict. After the reform: br> /p>

[E]mployment of never married mothers increased by nearly 50%, of single mothers who are high school dropouts by 66%, and of young single mothers ages 18 to 24 by nearly 100%. The child poverty rate fell from 20.8% to in 1995 to 17.8% in 2004, lifting 1.6 million children out of poverty. The poverty rate among black children fell from 41.5% in 1995 to 32,9% in 2004. The poverty rate also fell from 53.1% to 39.8% for children from single-mother families.

br> These same reforms should now be extended to the other major federal welfare programs, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and federal housing programs, as well as the dozens of smaller federal welfare programs. Send them back to the states where they can be reformed from the bottom up with an expanded focus on work, private health insurance, even home ownership, creating a new modern welfare program to achieve middle class prosperity for the previously poor. p>To create jobs, Gingrich emphasized: br> /p>

In a healthy society, you want the smallest possible tax rate because you want the maximum resources with people who know how to create jobs. And the choice is simple, do you make the politician or the bureaucrat more powerful by giving them more money, or do you make the job creator more effective by letting them keep their money. But does anyone seriously want to argue that the bureaucrat is more likely to create the next million jobs than the entrepreneur?

br> Gingrich also argued for a cultural change encouraging more African Americans and other minorities to go into business because, “a generation of entrepreneurs can mop up poverty at a rate no bureaucracy can imagine.”

In his latest book, Real Change, Gingrich also argues extensively for personal accounts for Social Security, which would provide an historic breakthrough in personal prosperity for working people. Between that book and this speech, it looks like Gingrich is really the one who has the audacity of hope to argue for sweeping real change for America.

Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation, and general counsel for the American Civil Rights Union.