Oh, here comes putative centrist Bruce Lisman with another load of warmed-over Reaganite crapola. In one short opinion column, he manages to misdiagnose the problem, misidentify the remedy, and prove, once again, that his thought process was forged in the free-market foundries of Wall Street.

Vermonters have spent billions on the war on poverty – the budget for AHS has grown from $863 million to $2.2 billion over the past 14 years (nearly 7 percent per year), comprises 42 percent of all state spending, and, this doesn’t include the earned income tax credit or property tax relief programs.

Vermonters have invested generously – better supported now than in past decades – but, our highest goal of lifting our neighbors out of poverty remains unmet.

Ol’ Brucie appears to be laboring under a buttload of false assumptions here. Let’s try to straighten him out, shall we?

— Anti-poverty programs are not solely designed to eliminate poverty. As Our Lord and Savior once said, “The poor you will always have with you.” To be sure, we’d like social service programs to give a hand up as well as a handout. But equally, their goal is to mitigate human suffering for those in poverty. Lisman, lifelong Wall Streeter that he is, refers to social service funding as an “investment” that hasn’t brought the desired return. Well yeah, if you expect the elimination of poverty. What I expect is that we help lift people out of poverty, but also keep the most unfortunate among us from freezing or starving to death.

— Anti-poverty programs are battling very powerful economic forces. By all measures — wealth, income, purchasing power — the poor, working class and middle class have been taking it on the chin for the last 30-plus years. Even people in the 50th or 60th percentile of income aren’t that far from poverty. And it’s almost impossible for someone at the bottom to escape from poverty, no matter how much assistance they get from SNAP, LIHEAP, EITC, and other alphabet-soup offerings. That’s why anti-poverty spending has grown so much: free-market capitalism keeps creating more and more victims.

— If you’re judging anti-poverty programs a failure, you have to do the same for capitalism itself. Free enterprise is supposed to create bountiful wealth, which redounds to the benefit of all, no? Apparently not. And we seem to create more poverty whenever the free-market system is given sway, from the Gilded Age to…

— The Reagan prescription of low taxes and deregulation has been especially abysmal. Cut taxes on the rich, unshackle American business, and the resulting growth will take care of everyone. That’s what Uncle Ronnie said. Well, it’s been 30-plus years, and things just keep getting worse for the poor, working class and middle class. Everyone, in fact, except for the super-rich and corporations. By Lisman’s own standard, it’s past time to end that experiment.

After the jump: pretty charts and graphs to prove my points.

Lisman provides statistics to “prove” the ineffectuality of anti-poverty efforts.

The 2012 U.S. Census best articulates the situation: 11.2 percent, or 70,100 Vermonters, live in poverty, and 15.7 percent, or 98,300, live at or below 125 percent of poverty (equals $14,363/individual and $29,438/family of four). The 2000 Census informs us that 10 percent (60,900) of Vermonters lived in poverty and 14.6 percent (90,175) lived at or below 125 percent of poverty. While I’ll acknowledge that poverty rates move up and down with the economy, it’s clear that efforts over the past 10 years to move Vermonters out of poverty have failed.

Lisman blames the public sector for this. Which is to be expected, I suppose, coming from someone who spent his entire adult life on Wall Street. Myself, I wonder why poverty has continued to expand from the inauguration of Reagan through two terms of George W. Bush.

Lisman’s favored fix for social services programs? It looks to me like a reheated version of Challenges for Change, the failed Jim Douglas experiment that remains the shining star in the firmament of Lisman’s right-hand man, Tom Pelham. He wants “performance-based measures” to evaluate human services programs. Just like Challenges for Change:

Rather than using an axe to make the budget fit the revenue available to pay for it, Challenges proponents said, government can change the way it does business in a way that trims expenditures without impacting programs.

Lawmakers used a number of terms to sell the idea, including “performance-based budgeting” and “outcomes-based budgeting.

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Douglas’ budget for FY 2011 called for $38 million in CFC savings; it only saved about $8 million in state operations. And in the process, it did damage to human services operations that have required a lot of time and money to repair.

“It was smoke and mirrors. That phrase has been used way too much to describe it, but it’s true,” Rep. Patti Komline, last year’s House minority leader, said last week.

And lest we forget the source of this new round of “smoke and mirrors,” I’ll again remind you of Bruce Lisman’s own economic views, as stated in his 2010 speech “Finding Skin.” Which I keep bringing up because it’s just about the only occasion where Lisman has expressed his own opinions on the record, rather than hiding behind the “nonpartisanship” and strangely-opaque “transparency” of his Campaign for Vermont.

Lisman advocated for lower taxes on capital gains and corporate earnings, because investment capital is “the most precious thing in the galaxy.” He asserted that “economic growth… is the ONLY answer for what might ail [Vermont]. And he characterized the Wall Street crash of 2008 as “this thing that happened to us.” Rather than, oh, “this thing we caused through our greed and hubris.”

(Still waiting, BTW, for someone in the media to pin down Lisman on his own political and economic beliefs, instead of giving him platforms to puke out his faux-centrist CFV pablum.)

And now for some charts and graphs that will show why social service programs have “failed” to end poverty, and some of the real causes of continuing poverty in the US.

1. The rich people have all the money. The bottom 80% have a tiny proportion of all US wealth. That includes the poor, the working class, the middle class, and even the upper middle class. When you have to reach the 80th percentile to get a decent share of the pie, what chance is there to get out of poverty — even with generous public assistance and powerful self-motivation? (Chart from the Economic Policy Institute)

2. The rich are earning all the money. The bottom 80% have seen stagnant income gains over the last half century. Again, how can you hope to reach economic security when you can’t get out of the rut? Also, how much longer do we have to wait for “trickle-down economics” to start working? (Figures from Census Bureau, graph from Mother Jones)

3. Reaganomics only works for the Republican “base,” as George W. Bush once put it. Still waitin’ for that trickle-down. And, again, this is the economic force that anti-poverty programs are trying to work against. How can they hope to lift people out of poverty, when more and more people are being pushed into poverty? (Graph from Congressional Budget Office)

I’m sure that Lisman’s answer to all of this is that taxes and regulation are still too high. Which fits Einstein’s definition of insanity: trying the same thing over and over again (or in Lisman’s case, doubling down) and expecting a different result.

I’m sure there are ways to improve social service programs. But I wouldn’t trust anything Bruce Lisman (or Tom Pelham) has to say on the subject.