On the one hand, this is a country that leaves behind too many people. Our child poverty rate is high compared to our peer countries. Many Americans still don’t have enough to eat, a bed to sleep in, or health care for themselves or their families.
On the other hand, an accretion of government programs, built up over the last five decades, has created a semblance of a safety net where once there was none. Programs like the earned income tax credit, expanded greatly in the 1990s, put much-needed money in working poor people’s pockets every year. Food stamps, established in the 1960s but made more generous in later decades, have put food on the table for many families. The Affordable Care Act, though still patchy, has nonetheless provided health care for the previously uninsured.
This patchwork net isn’t perfect, but it has inarguably made a difference in the lives of millions of low-income people over the decades. And while many hands contributed to that net’s creation, one man is as responsible as anyone for pushing our sclerotic, fractious government in a more humane direction.
Robert Greenstein is not a household name. But for 40 years, he was one of the most powerful people in Washington, DC, with one of the most surprising jobs. He was the capitol’s de facto lobbyist for the poor, and he won countless fights that cumulatively directed hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to programs for low-income people. The odds are that you or someone you know got more services from the government — health insurance, more money, food assistance — because of his actions.
In 1981, Greenstein founded the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank to provide rapid-fire analysis of tax and spending proposals, with a focus on how they affected low-income people. Over four decades, he built the Center up into one of Washington’s most influential institutions, insinuating it into the heart of the $6 trillion-plus annual federal budget process. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), formerly the top Democrat on the House budget committee, told me that Greenstein and other Center staffers were in his office so much amid the 2011 budget fights it was like their “home away from home.”
It has played a major role in growing tax credits for low-income people, in expanding the SNAP (a.k.a. food stamps) and WIC (Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) nutrition programs, and in passing and defending Obamacare. Perhaps even more important was what it helped prevent from happening: It played a pivotal part in blocking deficit hawks’ efforts to add a balanced budget requirement to the Constitution in the mid-1990s, and in killing George W. Bush’s effort to privatize Social Security in 2005.