The incomparably-named Myron Magnet writes in the Wall Street Journal about the blight of poverty, a foul stench wafting into the boardrooms of the “Ownership Society":

If you want to help the poor, compassionate conservatives argued, liberate them from dependency through welfare reform; free their communities from criminal anarchy through activist policing; give them the education they need to succeed in a modern economy by holding their schools accountable; and let them enjoy the rewards of work by taxing their modest wages lightly–or not at all.

Because, as everyone knows, the poor are unjustly taxed on their dividends and million-dollar estates. And giving low-income families that Earned Income Tax Credit check is the moral equivalent of breaking into their house and robbing them blind.

For the worst-off… Such people need a change of heart to solve their problems, the president himself deeply believed; and while a clergyman or a therapist might help them, a bureaucrat couldn’t.

Job training? No, job-prayer.

The War on Poverty rests on a false premise: that capitalism creates a permanent class of poor. And War on Poverty attitudes have a deeply harmful effect on those entrammeled in America’s current welfare state. So the second Bush term is bringing the War on Poverty–demonstrably a cataclysmic mistake–to an end. A glance at the administration’s recent budget shows the ongoing dismantling of antipoverty programs: a sharp reduction in the Community Development Block Grant, the main conduit for funneling federal money to cities; the reduction in HUD money for Section 8 subsidized housing vouchers, which abets the formation of dysfunctional single-parent families and destabilizes respectable working-class neighborhoods; and the shrinkage of ever-expanding Medicaid.

This is the heart of the War on the War on Poverty: that the evils of Big Gummint infect the hearts and minds of the lumpenproletariat. Indeed — poor families are likely to break up simply to be eligible for more and more Section 8 apartments. If we eliminated HUD, then families could stay together and live, like the Magnet family, in a bluebird shack, down by the railroad track. How can families stay emotionally close together unless they are crammed, physically, into the same room (or cardboard box)?

And how can the poor ever dig themselves out of their never-ending cycle of dependency if they are not denied medical care? Health care is like a drug to these people. And like a stern father, we must be deaf to their cries for more “juice.”

It’s in this context that we should understand President Bush’s campaign for Social Security reform. It is part of the large and coherent world view that has evolved out of compassionate conservatism. What has always made America exceptional is limitless opportunity for everyone, at all levels–the ability to find a job, to advance up the ladder as you prove yourself, and to prosper.

Yes, it’s true! Elderly immigrants flock to our shores in order to work as Wal-Mart greeters for $5 an hour, a privilege they are denied in the quasi-Communist regimes they leave. It is worth $4.9 trillion in transition costs, and much more, merely to see the smiles on their faces.

However, Myron Magnet is forgetting one crucial component of the president’s poverty plan: subsidizing third-string conservative commentators. While Bush has encouraged faith-based charities such as the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal (where Myron Magnet himself has found economic and spiritual relief) to take on these impoverished pundits with hearts of gold, sometimes a few of the Neediest Cases — the Williams, Gallagher, and McManus families, for example — slip through the cracks.