On January 9, up to 1700 people packed the exhibit hall of the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center in South Carolina to hear what some of the 2016 candidates have to say about poverty — and how America can fight it. The forum, hosted by the Jack Kemp Foundation, Speaker Paul Ryan, and Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), featured Dr. Ben Carson, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Gov. Chris Christie, Gov. John Kasich, and Sen. Marco Rubio; former Hewlett-Packard Carly Fiorina was unable to attend. So, is this a new day for the conservative movement? It was a question posited towards to the crowd by American Enterprise Institute’s president Arthur Brooks, who said the reason he’s conservative is because poverty is an issue he cares about the most. It’s also a moral one for him.

Brooks delivered remarks prior to the first panel, introducing Speaker Ryan, Sen. Scott, Gov. Christie, Dr. Carson, and Gov. Bush before they took their seats on stage, where he said that in 50 years, we’ve spent $20 trillion dollars in anti-poverty programs. The dividends: a 15 percent poverty rate in 1964 — when the Johnson administration declared war on this social ill — to 14.7 percent today.

“That’s failure,” said Brooks. One that would get any CEO in the country fired. Moreover, it represents a staggering social cost of three generations of Americans lost to this awful cycle of lost hope and dependency. It represents the tripling of working-age men who have remained idle; they’re not working. And it’s a nine-fold increase in dependency on government programs.

Brooks aptly noted that when Johnson declared war on poverty, he talked about dignity not doles, moving people out of dependency on government, and lifting the beleaguered to better economic opportunities. He added that the government’s most visible way to combat poverty today is the Powerball lottery. Yet, while the cost of these programs is significant, and certainly an issue, Brooks mentions that the cost isn’t just financial. It’s human — and it’s moral.

It’s an ugly five-decades long history of how progressive, large government policies utterly failed to help the poor, and in doing so, has failed America.

Read the article “The New Right: Warriors for the Poor” on townhall.com.