RIGHT SPEAK: Paul Ryan's Mentor Bob Woodson Slams 'War on Poverty'

“Keep doing what yer doing and you’ll keep getting what you got.” Thus spoke Robert Woodson, explaining why the War on Poverty, now entering its fifth decade, has failed—and miserably so.

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The American public is “tired of the gladiatorial combat that masquerades as political discourse” and is “desperate for solutions that transcend the ideological divide,” he said. “The Civil Rights movement has abandoned the high ground on which it was founded. It has morphed into a race grievance industry. It has been hijacked by the Democratic Party. It has sold its soul to the highest bidder.”

Yet, far from being bitter, Bob is ever more committed to his work at the Center for Neighborhood Enterprises, where his focus is on studying, identifying, and amplifying success, not justifying, subsidizing, and profiting from failure. “The only thing you can learn from studying failure is how to create more of it.”

He argues that most government spending on poverty alleviation is misdirected. “Seventy percent of the money spent on poor people goes not to poor people; it goes to those that serve poor people. And so they ask not which problems are solvable but which problems are fundable. We’ve spent $15 trillion to aid the poor with the bulk of it going to middle class providers. We have created a commodity out of poor people and wonder why poverty expands as funding increases.”..