In sports, if a game plan is not working, the coach changes it. In medicine, if a course of treatment does not cure a disease, doctors try a different approach. In government, failure means nothing. Government keeps cash flowing with little regard for results. In government, failure endures.

In an attempt to change our approach to poverty and to combat the long-held liberal accusation that conservatives care only about tax cuts for the rich and cutting programs for the poor, the Jack Kemp Foundation sponsored a forum last weekend in Columbia, S.C.

The gathering focused on ways to help the poor get out and stay out of poverty, which participants charged liberal programs have not done and are incapable of doing.

“U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on ‘anti-poverty’ programs since President Lyndon Johnson announced a ‘war on poverty’ ” in 1964, writes the Heritage Foundation, and yet the poverty rate has not changed all that much, from 19 percent in 1965 to 14.8 percent in 2014.

The key to unlocking the prison door that keeps too many locked in poverty is education. An uneducated child will likely repeat the poverty cycle. That is a fact.

The poor must listen to the right voices, not the ones associated with the Democratic establishment, which preaches that racism is at the heart of poverty. They must hear from black entrepreneurs and successful fathers and mothers who have emerged from poverty to build a life independent of government and of a Democratic Party that talks about poverty but has done little to eradicate it. Perhaps that’s what Democrats fear most, that if the poor are no longer addicted to government they will be more independent in their political thinking.