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“The Poor Are Bad And Irresponsible People”: The Grotesque Moral Atrocity Of Blaming The Poor For Being Poor

The Republican Party has long struggled with how to package its blatantly pro-rich policy portfolio of top-heavy tax cuts and deregulation. Such things are deeply unpopular — even self-identified Republicans are divided on whether the rich pay their fair share of taxes — but the GOP’s wealthy donor class demands them.

Thus far in the 2016 presidential race, candidates have basically landed on the George W. Bush formula: Sweeten your handouts to the wealthy with far smaller ones for the rest of Americans, and sell it with utterly preposterous promises of 50 zillion percent growth. Jeb Bush promises a growth rate not achieved since FDR started his term at the very bottom of the Great Depression and ended it at the peak of World War II mega-spending. Donald Trump promises half again as much as that.

Marco Rubio has one small change from the usual formula. Sure, he’s got the typical titanic handouts for the rich — incredibly, including the total abolishment of the capital gains tax. But he’s also got new welfare spending for middle-class families. However, in a sad demonstration of the conservative mindset, the poor are deliberately excluded from Rubio’s plan.

Here’s how Rubio’s new welfare benefit works: It’s a non-refundable tax credit of up to $2,500 for people with children — meaning unlike the Earned Income Tax Credit, it gives nothing to people who already have no federal tax liability. This means that the average lower-middle-class family — as Matt Bruenig calculates, ironically including households like the one Rubio grew up in — would receive nothing whatsoever from the credit.

Cutting out the poor is surely intentional, and the reason is obvious: Many conservatives basically think the poor are bad and irresponsible people who have made stupid, disgusting choices — particularly having kids outside of marriage — that put them in the place they are today. Hence, giving the poor welfare will merely short-circuit the process of bourgeois norm-formation at the root of their actual problems. Government handouts will just turn the poor into shiftless parasites.

If you spend much time in conservative comment sections, or among the #tcot crowd, then this idea will be extremely familiar. But even high-minded policy elites will own up to it on occasion. Robert Stein, the original creator of Rubio’s tax credit, told me it is “not designed to encourage fertility in the poor over and above what we already do.” W. Bradford Wilcox, another conservative thinker, wrote that he made a similar tax credit proposal non-refundable to “reduce the possibility that an expanded [child tax credit] might encourage single-parenthood.” Charles Murray has written several books wholly premised on poor-blaming, the most influential of which was probably 1984’s Losing Ground, which argued for abolishing welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, housing subsidies, and disability insurance (a tiny fraction of which might be replaced).

Indeed, until fairly recently, poor-blaming was mainstream Democratic Party thinking, too. Murray’s book was hugely influential on the right, but Democrats embraced it as well. In 1993, President Bill Clinton said in an interview that Murray’s analysis was “essentially correct,” recounting how a classroom of children once agreed with the idea that welfare would increase single parenthood. (I should note that while he pummeled the very poor, to his credit President Clinton also passed a sizable expansion of the EITC, which boosted benefits for poor people a bit higher on the income ladder.) Until the early 2000s, Hillary Clinton would routinely say similar things, boasting about how after welfare reform, recipients were “no longer deadbeats,” or that they had transitioned “from dependency to dignity,” as Buzzfeed News reports.

Now to be fair, Bill Clinton noted that while he agreed with Murray’s prediction about policy mechanics, whether it would be morally correct to starve people out of single motherhood was the more important question. But it turns out Murray was wrong about both points, as he was about just about everything else in his book. Welfare reform did nothing to halt the long decline of marriage, which has been steadily eroding for decades, nor did it decrease the rate of single motherhood. On the contrary, as is seen in many other developed nations, a big fraction of children are now born to cohabiting couples who are neither married nor poor.

Welfare reform, in fact, didn’t do much but snatch money from very poor families with children, increasing the fraction of people living in extreme poverty by 150 percent.

Many conservatives and ’90s-vintage Clintonites imagine that most poor people are an unchanging core of working-age adults who are too busy having constant unprotected sex to go out and get jobs, but in reality, over 80 percent of them are either children, disabled, students, or involuntarily unemployed, constantly churning in and out of poverty. These people are poor because they generally can’t work. In a purely capitalist economic system, such people will always fall through the cracks. Neither work requirements for cash benefits nor Paul Ryan’s goofy “life plan” paternalism will conjure up jobs for 5-year-olds or the seriously mentally ill.

It’s also important to note that traditional welfare was a small program targeted at the very poor — the rest of the welfare state, notably Social Security (by far the largest anti-poverty program), Medicare, and Medicaid, has survived largely intact. So while welfare reform was a grotesque moral atrocity, it didn’t much affect the ongoing war on poverty, which has been a big, if incomplete, success.

But welfare reform does make a good test case. We can predict what will happen if Rubio gets to fulfill his desire to “reform” the rest of the welfare state along Clintonesque lines: The number of people in poverty will explode. And after that, conservative policy hacks will construct convoluted theories about how a decline in traditional marriage norms or something is to blame. The point, always, is to justify and deepen the existing social hierarchy.

 

By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, November 3, 2015

November 5, 2015 Posted by | Poor and Low Income, Poverty, Republicans | , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

“A Giant Confidence Game”: Is Ben Carson’s Campaign One Big Con?

Ben Carson’s presidential campaign is many things. A curiosity, an oddity, a fascinating yet disturbing commentary on today’s Republican Party? Absolutely. But there’s also some reason to believe that it’s a giant confidence game.

That isn’t to say that Carson isn’t genuinely trying to become president. He has even moved into the lead in a couple of recent national polls. But the inner workings of his campaign will look awfully familiar to those who understand how one right-wing movement has been bilking gullible conservatives over the last half-century.

Like many outsider candidates, Carson is relying on small donors to raise money — lots of it. He took in over $20 million in the third quarter, more than any other Republican (though less than Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders). But he has also spent much of it already. As of the end of the third quarter, he had raised $31 million but spent $20 million, almost two-thirds of the haul, an unusually high “burn rate.”

Spending lots of money early in an election isn’t necessarily bad, if you’re investing it in things that will be valuable for you later. If you have a big staff in Iowa, for instance, presumably they’ll be organizing activists, persuading voters, and putting in place the infrastructure you’ll need to get your supporters to the caucuses.

But that’s not where Ben Carson’s money is going. Much of it is going to the fundraising itself, mostly through direct mail. And money spent to raise money is just gone. Yes, you can go back to those people who contributed and ask for more, but that might or might not pay off. The Carson campaign is also delivering phone spam to untold numbers of people all over the country. I know lifelong Democrats who have gotten these calls and can’t figure out what list would include them as potential Carson supporters, suggesting a telemarketing firm is billing the candidate for oodles of useless calls.

It sure looks like Carson’s campaign is a self-perpetuating machine in which money is raised to pay mostly for more money being raised — and the people doing the direct mail and phone calls are making out quite nicely. As conservative radio host Erick Erickson says, “Carson’s actual expenditure list reads like a wealthy Republican getting played by consultants.”

So why does this sound familiar? As Rick Perlstein has documented, out of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign grew an entire industry in which conservatives would receive an endless stream of solicitations for both right-wing causes and various brands of snake oil, offered by people they trusted and with the assurance that they were remaking the country in their own image. Lists were the primary currency, the leads that were bought, sold, and traded between the industry’s participants, providing an endless stream of profits in mountains of small checks and bills. “The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers,” Perlstein wrote, “points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place — and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.”

And that was before the internet and super PACs came along. Now it’s even easier, with conservative publications and organizations using the new versions of those lists to solicit more and more cash. Go to Newsmax or WorldNetDaily or Human Events and sign up for updates, and just watch the solicitations roll in. “Give to our super PAC and take down Obama!” they’ll say, and people do — though the money only goes to pay the fundraisers, who in a weird coincidence share an address with the super PAC. Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee hawks miracle Biblical cancer cures to the gullible fans on his email list, profiting off their misery with talk as smooth as any confidence trickster.

No candidate was better positioned to take advantage of these same marks, who had been conned so many times before, than Ben Carson. While most Americans only heard of Carson when he started running for president, he’s been a prominent figure in certain socially conservative circles for years. With his mix of fervent religious belief and faith in unseen conspiracy theories, Carson’s story and personality has been admired by those same people who get so many other solicitations from those in the movement — or who seem like they’re part of the movement, but who are really only there to make money.

It may be that Ben Carson is really running a professional, forward-thinking campaign where nobody’s getting rich and all the money being spent is only on wise investment that will pay off when the actual voting starts. But it sure doesn’t look that way so far.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, November 4, 2015

November 5, 2015 Posted by | Ben Carson, Campaign Consultants, Campaign Fundraisers | , , , , , , | 3 Comments

“Good Advice For A Presidential Candidate”: Kasich Explains Government Spending To Woman: ‘You Ever Been On A Diet?’

At a town hall Tuesday in Dubuque, Iowa, John Kasich gave an interesting answer to a woman who asked the GOP candidate and former chairman of the House Budget Committee his advice on how to keep federal spending under control.

“I know how to do this. I mean, I know how to balance budgets; I know how to cut taxes; I know how to deal with the bureaucracy. I know how to do these things. And I get there, and we’ll get it done — but it won’t be done overnight,” Kasich said, actually sounding at least somewhat sensible. “It’s gonna take years to get there, because the debt is really high. And there’s no way to just slash all these programs — people wouldn’t accept that. But they will accept change.”

Then his answer got interesting. “And then you get there, and once you’re there, then you say, ‘How are we gonna stay here?’ And that’s where things kind of fall apart, because — Have you ever been on a diet?” Kasich said to the woman.

The woman replied, “Many times.” — to which he laughed and responded, “Well, you’re the perfect example!”

“Okay, so we set a goal, and you reach it. And what happens? How about a little spumoni? How about a trip over to Mario’s, an extra — you ever go to Mario’s? We were there last night. How about a little spumoni? How about another piece of garlic bread?”

The key, he said, was to maintain the original discipline — which might also be a good advice for a presidential candidate making personal remarks to people who ask questions at town halls.

 

By: Eric Kleefeld, The National Memo, November 4, 2015

 

November 5, 2015 Posted by | GOP Presidential Candidates, John Kasich, Women Voters | , , , , , | 2 Comments

“What’s The Price On Jeb Bush’s Integrity?”: Preaching Against The Corrupt Coziness Between Money Interests And Government Officials

If you are a presidential aspirant and you have to tell people that you are a person of integrity — there’s a very good chance that you are not.

And those odds at least quadruple if you have to hire a talking head to attest to your honor; how intriguing, then, that a spokeswoman for the Bush campaign was recently trotted out to tell us that, “Jeb’s record, both in office as Florida’s governor and in the private sector as a successful businessman, is one of integrity.” The testimonial from his paid mouthpiece was necessitated by the still-evolving news story that, after leaving the Florida governorship in 2007, he immediately cashed in on his name, state government knowledge, and contacts. Bush became a richly paid legislative consultant and board member to major corporations that had received lucrative benefits from Florida’s government while he was at the helm of it.

With cynical chutzpah, Jeb, the presidential wannabe, now campaigns as an ethics reformer, piously preaching against the corrupt coziness between money interests and government officials. But in the last eight years, Preacher Bush has pocketed at least $18 million in personal payment from his own quiet spins through the revolving door of government-corporate corruption. For example, Jeb was only out of government office for four months when he got a nice sinecure as a board member of the insurance giant, Tenet Healthcare (which just happened to run several of Florida’s private hospitals under Florida’s Medicare program). In 2006, Tenet was found to have cheated patients and taxpayers with more than a billion dollars in overcharges. To settle this malfeasance, the corporation paid only $7 million.

Meanwhile, Tenet has gushed in recent financial reports that it has “benefited greatly from Mr. Bush’s extensive background in government service, his perspectives on public policy and social issues.” In heartfelt gratitude, during the past eight years, this one corporation alone has put more than $2 million in Bush’s pocket.

The Tenet case clearly shows that Bush suffers from a total lack of integrity, but poor ‘ol Jeb seems to also have a terminal case of “Mitt Romney disease” — he just keeps blurting out asinine comments that reveal the fact that, in heart, soul, and political mindset, he is yet another “son of a Bush.”

His inner-bigotry against the poor, coupled with his cartoonish concept of the black community’s political motivation, was outed recently when he was asked how he planned to win the votes of African-Americans. “Our message is one of hope and aspiration,” he responded. Okay, Jeb, go positive, so far so good! But then the deep prejudice derived from his narrow upbringing as a child of privilege surfaced. His campaign message “isn’t one of division and get in line and we’ll take care of you with free stuff,” he asserted with a sneer. Then, to punctuate his little lecture on how to appeal to low-income black families, the multimillionaire heir to the Bush fortune said he would tell them: “You can achieve earned success.”

Yes, Jeb — instead of hard-hit people lining up to get what you call “free stuff” (like unemployment compensation and health care), thinks it better to challenge them to “earn” success. Tell them to have the same gumption you did — to be born to rich parents, to be welcomed as “legacy” applicants into the most prestigious schools, and to have their fathers open the doors for them to “achieve” financial and political success.

Yet the former “shoo-in” for the GOP presidential nomination can’t figure out why he’s running fifth in New Hampshire and fifth in Iowa, even after pouring millions into a month-long blitz of TV ads to goose up his appeal. Such shallowness, callousness, and condescension expose an ingrained contempt for all who don’t live in Bush’s elite zip code. No one but his fellow “one-percenters” wants someone like that in the White House.

 

By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, November 4, 2015

November 5, 2015 Posted by | GOP Presidential Candidates, Jeb Bush, Lobbyists | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“The Wrong Lessons Are Being Learned”: Stop Calling Them ‘Debates’. They’re Game Shows

After the bloody mess made by holding nearly two dozen debates in the 2012 election cycle, RNC chair Reince Priebus made reforming the Republican debate process one of his top priorities for 2016. It hasn’t worked. Why? Because these events are not debates at all. They’re game shows.

In 2011-12, attention-hungry candidates jumped at the chance to hold more and more debates, thinking the spotlight would help their candidacies. Instead, all those debates gave the media extra opportunities to find gotcha sound bites that damaged the party’s chances of winning against Barack Obama. Priebus pledged to keep that from happening this time around, by taking control of the debates, limiting their number, and pushing campaigns out of the strategy loop.

That didn’t work out so well.

Wednesday’s debacle on CNBC has infuriated the GOP’s 2016 presidential candidates, and has the RNC backpedaling. But the wrong lessons are being learned — and the candidates seemed poised once again to open the door to another 2012-style free-for-all.

Most observers agree that the CNBC debate was a disaster from start to finish. Seasoned journalists without a partisan ax to grind expressed their amazement and disgust at the spectacle. “Biggest loser of this debate isn’t JEB,” Ron Fournier tweeted during the debate. “It’s MSM. We’ve earned this bashing.” Even former DNC chair (and current governor of Virginia) Terry McAuliffe called the CNBC debate “an absolute farce … a joke … an embarrassment to our country.”

And so Republican candidates gathered this weekend to find a way to change the trajectory of the debates — and ended up making the problem even worse. The Ben Carson campaign argued that the debates needed to be severed from their network “sponsors.” A number of other campaigns didn’t want changes made to the format at all. The result was a series of “tweaks,” as Byron York put it, to be implemented after the upcoming Fox Business Channel debate on Nov. 10, which was deemed too close to change.

Even that modest outcome didn’t last a day. By Monday afternoon, the tenuous confederation of Republican candidates blew apart as frontrunner Donald Trump repudiated the agreement. Instead of coordinating between campaigns and broadcasters, Trump declared that he’d negotiate his own terms with the “sponsors,” and that the other candidates could either follow along or not. That threatens to return the GOP back to the 2012 dynamic, where candidates jumped at the chance to appear on television and dragged the other FOMO-plagued candidates through a gauntlet of televised debates.

The candidate confederation failed because all of these campaigns are competing with each other. The reason the RNC stepped into this role was to prevent exactly what Trump and his team want to do, which is to have 14 free agents negotiating with broadcasters.

But the reason the RNC’s original reforms failed is this: The RNC attempted to reform the wrong part of the process. The issue isn’t really how many debates take place, but the nature of the debates themselves, and the risk any one of them poses to the GOP.

These events are not debates in any substantive sense. The game-show format and the number of candidates on stage make substantive debate all but impossible. These are sound bite and gaffe contests, not a forum for sharp, honest arguments about the future of our country and party.

Nothing of substantive value emerged from two hours of wasted air time in the CNBC debate; indeed, all we have learned in nearly 14 hours of debate is how well the candidates can launch zingers. That might be valuable if we were electing the next Borscht Belt headliner, but hardly useful for choosing the next leader of the free world.

This is a failure of imagination more than a deficit of competence. We need to truly rethink debates themselves, and not just squabble over a hopelessly broken process. The RNC needs to put an end to both network sponsorship and the game-show format. If 14 candidates make the grade for a debate, then use a format that allows all 14 to make arguments for their policy choices. Offer a set of identical questions on a policy area to every candidate individually and give them each 15 minutes to answer, providing equal time for every candidate. That would require three and a half hours. Sounds like a lot, right? Well, it’s still shorter than the undercard + main event of each of the three previous debates.

When the field comes down to a manageable number — say, six or fewer — then a two-hour debate has a chance to offer substantive discussions that can frame Republican and conservative policy in an attractive manner.

If networks don’t like that format, they can cover the forums from the sidelines. In fact, with the proliferation of broadband internet, the media partnership model should be an anachronism, not a tradition. Carson’s campaign is absolutely correct about the need to cut the network strings. Presidential forums will get plenty of coverage regardless of whether they get broadcast by an alphabet-named media outlet; filing rooms fill up with reporters from all media organizations for every debate. By taking ownership of the entire event, the RNC can select moderators who display objectivity in their reporting, or even better yet, choose media figures who know the Republican voters that candidates need to reach in the primaries. Priebus deserves credit for pushing the envelope already by involving media groups on the right (including my employer, Salem Media Group, as a partner in the CNN debates), but the reform needs to go all the way toward self-sufficiency.

The Republican Party learned a hard lesson last week about the game-show format and the ability of media figures to exploit it, especially in a crowded primary. Until they change the debate format itself and replace it with a format that rewards depth and substance, they will continue to get caught with their pants down — even if the RNC or the campaigns delude themselves into thinking they’re in control.

 

By: Ed Morrissey, The Week, November 4, 2015

November 5, 2015 Posted by | GOP Primary Debates, Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee | , , , , , | 1 Comment

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