“Meet The Poverty Liars”: GOP Peddles More Garbage In War On The Poor
As we observe the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson declaring the “War on Poverty” this week, it’s worth remembering the way Ronald Reagan wrote its history, and its epitaph, with a soothing nine-word bromide: “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.”
It’s worth remembering, because as Republicans scramble to appear as though they care about the poor, circulating memos teaching how to seem “compassionate” and digging “anti-poverty plans” out of dusty file folders from the 1980s, all they’re doing is updating Reagan for the 21st century. And Reagan was dead wrong the first time around.
It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the effect of Reagan’s War on Poverty lies, especially as they’re warmed over by Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Paul Ryan as they dream about 2016. Even though Reagan began his Republican political career as a race-baiter and anti-welfare demagogue, by the 1980 campaign and his presidency, he’d softened some. He didn’t rail as much against “welfare queens” and “young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. Now he projected concern for the poor: He wanted to help them, and poverty programs hurt them.
Of course, we can’t forget the racial component of Reagan’s anti-welfare animus. Racial division is what doomed Johnson’s War on Poverty, almost as soon as it began. I was riveted by Slate’s feature on the actual woman behind Reagan’s race-baiting “welfare queen” stereotype. Reagan didn’t invent her, as many people thought over the years; his anecdote was based on Linda Taylor, a Chicago woman who did in fact use multiple identities to commit welfare fraud.
But my takeaway from Josh Levin’s mind-blowing piece had nothing to do with government poverty programs: Linda Taylor was a scary sociopath, a serial identity-switcher credibly accused of multiple cases of kidnapping and murder. Yet politicians and the media focused on the welfare fraud charges. It was the Chicago Tribune, not Reagan, that dubbed her the “welfare queen.” The Chicago police officer responsible for investigating her actual crimes was aghast at the focus on her welfare-grifting rather than her more far serious crimes. She went down in history as a symbol of a “welfare cheat,” not the kind of shrewd but deadly con artist and criminal that comes in every color and gender. And she got away with everything except the welfare fraud.
There weren’t neighborhoods full of Linda Taylors; there was one. But she’s the person Reagan chose to represent the millions of mothers – the vast majority of them white, by the way — struggling to feed their children on welfare aid that in many states might not bring them over the poverty line. And too many Americans chose to believe him.
Later, they believed his lyrical lie about welfare. Reagan revolutionized the poverty game for Republicans: You didn’t have to be angry and Nixonian, or an Archie Bunker type, to be against welfare anymore; instead you could project compassion. White middle-class folks didn’t have to worry that they were indulging resentment, or God forbid racism, by opposing poverty programs. Those programs hurt the poor; Reagan said so.
And here we are again. On the one hand, it’s a slight relief to see some in the GOP abandoning their ugly narrative about “makers” and “takers,” their demonization of the “47 percent” who “just won’t take care and responsibility for their lives,” in Mitt Romney’s campaign-killing words. House Republican leaders are now coaching members to show “compassion” for the unemployed, making sure they reflect that it’s a “personal crisis” and that they will give “proper consideration” to an extension of benefits — as long as Democrats cut other programs, of course — instead of rejecting it out of hand as they did last month.
Meanwhile Sen. Marco Rubio made a whole video to channel Reagan’s ideas about poverty programs. (Is it just me, or is anyone else waiting for him to lurch for a nearby bottle of water and take a slug?) Sleepy-eyed and absolutely unconvincing, Rubio asks: “After 50 years, isn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure?” Not surprisingly, his cheesy video offers absolutely no policy agenda to fight poverty.
Rubio’s efforts are being met by well-deserved cynicism in the media and among Republicans. Not so for Paul Ryan’s claims that he’ll develop a bold new anti-poverty agenda. Yet so far, the notions Ryan has floated sound like warmed over Enterprise Zones, the failed 1980s GOP prescription for urban neighborhoods that cut taxes and created other incentives for employers to hire poor residents. Not to be outdone, Sen. Rand Paul is advocating “enterprise zones on steroids,” what he calls “economic freedom zones” in places like Detroit with high unemployment.
Of course, every reputable study of enterprise zones has found their impact on urban poverty “negligible” to nonexistent. “Enterprise zones are not especially effective at increasing overall economic activity or raising incomes for the poor,” Len Burman of the Urban/Brookings Tax Policy Center told Politico recently. “They just seem to move the locus of activity across the zone’s boundary — reducing activity outside the zone and increasing it inside.”
Criticizing GOP flim-flam on poverty shouldn’t obscure the fact that the War on Poverty didn’t do all that its sponsors hoped. That’s not because we did too much, but because we did too little. It’s true that in the immediate wake of the war’s launch, poverty fell from roughly 22 percent to 12 percent, before it began to climb again in the mid-1970s. Not surprisingly, given that establishing Medicare and expanding Social Security were its core components, Johnson’s anti-poverty push made the biggest strides in reducing poverty among the elderly.
For the rest of the poor, the program was never as ambitious – or successful. Johnson famously rejected a big public works jobs program as too expensive, especially as the Vietnam War escalated. He agreed to make “community action” a centerpiece of his anti-poverty work, but he had very different ideas about what that meant than some of the people who implemented the program. To kick it off, Johnson called Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and told him, “Get your planning and development people busy right now to see what you do for the crummiest place in town, the lowest, the bottom thing, and see what we can do about it. We’ll get our dough, and then you can have your plan ready, and we’ll move.”
But on the ground, community action organizers saw their role as organizing the poor to challenge mayors like Daley, which widened existing fissures around race and power in the Democratic Party. Federally funded anti-poverty warriors often took the side of urban insurgents – which was surely the correct side, in moral terms, but with hindsight, not the most effective way to mount a controversial and weakly bipartisan anti-poverty effort.
Finally, Democrats ran away from the War on Poverty, joining Reagan in declaring that government was too often a problem rather than a solution. Bill Clinton’s anti-poverty agenda was a stealthy one. With one hand, he ended welfare as we knew it with the 1996 reform act; with the other hand, he funneled billions to poor people by expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit – a Republican idea – as well as eligibility for food stamps and Medicaid. That lifted millions of Americans above the poverty line — but most Americans didn’t know he did it. Democrats from Jimmy Carter to Clinton to Barack Obama – at least until recently — have contributed to the belief that “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” by refusing to either take credit for existing programs that fight poverty or advance a bold new agenda to update them.
That’s changing some. Obama is said to be readying a big income inequality push for his State of the Union, and he seems to have realized it must include taking aim at persistent poverty. With even Republicans conceding they can no longer demonize the poor, maybe Democrats can do something to actually help them.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 8, 2014
“During The Holidays, Remember Our Least”: Today We Have To Say “Thou Shalt Not” To An Economy Of Exclusion And Inequality
As we celebrate the holiday season, we are instructed by virtually all faiths to turn our thoughts to the “least of these.” January will mark the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, but most notable today is how impoverished our discussion of poverty is.
Political leaders in both parties pledge to save the “middle class,” because polls show that most Americans consider themselves part of the broad middle. Democrats tout their “middle out” economics against Republican “trickle-down” economics. Republicans claim to be fighting to save small businesses and middle-class homeowners from the rapacious demands of government. Very little attention is given to the poorest among us.
Perhaps that is because poverty scars this rich nation. A recent report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) reveals that among 35 developed nations the United States ranks 34th in childhood poverty, above only Romania, a country several times less wealthy. Worse, we are also next to last in the depth of childhood poverty — the gap between average income of child’s family and that of poverty standard.
There is no argument about the facts. The poor were much more deprived when Lyndon Johnson declared his “war on poverty,” of course, but the percentage in poverty hasn’t changed much . Childhood poverty translates into poor health, poor education, and poor prospects. It isn’t an accident that the country frequently at the top of the international education rankings – Finland — also has the lowest levels of childhood poverty in that U.N. study.
So you’d think Washington would be focused on what to do to reduce the number of children in poverty, to address mass unemployment, declining wages, family distress. Instead, Washington has decided to administer a little “tough love.” Last month, Congress cut food stamps by an average of 7 percent for 48 million Americans . And this week 1.3 million jobless Americans will lose unemployment benefits , with as many as 5 million left in the cold over the course of the coming year .
In his recent “exhortation,” Pope Francis wrote starkly about the moral challenge of poverty:
“We can only praise the steps being taken to improve people’s welfare in areas such as health care, education and communications. At the same time, we have to remember that the majority of our contemporaries are barely living from day to day, with dire consequences. A number of diseases are spreading. The hearts of many people are gripped by fear and desperation, even in the so-called rich countries. . . .[Emphasis added.]
“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”
Here, the Pope was standing firmly in the long tradition of the church’s concern for the poor, but among American conservatives, the response was hysteria. Rush Limbaugh accused him of peddling “pure Marxism.” Louis Woodhill in Forbes scorned him for “Papal Bull” that seemed “copied and pasted out of The Nation or Mother Jones.” (I take that as a compliment.) Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), a pious Catholic, was notably silent.
In a recent speech on inequality, President Obama insisted, “We are a better country than this,” and he made the case for government action. But his agenda was far less impressive than his rhetoric — including lower corporate tax rates, more trade accords, “streamlined” regulations, a “responsible budget” (meaning continued austerity).
The president touted his “race to the top” education program, when, in fact, schools in low-income districts have been forced to fire teachers, leaving classrooms far more crowded. He bragged on his college loan efforts even as reports showed students are graduating even deeper in debt. He did repeat his call for universal preschool and raising the minimum wage, but neither of these has been able even to receive a vote in the Republican-led House.
The reality is that government programs to lift the poor work. Johnson’s War on Poverty brought poverty down dramatically, but that war was lost to the war in Vietnam. Today, the United States does a much better job lifting poor children out of poverty than it did before Johnson pushed through Medicare and Medicaid expansions, child nutrition programs, subsidized school lunches and more. Even so, the United States still does far less than other developed countries. In 2010, for example, Dutch government programs reduced its poverty rate from 25 percent to 7.5 percent , while the United States only reduced its rate from 28 percent to 17 percent .
Two fundamental issues should be at the center of our debate. The first, posed by Pope Francis and Barack Obama, is what must be done to make the economy work for working people? The second is that posed by the president: Are we a better country than this? Do we want to be? We know what works. We can afford it, even more than other industrial countries. But are we prepared to do what needs to be done?
By: Katrina vanden Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 24, 2013
“The GOP’s Sad Scrooge Agenda”: A Real Anti-Poverty Agenda Involves Raising The Minimum Wage
It’s the most wonderful time of the year … unless your unemployment benefits are set to run out three days after Christmas. But there’s a little bit of holiday cheer for the long-term unemployed: Democrats are showing some new spine in fighting to help them.
For decades Democrats have had, at best, a stealth agenda when it comes to fighting poverty. After backing GOP-inspired welfare reform in 1996, most favored work-support programs taxpayers couldn’t necessarily see, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, and borrowed Republican rhetoric dividing the deserving from the undeserving poor. Expanding eligibility for food stamps and Medicaid was mainly defended in terms of an agenda to support the working — i.e. “deserving” — poor, and even for someone as ostensibly liberal as President Obama, deficit reduction has been a higher-profile priority than fighting income inequality throughout most of his five years in office, and the word “poverty” rarely crosses his lips at all.
That’s slowly been changing, for Obama and his party. Increasingly Democrats seem to believe poverty and income inequality are not only important issues morally, but politically. Now comes the liberal group Americans United for Change with polling, advertising and a political campaign designed to make sure Republicans suffer for their Scrooge agenda in 2014.
Polling by PPP finds that in four swing House districts currently held by Republicans, at least two-thirds of voters support continuing the expanded unemployment benefits that are set to expire Dec. 28, just three days after Christmas. Even in Speaker John Boehner’s district, 63 percent of voters want benefits extended, including 52 percent of Republicans.
But it’s not just PPP polling. A new Pew poll finds the public supports maintaining programs for the poor over deficit reduction 59-33; among independents it’s 53-38.
Of course, one of the tough things about being a progressive is that you can often find poll data supporting your policy agenda. And yet when push comes to shove in the only polls that matter, the ones that open on Election Day, economic fairness issues haven’t driven liberal voters quite the way social issues have turned out conservatives. Of course that’s because conservatives have had a head start organizing on issues like abortion and gun rights while liberals too often assume the obvious correctness of their world view will prevail over time.
But the fight over unemployment looks different. Americans United for Change, along with labor groups, plans an advertising and media push focused on vulnerable Republicans. Already, an effort to publicize the cost of cutting unemployment in those members’ home districts has paid off in remarkable local media coverage, as Greg Sargent laid out two weeks ago.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has already announced that extending unemployment is at the top of his agenda when the Senate reconvenes in January. He’ll of course face pushback from the Tea Party caucus — Sen. Rand Paul continues to insist that extending unemployment is a “disservice” to the unemployed, as if he has any interest in policies that would actually be of “service” to them. Sen. Ted Cruz insists unemployment benefits “exacerbate” joblessness. But vulnerable and moderate Republicans in the House and Senate could conceivably surprise Paul and Cruz — they don’t want to find themselves in the unemployment line come 2015.
Still, it’s not time to celebrate just yet. Democrats weren’t tough enough to insist that an unemployment extension become part of the budget compromise. And there’s been little comparable innovative organizing around restoring food stamp cuts. Of course, a real anti-poverty agenda involves not just improving the safety net but raising the minimum wage, strengthening union rights, increasing spending on both preschool and higher education and restoring fairness and progressivity to the tax code. None of those things is going to happen with the current Congress.
But the Democrats’ new strength and political savvy on unemployment insurance is just more evidence that the party is no longer exclusively playing defense when it comes to an economic populist agenda. If progressives can demonstrate real political benefits to that agenda, expect cowardly Blue Dog Dems and even some Republicans to see the light.
Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 23, 2013
“Good Poor, Bad Poor”: Where You Stand Depends On Where You Sit
On Sundays, this time of year, my parents would pack a gaggle of us kids into the station wagon for a tour of two Christmas worlds. First, we’d go to the wealthy neighborhoods on a hill — grand Tudor houses glowing with the seasonal incandescence of good fortune. Faces pressed against the car windows, we wondered why their Santa was a better toy-maker than ours.
Then, down to the valley, where sketchy-looking people lived in vans by the river, in plywood shacks with rusted appliances on the front lawn, their laundry frozen stiff on wire lines. The rich, my mother explained, were lucky. The poor were unfortunate.
Dissenting voices rose from the back seat. But didn’t the poor deserve their fate? Didn’t they make bad decisions? Weren’t some of them just moochers? And lazy? Well, yes, in many cases, my mother said, lighting one of her L&M cigarettes, which she bought by the carton at the Indian reservation. But neither rich nor poor had the moral high ground.
As the year ends, this argument is playing out in two of the most meanspirited actions left on the table by the least-productive Congress in modern history. The House, refuge of the shrunken-heart caucus, has passed a measure to eliminate food aid for four million Americans, starting next year. Many who would remain on the old food stamp program may have to pass a drug test to get their groceries. At the same time, Congress has let unemployment benefits expire for 1.3 million people, beginning just a few days after Christmas.
These actions have nothing to do with bringing federal spending into line, and everything to do with a view that poor people are morally inferior. Here’s a sample of this line of thought:
“The explosion of food stamps in this country is not just a fiscal issue for me,” said Representative Steve Southerland, Republican from Florida, chief crusader for cutting assistance to the poor. “This is a defining moral issue of our time.”
It would be a “disservice” to further extend unemployment assistance to those who’ve been out of work for some time, said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. It encourages them to sit at home and do nothing.
“People who are perfectly capable of working are buying things like beer,” said Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, on those getting food assistance in his state.
No doubt, poor people drink beer, watch too much television and have bad morals. But so do rich people. If you drug-tested members of Congress as a condition of their getting federal paychecks, you would have most likely caught Representative Trey Radel, Republican of Florida, who recently pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine. Would it be Grinch-like of me to point out that this same congressman voted for the bill that would force many hungry people to pee in a cup and pass a drug test before getting food? Should I also mention that the median net worth for new members of the current Congress is exactly $1 million more than that of the typical American household — and that that may influence their view?
For the record, the baseline benefit for those getting help under the old food stamp program works out to $1.40 a meal. And the average check for those on emergency unemployment is $300 a week. If you cut them off cold, the argument goes, these desperate folks would soon find a job and put real food on the table. They are poor because they are weak.
I met a wheat farmer not long ago in Montana whose family operation was getting nearly $300,000 a year in federal subsidies. With his crop in, this wealthy farmer was looking forward to spending a month in Hawaii. No one suggested that he pass a drug test to continue receiving his sizable handout, or that he be cut off cold, and encouraged to grow something that taxpayers wouldn’t have to subsidize.
One person deserves the handout, the other does not. But these distinctions are colored by your circumstances — where you stand depends on where you sit.
When a million Irish died during the Great Famine of the 1850s, many in the English aristocracy said the peasants deserved to starve because their families were too big and indolent. The British baronet overseeing food relief felt that the famine was God’s judgment, and an excellent way to get rid of surplus population. His argument on relief was the same one used by Rand Paul.
“The only way to prevent the people from becoming habitually dependent on government is to bring the operation to a close,” Sir Charles Trevelyan said about the relief plan at a time when thousands of Irish a day were dropping dead from hunger.
This week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg tried not to sound like a plutocrat out of Dickens when asked about the homeless girl, Dasani, at the center of Andrea Elliott’s extraordinary series in The New York Times — a Dickensian tale for the modern age.
“The kid was dealt a bad hand,” Bloomberg said. “I don’t know why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky, and some of us are not.”
And in that, he echoed my mother at Christmas. Luck is the residue of design, as the saying has it. But the most careful lives can be derailed — by cancer, a huge medical bill, a freak slap of weather, a massive failure of the potato crop. Virtue cannot prevent a “bad hand” from being dealt. And making the poor out to be lazy, or dependent, or stupid, does not make them less poor. It only makes the person saying such a thing feel superior.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, December 19, 2013
“Champion Of The Poor?”: Paul Ryan’s Post-Epiphany Agenda Is Likely To Be Awfully Similar To His Pre-Epiphany Agenda
Just last month, the Washington Post ran a surprisingly uncritical, front-page article on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), celebrating the congressman for his efforts “fighting poverty and winning minds.” The gist of the piece was that the far-right congressman is entirely sincere about using conservative ideas – both economic and spiritual – to combat poverty.
BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins is thinking along similar lines.
Until recently, Paul Ryan would have seemed like an improbable pick to lead the restoration of compassionate conservatism with a heartfelt mission to the poor. Of all the caricatures he has inspired – from heroic budget warrior to black-hearted Scrooge – “champion of the poor” has never been among them. And yet, Ryan has spent the past year quietly touring impoverished communities across the country with Woodson, while his staff digs through center-right think tank papers in search of conservative policy proposals aimed at aiding the poor. Next spring, Ryan plans to introduce a new battle plan for the war on poverty – one he hopes will launch a renewed national debate on the issue. […]
[T]hose closest to him say Ryan’s new mission is the result of a genuine spiritual epiphany – sparked, in part, by the prayer in Cleveland, and sustained by the emergence of a new pope who has lit the world on fire with bold indictments of the “culture of prosperity” and a challenge to reach out to the weak and disadvantaged.
Well, if those closest to Paul Ryan think we should see his concern for the poor as heartfelt, who am I to argue?
All kidding aside, I don’t know the congressman personally, and can’t speak to his sincerity. But ultimately, whether or not Ryan had a “genuine spiritual epiphany” doesn’t much matter – either the Wisconsinite has a policy agenda that will make a difference in the lives of those in poverty or he doesn’t.
And at least for now, he doesn’t. Though we have not yet seen the agenda Ryan intends to unveil in the spring, we’ve seen reports that his vision “relies heavily on promoting volunteerism and encouraging work through existing federal programs, including the tax code.” He’s also reportedly focused on “giving poor parents vouchers or tax credits” for private education.
In other words, Ryan’s post-epiphany agenda is likely to be awfully similar to his pre-epiphany agenda.
What’s more, we’ve also seen plenty of other policy measures from the congressman. As we talked about in November, this is the same congressman whose original budget plan was simply brutal towards families in poverty, the same congressman who supports deep cuts to food stamps, the same congressman who wants to scrap Social Security and Medicare; and the same congressman who’s balked at raising the minimum wage and extending federal unemployment benefits.
If Paul Ryan is the new model for the Republican Party’s anti-poverty crusader, struggling families should be terrified.
Jared Bernstein recently said of Ryan, “the emperor in the empty suit has no clothes,” adding:
Ryan Poverty Plan
1. Cut spending on the poor, cut taxes on the wealthy
2. Shred safety net through block granting federal programs
3. Encourage entrepreneurism, sprinkle around some vouchers and tax credits
4. ???
5. Poverty falls
If Ryan is in the midst of a personal transition from Ayn Rand to Scripture, more power to him. But I hope the political establishment, which has always taken the congressman a bit too seriously and accepted his radical vision with far too much credulity, will be duly skeptical as he slaps a fresh coat of paint on his old ideas.
Postscript: Peter Flaherty, a devout Catholic and former Romney adviser, told BuzzFeed, “What Pope Francis is doing is, instead of changing Catholicism, he’s changing the way the world views Catholicism… And I think Paul has the opportunity to do something similar for conservatism.”
Oh my.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 20, 2013
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