“The GOP War On Christmas”: Compassionate Conservatism Is As Much An Oxymoron As “Free Agency” In The Sports World
Most of us will eat a great dinner Thursday and we have a lot to be thankful for. But many Americans won’t have much to eat on Thanksgiving or any other day for that matter.
The Boston Globe recently profiled Lurinda DaRosa, a single mother of two children who lives in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Lurinda had a job but unfortunately she hasn’t been able to work since she had heart surgery.
Before November 1st, Lurinda received $66 in federal nutrition benefits every month. You can imagine it’s not easy to feed three people on that kind of budget. Don’t try it at home. A gallon of milk at the local supermarket costs $2.99. You can do the math, so you can imagine how tough it was for Lurinda and her children when her federal food assistance allowance dropped to $37 a month effective November 1. The allowance for the DaRosa family and millions of other Americans decreased because House Republicans refused to extend the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits that were part of the Economic Recovery Act.
Whatever happened to compassionate conservatism anyway? These days, compassionate conservatism is as much an oxymoron as the phrase “free agency” in the sports world is.
Lucinda and her family will soon take another hit for the holidays from the GOP Grinch who stole Christmas. The deadline for a new federal budget agreement is 10 days before Christmas. The Republican budget proposal is Rep. Paul Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” which is a path to poverty for millions of Americans. Under the Ryan budget there will an additional $39 billion in cuts in nutrition assistance for people like Lurinda and her kids over the next 10 years. Good luck with that.
Forty-seven million Americans were on the wrong end of the cuts that just went into effect. Thirty-seven million of the people who suffered the cuts were women and children. The cut took food out of the mouths of babes. And Republicans wonder why so few women vote for them anymore. Ten million of the recipients of the reduced allotments were seniors. A million veterans were also at the wrong end of the budget axe – I hope they didn’t build up too much of an appetite fighting for our freedom. Thank you for your service.
Meanwhile President Obama’s calls to congressional Republicans to cut the hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare fall on deaf ears. Big business has thousands of highly paid lobbyists in Washington. Hungry Americans just don’t have much clout in the capital.
The burden on federal taxpayers would be lighter if Republicans in the House of Representatives would follow the Senate’s example and vote to increase the minimum wage. The best Wal-Mart can do is to sponsor food drives for its workers. McDonald’s does its part by sending its workers a pamphlet on stretching their food dollar. If McDonald’s really wants to help, the fast food giant could pay its workers a living wage.
Conservatives trot out the Bible at the drop of a hat to justify their extremism. During the holiday season, they might want to check out Matthew 25:34-36. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat.'”
This time of year, conservatives complain that liberals are trying to take Christ out of Christmas. One way for Republicans to put Christ back into Christmas would be practice a little Christian charity by voting against the Ryan budget next month.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, November 26, 2013
“Prudence Or Cruelty?”: Slashing Food Stamps Is A Mark Of Shortsighted Cruelty
When members of Congress debate whether to slash the food stamp program, they should ask if they really want more small children arriving at school having skipped breakfast.
As it is, in the last few days of the month before food stamps are distributed, some children often eat less and have trouble focusing, says Kisha Hill, a teacher in a high-poverty prekindergarten school in North Tulsa, Okla.
“Kids can’t focus on studying when their stomachs are grumbling,” Hill told me.
Some 47 million Americans receive food stamps, including some who would otherwise go hungry — or hungrier. A recent government study found that about 5 percent of American households have “very low food security,” which means that food can run out before the end of the month. In almost a third of those households, an adult reported not eating for an entire day because there wasn’t money for food.
Meanwhile, 14 percent of American toddlers suffer iron deficiency. Malnutrition isn’t the only cause, but it’s an important one — and these children may suffer impaired brain development as a result. This kind of malnutrition in America is tough to measure, because some children are simultaneously malnourished and overweight, but experts agree it’s a problem. We expect to find malnourished or anemic children in Africa and Asia, but it’s dispiriting to see this in a country as wealthy as our own.
Let me take that back. It’s not just dispiriting. It’s also infuriating.
“The cutback in food stamps represents a clear threat to the nutritional status and health of America’s children,” says Dr. Irwin Redlener, the president of the Children’s Health Fund and a professor of pediatrics at Columbia University. Dr. Redlener said that one result of cutbacks will be more kids with anemia and educational difficulties.
Food stamp recipients already took a cut in benefits this month, and they may face more. The Senate Democratic version of the farm bill would cut food stamps by $4 billion over 10 years, while the House Republican version would slash them by $40 billion.
More than 90 percent of benefits go to families living below the poverty line, according to federal government data, and nearly two-thirds of the recipients are children, elderly or disabled.
Let’s remember that the government already subsidizes lots of food. When wealthy executives dine at fancy French restaurants, part of the bill is likely to be deducted from taxes, which amounts to a subsidy from taxpayers. How is it that food subsidies to anemic children are more controversial than food subsidies to executives enjoying coq au vin?
Meanwhile, the same farm bill that is hotly debated because of food stamps includes agricultural subsidies that don’t go just to struggling farmers but also, in recent years, to 50 billionaires or companies they are involved in, according to the Environmental Working Group, a Washington research group.
Among the undeserving people receiving farm subsidies has been a New York Times columnist. Yes, I have been paid $588 a year not to grow crops on wooded land I own in Oregon (I then forward the money to a maternity hospital in Somaliland). When our country pays a New York journalist not to grow crops in an Oregon forest, there’s a problem with the farm bill — but it’s not food stamps.
Granted, safety-net spending is more about treating symptoms of poverty than causes, and we may get more bang for the buck when we chip away at long-term poverty through early education, home visitation for infants, job training and helping teenagers avoid unwanted pregnancies.
That said, food stamps do work in important ways. For starters, they effectively reduce the number of children living in extreme poverty by half, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington.
By improving nutrition of young children, food stamps also improve long-term outcomes. In recent years, mounting scholarship has found that malnutrition in utero or in small children has lasting consequences. One reason seems to be that when a fetus or small child is undernourished, it is programmed to anticipate food shortages for the remainder of its life. If food later becomes plentiful, the metabolic mismatch can lead to diabetes, obesity and heart disease.
An excellent study last year from the National Bureau of Economic Research followed up on the rollout of food stamps, county by county, between 1961 and 1975. It found that those who began receiving food stamps by the age of 5 had better health as adults. Women who as small children had benefited from food stamps were more likely to go farther in school, earn more money and stay off welfare.
So slashing food stamp benefits — overwhelmingly for children, the disabled and the elderly — wouldn’t be a sign of prudent fiscal management by Congress. It would be a mark of shortsighted cruelty.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 16, 2013
“Thank You For Your Service, Or Not”: Republicans Thank Veterans By Cutting Food Stamps
The next time I hear a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives thank a veteran for his or her service, I’ll hurl.
Veterans Day is on Monday. This year the holiday will come 10 days after cuts in federal food aid demanded by House Republicans go into effect. The cuts mean that 47 million hungry Americans, including almost 1 million veterans, will be even hungrier and more malnourished than they were last Veterans Day.
Mother’s Day won’t be much better because 80 percent, or 37 million, of the food aid recipients are women and children. And for the record, 10 percent or almost 5 million of the recipients are senior citizens.
I hope the House Republican budget guru, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is proud of his handiwork because it’s a callous way of thanking vets for their service. Before the cuts, the average veteran received a little more than $4 a day for food from the feds. Now vets will have to get by on even less. Don’t try this at home, because if you try to eat on $4 a day, you will be malnourished pretty quickly. The GOP went to the mat to get these cuts and now they want even more.
The Republican hostility towards vets is just the latest episode in the sad saga of vets under the GOP. George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney both avoided serving in Vietnam when they were of draft age in the 1960’s. But that didn’t stop the deadly duo from sending more than 4,000 brave young Americans to their deaths in Iraq based on a lie about the existence of weapons of mass destruction there.
If wounded soldiers were lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive, things didn’t get much better back home. During the Bush/Cheney administration, hospitals administered by the Veterans Administration were poorly staffed and inadequately equipped. The corridors of the “crown jewel” of the military hospital system, Walter Reed Hospital, were plagued with garbage and rats.
The tea party caucus in Congress forced $5 million a year in cuts for food aid. Why? Because the GOP shot down President Obama’s proposal to eliminate $6 billion in federal tax freebies to oil companies and firms that own corporate jets. While millionaires, billionaires and oil company executives fly the friendly federal skies, almost 1 million veterans are still in the desert, fighting hard. This time they struggle in a fight for food in the land of plenty.
Thank you for your service!
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, November 8, 2013
“The Middle Class Doesn’t Write Big Checks”: The Bottom 90 Percent Have Disappeared And Have No Voice In Washington
So how to explain this paradox?
As of November 1 more than 47 million Americans have lost some or all of their food stamp benefits. House Republicans are pushing for further cuts. If the sequester isn’t stopped everything else poor and working-class Americans depend on will be further squeezed.
We’re not talking about a small sliver of America here. Half of all children get food stamps at some point during their childhood. Half of all adults get them sometime between ages 18 and 65. Many employers – including the nation’s largest, Walmart – now pay so little that food stamps are necessary in order to keep food on the family table, and other forms of assistance are required to keep a roof overhead.
The larger reality is that most Americans are still living in the Great Recession. Median household income continues to drop. In last week’s Washington Post-ABC poll, 75 percent rated the state of the economy as “negative” or “poor.”
So why is Washington whacking safety nets and services that a large portion of Americans need, when we still very much need them?
It’s easy to blame Republicans and the rightwing billionaires that bankroll them, and their unceasing demonization of “big government” as well as deficits. But Democrats in Washington bear some of the responsibility. In last year’s fiscal cliff debate neither party pushed to extend the payroll tax holiday or find other ways to help the working middle class and poor.
Here’s a clue: A new survey of families in the top 10 percent of net worth (done by the American Affluence Research Center) shows they’re feeling better than they’ve felt since 2007, before the Great Recession.
It’s not just that the top 10 percent have jobs and their wages are rising. The top 10 percent also owns 80 percent of the stock market. And the stock market is up a whopping 24 percent this year.
The stock market is up even though most Americans are down for two big reasons.
First, businesses are busily handing their cash back to their shareholders – buying back their stock and thereby boosting share prices – rather than using the cash to expand and hire. It makes no sense to expand and hire when most Americans don’t have the money to buy.
The S&P 500 “Buyback Index,” which measures the 100 stocks with the highest buyback ratios, has surged 40 percent this year, compared with a 24% rally for the S&P 500.
IBM has just approved another $15 billion for share buybacks on top of about $5.6 billion it set aside previously, thereby boosting its share prices even though business is sluggish. In April, Apple announced a $50 billion increase in buybacks plus a 15% rise in dividends, but even this wasn’t enough for multi-billionaire Carl Icahn, who’s now demanding that Apple use more of its $170 billion cash stash to buy back its stock and make Ichan even richer.
Big corporations can also borrow at rock-bottom rates these days in order to buy back even more of their stock — courtesy of the Fed’s $85 billion a month bond-buying program. (Ichan also wants Apple to borrow $150 billion at 3 percent interest, in order to buy back more stock and further enrich himself.)
The second big reason why shares are up while most Americans are down is corporations continue to find new ways to boost profits and share prices by cutting their labor costs – substituting software for people, cutting wages and benefits, andpiling more responsibilities on each of the employees that remain.
Neither of these two strategies – buying back stock and paring payrolls – can be sustained over the long run (so you have every right to worry about another Wall Street bubble). They don’t improve a company’s products or customer service.
But in an era of sluggish sales – when the vast American middle class lacks the purchasing power to keep the economy going – these two strategies at least keep shareholders happy. And that means they keep the top 10 percent happy.
Congress, meanwhile, doesn’t know much about the bottom 90 percent. The top 10 percent provide almost all campaign contributions and funding of “independent” ads.
Moreover, just about all members of Congress are drawn from the same top 10 percent – as are almost all their friends and associates, and even the media who report on them.
Get it? The bottom 90 percent of Americans — most of whom are still suffering from the Great Recession, most of whom have been on a downward escalator for decades — have disappeared from official Washington.
By: Robert Reich, RobertReich.org, Published in Salon, November 1, 2013
“Casting Aside The Weak And Fragile”: Cuts To Food Stamp Program Reveal Congressional Hypocrisy
For decades, I’ve proudly asserted that “nobody starves to death in America.” The comment has been addressed to acerbic critics of the American government, often foreign visitors, who insist that the United States is a mean-spirited place that casts aside its weak and fragile citizens.
I still contend that nobody starves to death here, but I’ve had to modify my claims about the country’s social safety net. Even if no one dies for lack of basic nutrition, plenty of people go to bed hungry every night. And if Congress’ harsh Republican caucus has its way, some may starve.
That’s because the band of ultraconservatives who control the House are bent on deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps. They passed a farm bill laden with welfare for farmers, but they left out one of its biggest traditional components: food stamps. It was the first time since 1973 that the nutrition program had been left out of the farm bill.
Now, negotiations have started between the Senate and the House to try to reconcile the upper chamber’s more charitable version with the one the lower chamber put together. It will be a tough slog since the two bills are billions of dollars apart. The Senate wants to cut $4 billion from SNAP over 10 years, while the House wants to cut nearly $40 billion.
Perhaps the most appalling thing about the farm bill presented by the ultraconservatives in the House is that it makes little pretense of cutting spending by ferreting out wastefulness or fraud, no feint at an all-out assault on the deficit. Instead, this is just a base and ugly assault on the working poor.
Oh, conservatives claimed that their cuts to food stamps were in response to fraud, as their claque filled the airwaves with the same example of a carefree California surfer enjoying his “wonderful” life on food stamps. They neglected to point to government data which show that SNAP is among the most efficient of government programs, with fraudulent spending restricted to about 2 percent of its budget.
Meanwhile, the same conservatives have said nothing — nothing — about the millions of dollars in fraud related to farm subsidies. A June audit by the Government Accountability Office found that millions of dollars in subsidies have been sent to farmers who’ve been dead for at least a year. That’s just the illegal stuff.
That doesn’t touch the entirely legal fraud: The entire network of agricultural subsidies is a massive boondoggle, welfare to people who hardly need it. While conservatives hector the working poor about their alleged laziness, some agricultural programs pay farmers not to plant. Why don’t Fox News and Rush Limbaugh ever talk about that?
Farmers hardly need the money. (Forget about the struggling family farmer of lore. He has largely disappeared.) Earlier this year, the Agriculture Department projected that farm income in 2013 would be $128.2 billion, the highest since 1973.
One of the more egregious examples of the sheer hypocrisy surrounding the debate over the farm bill was revealed by The New York Times, which wrote about U.S. Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN). He voted for the bill that eviscerates SNAP, but he received nearly $3.5 million in farm subsidies from the government between 1999 and 2012, according to the Times.
“We have to remember there is not a big printing press in Washington that continually prints money over and over,” he said, apparently without irony.
Conservatives claim to be alarmed by the dramatic increase in food stamp outlays, up 77 percent since 2007 to a record high of $78.5 billion in fiscal year 2012. (The SNAP program is already scheduled for a 5 percent cut as a provision related to the 2009 stimulus bill lapses.) But that’s because so many more people are struggling to make ends meet.
The Great Recession accelerated a trend that has hollowed out the middle class, leaving many Americans without college degrees in a downward spiral. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that nearly 49 million Americans are “food insecure” — bureaucratese that means they don’t have enough to eat.
If we aren’t willing to see to it that they have basic nutrition, I’ll have to reconsider what I believe about my country.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, November 2, 2013
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