“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
“Meet The GOP’s New Black Friend”: What Exactly Does Mia Love Represent For The Republican Party?
When Allen West was defeated in the 2012 election and Tim Scott was appointed to serve out the term of retiring South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, that left Republicans back where they had usually been in the past, with not a single black Republican in the House of Representatives. This is something they aren’t particularly pleased about, which is why in the coming year you’re going to be hearing a lot about Mia Love, a candidate from Utah’s 4th district. Barring some shocking scandal, come November she’ll be bringing that number from zero up to one, and she’s going to become a right-wing celebrity. Mia Love is the Republicans’ New Black Friend.
You may remember Love from the 2012 Republican convention, where she gave a not-particularly-memorable speech. She couldn’t beat Jim Matheson, the conservative Democrat who represented the district, despite the fact that Mitt Romney won there by a 37-point margin. But now Matheson has just announced that he’s retiring, which makes Love’s election in what was supposed to be a rematch all but certain. So get ready: Mia Love is going to be the most famous Republican House candidate in the country. She’ll be on Fox News more often than Sean Hannity. She’ll be touted by all the conservative radio hosts. I’m betting they’ll put her on the cover of National Review. Because that’ll show those liberals.
I guess the question conservatives might ask is, “What’s wrong with that?” Lots of politicians are elevated by their party because of something that their personal story is supposed to represent. But the question is, what exactly does Mia Love represent for the Republican party? It’s not like she’s the first of a coming wave of black Republican leaders, and certainly not female black Republican leaders. That isn’t going to happen. It’s not like she is a harbinger of a change in the Republican approach toward African-Americans and other minority groups. Maybe she’ll turn out to be some spectacular talent who will rise to untold heights, but she hasn’t yet shown that she’s that, either.
Conservatives might also say, “Didn’t liberals love Barack Obama because he was black?” It’s true that Obama’s race was part of his appeal to the left. The difference is, first, that it was only part of it, while you could probably ask a hundred Republicans what they know about Mia Love and 99 of them would only be able to tell you one thing. But more importantly, in 2008 the elevation of an African-American presidential candidate was a genuine reflection of liberal values and history. Liberals are the ones who have always advocated for civil rights and continue to do so. Their party is the multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiracial one. They did want Obama’s nomination to say something about themselves, but it was something true. What do conservatives want Love’s election to say about them?
I suppose it’s possible that blacks (and members of other minority groups, too) will see all the attention Love will get and say, “Hmm, maybe those Republicans are changing.” Or they might think just the opposite, that they’re trying way too hard with her, and its a kind of tokenism that only reinforces their basic problem. That being said, there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with the GOP making Mia Love a star. There are black female conservatives out there—not many, but some. It’s only questionable if they try to use her election as evidence for an assertion that is otherwise without support, like “We’re not just the party of white people.” When nearly nine in ten of your voters are white, you are. Even if you elect one black Republican from Utah.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 20, 2013
“Five Times George W. Bush Extended Unemployment Insurance Benefits”: It’s Just Bad Policy To Refuse To Renew The Extension
In his December 14, 2002 weekly radio address, President George W. Bush reminded Congress that “no final bill was sent to me extending unemployment benefits for about 750,000 Americans whose benefits will expire on December 28th.”
He went on, “These Americans rely on their unemployment benefits to pay for the mortgage or rent, food, and other critical bills. They need our assistance in these difficult times, and we cannot let them down.”
What was the unemployment rate in December 2002?
It had just risen to 6.0 percent.
The unemployment rate today is 7.0 percent and at the end of this year 1.3 million Americans — including 20,000 veterans — who have been out of work for more than six months will have their unemployment insurance benefits cut off. Republicans in Congress have refused to extend these benefits, though the Congressional Budget Office predicts failing to do so will cost the economy 200,000 jobs.
The Republican Congress heeded George W. Bush’s call to extend unemployment insurance as they had the March before. They passed a bill and he signed it.
In 2003, the American economy was still dealing with the residue of the dot-com bust and economic shock of the 9/11 attacks — but it was still considerably stronger than the America that lived through the Great Recession and continues to see its growth hindered by government austerity.
The extended unemployment benefits Congress is about to let expire actually began under George W. Bush, long after his 2003 extension expired as unemployment dipped below 5 percent again. In 2008, as the financial crisis began to rock the economy, President Bush signed an extension of 13 weeks, 39 weeks total in most states, for anyone living in a state with unemployment over 6.0 percent. He also signed unemployment extensions that specifically helped the victims of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.
All five times Bush extended unemployment benefits, he did so with the majority of Republicans in Congress supporting him.
At the peak of the crisis, when unemployment was around 10 percent, Congress and President Obama extended benefits to 99 weeks. The current maximum is 73 weeks.
A requirement of receiving benefits is seeking a new job, but with an estimated three people out of work for every one job opening, cutting off benefits likely won’t encourage jobseekers — as Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) imagines — but instead doom them to permanent unemployment. And the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates that the 1.3 million who will be cut off in 2014 will soon swell to 5 million.
There are two huge reasons why now is not the time to cut off the long-term unemployed, explains the CBPP’s Brad Stone.
While the unemployment rate has declined, the overall employment rate has not grown as it usually would during a recovery.
Secondly, cutting off benefits now for those who need them most is unprecedented.
“At 2.6 percent, the long-term unemployment rate is at least twice as high as when any of the emergency federal UI programs that policymakers enacted in each of the previous seven major recessions expired,” Stone wrote.
Even conservatives recognize that it’s just bad policy to refuse to renew the extension.
Democrats in Congress have vowed to tie the extension to the passage of the farm bill in order to force Republicans to approve it retroactively. They’re expected to be supported by an organized grassroots effort from the left to force vulnerable congressmembers to encourage the GOP leadership to take up the bill.
But it’s safe to assume that if it were President Bush asking for the extension rather than President Obama, the GOP would be happy to just say yes.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 20, 2013
“The “I Hate Everything” Vote”: The GOP Base That’s Always Been Around, But Given A Fresh Identity By The Tea Party Movement
There’s a new ABC-WaPo poll out showing about what you’d expect: the president’s job approval rating is at 43%, about what it was last month but way down from a year ago.
But at The Fix, Sean Sullivan and Scott Clement look at a large slice of the electorate they call “haters,” and see a potential GOP landslide coming. The “haters” are people who disapprove of the president and both congressional parties.
Seventy-two percent of voters who disapprove of the job Obama, congressional Democrats and congressional Republicans are doing say they’d vote for the GOP candidate for U.S. House in their district if the election were held today, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday. Just 14 percent say they’d vote for the Democrat….
[T]he haters don’t tilt as heavily toward the GOP now as they did on the eve of the GOP wave election of 2010, when 85 percent said they planned to vote for the GOP candidate.
Now you might look at some of these numbers and conclude that Democrats should be frantically appealing to the “haters,” since they are “between” the two parties and open to both. But you’d be wrong: the people we are talking about are largely GOP “base” voters if they vote at all. They’ve always been around, but the Tea Party Movement has given them a fresh identity: people who will vote for any Republican over any Democrat 99 out of 100 times, but can’t bring themselves to say they approve of any major party that’s not busily tearing down the welfare state or eliminating taxes. To their credit, Sullivan and Clement note the “haters” strong right-ward tilt:
Thirty-four percent identify as Republicans and another 38 percent are independents who lean Republican. Just 13 percent are independents with no lean and just 10 percent are Democrats.
So in any poll of the popularity of the two parties, you have to put a fat thumb on the scale for Republicans because so many of their own just won’t admit their proclivities. Yes, haters are gonna hate both parties, but they’re sure not up for grabs at the ballot box.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 17, 2013
“And The Shootings Continue”: 2013, The Year We Learned Gun Reform Is Impossible
Nothing in 2013 matched the horror of Sandy Hook or Aurora, but the year proved to be a dispiriting one for gun-control crusaders hoping to capitalize on the intense outpouring of grief wrought by 2012’s shooting massacres.
After Newtown, President Obama gave an impassioned speech promising to do everything in his power to prevent “more tragedies like this.” We’d watched these scenes of public mourning before—after Tucson, after Aurora—but it was different this time. Obama’s bold declaration that “we are not doing enough and we will have to change” seemed more forceful than before. And coming just six weeks after his reelection, it seemed more possible.
But once the National Rifle Association and others got a whiff of any serious threat to firearm freedoms, they moneyed up. Although gun-control groups spent five times as much on federal lobbying in 2013 as they did in 2012, according to data compiled by the Sunlight Foundation, gun-rights groups outpaced them by more than 7-to-1.
As usual, the NRA’s efforts paid off. Watered-down legislation that would have expanded background checks failed in the Senate this past spring, and the issue retook its place in Congress as a perennial nonstarter.
And the shootings continued.
But Congress delivered gun-reform advocates one final 2013 disappointment this week. The Senate on Monday voted to renew the Undetectable Firearms Act just hours before the 25-year-old law was set to expire. The 10-year extension, which even the National Rifle Association endorsed, is largely genteel. It keeps on the books a ban on firearms that can sneak through metal detectors, but efforts by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to close what he called a “dangerous loophole” allowing a person to use 3-D printing technology to craft a plastic gun failed to get off the ground. Schumer wanted to amend the law to require that firearms have permanent metal pieces in them.
Gun-control advocates have seen some movement outside of Congress. In September, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz declared guns unwelcome in his stores, even in states with open-carry laws. Colorado’s State House passed stricter gun laws, though members did so at great political peril. Connecticut adopted some of the strictest in the nation, despite being home to several gun manufacturers. And Obama did pass a number of executive orders that make small inroads, such as restricting the import of military surplus weapons and ordering federal agencies to share more data with the background-check system.
But national lawmakers in 2013 did what they do every year when it comes to tightening gun restrictions: nothing.
“It should be a source of great embarrassment to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives that we have not moved the ball forward one inch when it comes to the issue of protecting the thousands of people all across this country who are killed by guns every year,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., before Monday’s vote of the Undetectable Firearms Act, which passed by unanimous consent.
2012’s gun violence brought us unprecedented grief. But 2013 reminded us just how impossible it is to move that ball forward. If a deranged man killing 20 kids and six teachers at an elementary school won’t prompt meaningful gun reform, it’s hard to imagine what will.
By: Dustin Volz, The National Journal, December 10, 2013
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