“Enemies Of The Poor”: Republicans Are Doing All They Can To Hurt The Poor
Suddenly it’s O.K., even mandatory, for politicians with national ambitions to talk about helping the poor. This is easy for Democrats, who can go back to being the party of F.D.R. and L.B.J. It’s much more difficult for Republicans, who are having a hard time shaking their reputation for reverse Robin-Hoodism, for being the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.
And the reason that reputation is so hard to shake is that it’s justified. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that right now Republicans are doing all they can to hurt the poor, and they would have inflicted vast additional harm if they had won the 2012 election. Moreover, G.O.P. harshness toward the less fortunate isn’t just a matter of spite (although that’s part of it); it’s deeply rooted in the party’s ideology, which is why recent speeches by leading Republicans declaring that they do too care about the poor have been almost completely devoid of policy specifics.
Let’s start with the recent Republican track record.
The most important current policy development in America is the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare. Most Republican-controlled states are, however, refusing to implement a key part of the act, the expansion of Medicaid, thereby denying health coverage to almost five million low-income Americans. And the amazing thing is that they’re going to great lengths to block aid to the poor even though letting the aid through would cost almost nothing; nearly all the costs of Medicaid expansion would be paid by Washington.
Meanwhile, those Republican-controlled states are slashing unemployment benefits, education financing and more. As I said, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the G.O.P. is hurting the poor as much as it can.
What would Republicans have done if they had won the White House in 2012? Much more of the same. Bear in mind that every budget the G.O.P. has offered since it took over the House in 2010 involves savage cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other antipoverty programs.
Still, can’t Republicans change their approach? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is almost surely no.
First of all, they’re deeply committed to the view that efforts to aid the poor are actually perpetuating poverty, by reducing incentives to work. And to be fair, this view isn’t completely wrong.
True, it’s total nonsense when applied to unemployment insurance. The notion that unemployment is high because we’re “paying people not to work” is a fallacy (no matter how desperate you make the unemployed, their desperation does nothing to create more jobs) wrapped in a falsehood (very few people are choosing to remain unemployed and keep collecting benefit checks).
But our patchwork, uncoordinated system of antipoverty programs does have the effect of penalizing efforts by lower-income households to improve their position: the more they earn, the fewer benefits they can collect. In effect, these households face very high marginal tax rates. A large fraction, in some cases 80 cents or more, of each additional dollar they earn is clawed back by the government.
The question is what we could do to reduce these high effective tax rates. We could simply slash benefits; this would reduce the disincentive to work, but only by intensifying the misery of the poor. And the poor would become less productive as well as more miserable; it’s hard to take advantage of a low marginal tax rate when you’re suffering from poor nutrition and inadequate health care.
Alternatively, we could reduce the rate at which benefits phase out. In fact, one of the unheralded virtues of Obamacare is that it does just that. That is, it doesn’t just improve the lot of the poor; it improves their incentives, because the subsidies families receive for health care fade out gradually with higher income, instead of simply disappearing for anyone too affluent to receive Medicaid. But improving incentives this way means spending more, not less, on the safety net, and taxes on the affluent have to rise to pay for that spending. And it’s hard to imagine any leading Republican being willing to go down that road — or surviving the inevitable primary challenge if he did.
The point is that a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor.
Will this ever change? Well, Republicans weren’t always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs — Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit — used to have bipartisan support. And maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P.
For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America’s poor. And that will remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us otherwise.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 12, 2014
“The War Over Poverty”: The Problem Of Poverty Is Part Of The Broader Problem Of Rising Income Inequality
Fifty years have passed since Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. And a funny thing happened on the way to this anniversary. Suddenly, or so it seems, progressives have stopped apologizing for their efforts on behalf of the poor, and have started trumpeting them instead. And conservatives find themselves on the defensive.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For a long time, everyone knew — or, more accurately, “knew” — that the war on poverty had been an abject failure. And they knew why: It was the fault of the poor themselves. But what everyone knew wasn’t true, and the public seems to have caught on.
The narrative went like this: Antipoverty programs hadn’t actually reduced poverty, because poverty in America was basically a social problem — a problem of broken families, crime and a culture of dependence that was only reinforced by government aid. And because this narrative was so widely accepted, bashing the poor was good politics, enthusiastically embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, too.
Yet this view of poverty, which may have had some truth to it in the 1970s, bears no resemblance to anything that has happened since.
For one thing, the war on poverty has, in fact, achieved quite a lot. It’s true that the standard measure of poverty hasn’t fallen much. But this measure doesn’t include the value of crucial public programs like food stamps and the earned-income tax credit. Once these programs are taken into account, the data show a significant decline in poverty, and a much larger decline in extreme poverty. Other evidence also points to a big improvement in the lives of America’s poor: lower-income Americans are much healthier and better-nourished than they were in the 1960s.
Furthermore, there is strong evidence that antipoverty programs have long-term benefits, both to their recipients and to the nation as a whole. For example, children who had access to food stamps were healthier and had higher incomes in later life than people who didn’t.
And if progress against poverty has nonetheless been disappointingly slow — which it has — blame rests not with the poor but with a changing labor market, one that no longer offers good wages to ordinary workers. Wages used to rise along with worker productivity, but that linkage ended around 1980. The bottom third of the American work force has seen little or no rise in inflation-adjusted wages since the early 1970s; the bottom third of male workers has experienced a sharp wage decline. This wage stagnation, not social decay, is the reason poverty has proved so hard to eradicate.
Or to put it a different way, the problem of poverty has become part of the broader problem of rising income inequality, of an economy in which all the fruits of growth seem to go to a small elite, leaving everyone else behind.
So how should we respond to this reality?
The conservative position, essentially, is that we shouldn’t respond. Conservatives are committed to the view that government is always the problem, never the solution; they treat every beneficiary of a safety-net program as if he or she were “a Cadillac-driving welfare queen.” And why not? After all, for decades their position was a political winner, because middle-class Americans saw “welfare” as something that Those People got but they didn’t.
But that was then. At this point, the rise of the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else is so obvious that it’s no longer possible to shut down any discussion of rising inequality with cries of “class warfare.” Meanwhile, hard times have forced many more Americans to turn to safety-net programs. And as conservatives have responded by defining an ever-growing fraction of the population as morally unworthy “takers” — a quarter, a third, 47 percent, whatever — they have made themselves look callous and meanspirited.
You can see the new political dynamics at work in the fight over aid to the unemployed. Republicans are still opposed to extended benefits, despite high long-term unemployment. But they have, revealingly, changed their arguments. Suddenly, it’s not about forcing those lazy bums to find jobs; it’s about fiscal responsibility. And nobody believes a word of it.
Meanwhile, progressives are on offense. They have decided that inequality is a winning political issue. They see war-on-poverty programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned-income tax credit as success stories, initiatives that have helped Americans in need — especially during the slump since 2007 — and should be expanded. And if these programs enroll a growing number of Americans, rather than being narrowly targeted on the poor, so what?
So guess what: On its 50th birthday, the war on poverty no longer looks like a failure. It looks, instead, like a template for a rising, increasingly confident progressive movement.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 9, 2014
“The Circle of Scam”: Welcome To Conservative Politics, Where Everybody’s Fleecing Somebody
I’ve long held that what William Goldman said about Hollywood—”Nobody knows anything”—is equally true of Washington. At the same time though, people in politics are particularly adept at finding those who know even less than they do, and scamming them into giving over their political support or their money, or both.
I thought of this when reading the long investigation The Washington Post published the other day on the byzantine network of organizations the Koch brothers have established or funded to funnel their ample resources into politics. There are dozens of groups involved, and money moves back and forth between them in intricate ways. The Post was able to trace $400 million they spent in the last election, but since there were a number of organizations whose money they weren’t able to track, the real number is almost certainly higher. As a tax law expert quoted in the article says, “It is a very sophisticated and complicated structure … It’s designed to make it opaque as to where the money is coming from and where the money is going. No layperson thought this up. It would only be worth it if you were spending the kind of dollars the Koch brothers are, because this was not cheap.” The Koch brothers no doubt can avail themselves of the most skilled and creative accountants money can buy.
But they sure didn’t get much for their money. Barack Obama, you might have noticed, is still the president, and Democrats did quite well overall in 2012. Perhaps there was no way for the Kochs to change that even with a mid-nine-figure investment. But what it appears happened is that these brothers, who are no doubt savvy businessmen, got taken to the cleaners by their consultants (Matt Yglesias had the same thought I did about this).
You see, political consultants don’t always have standard rates that they use for all their clients. On one end, this may mean that the firm accepts a smaller profit to do some work for a do-gooder nonprofit. On the other end, it means that for a client the consultant knows has deep pockets, the same services will be marked up, maybe by a little, maybe by a lot. If you were a Republican polling firm and the Kochs came to you asking you to do a poll that you ordinarily charge $50,000 for, maybe you could just bump that up to $75,000. They probably won’t notice the difference, after all. And maybe you convince them that they need to conduct six or eight such polls over the course of the year. The direct mail consultants are doing the same thing, and you can bet the media consultants are doing it too, because those guys pull money from clients like nobody’s business. And it isn’t like the Kochs are going to be going over the contracts line by line, right?
Each individual consultant may only be padding his own bottom line by $50,000 here or $100,000 there, but there are so many people involved and so many millions passing hither and yon that by the time its over, the results at the ballot box may be discouraging but a lot of already successful Republican consultants are thinking it’s finally time to get that beach house.
There’s another scam going on at the same time, which is that many of these efforts are aimed at recruiting regular people to be the Koch’s ground troops, to put a “grassroots” face on what is most assuredly an elite project. The Kochs have sincerely held political beliefs, which by pure coincidence happen to line up perfectly with their economic interests. They’d like it if there were fewer regulations on corporate behavior and lower taxes on the rich, among other things (that isn’t to say they don’t also have beliefs on non-economic topics like abortion as well, because I’m sure they do). If you can convince a bunch of middle-class folk to go stand outside in their tricorner hats braying about the Founders and the Constitution as they press Congress to lighten the burdens on our nation’s beleaguered plutocrats, then it’s all worth it.
So the Kochs are getting scammed by their consultants, and they’re scamming the people whom those consultants are persuading, and meanwhile there are plenty of other scams around too. Today Rush Limbaugh went on the air and told his millions of listeners that the “polar vortex” is not an actual thing that meteorologists have documented, but something the media made up in order to make the current cold wave not contradict their existing global warming hoax. Does Rush Limbaugh believe this? I doubt it. But treating his audience like a bunch of gullible fools is part of his business model.
You can find regular people who think that if “global warming” were real, that would mean it will never get cold again. But that’s not because they’re dumb (though they may be). It’s because that’s what people they trust have been telling them for years. Every winter, whenever there’s a cold snap or a big snowfall, a parade of doltish Fox anchors goes on the air hour after hour to say, “So much for global warming! Suck it, Al Gore!” Or as Ted Cruz said today, “It’s cold! Al Gore told me this wouldn’t happen!” Har, har! And those Republican voters, made ever stupider by the media figures they adore, make sure the people who represent them won’t allow anything to be done to address climate change. And you know who benefits from that? Why Charles and David Koch, who are in the oil business. They make money, the consultants make money, Rush Limbaugh makes money, and the only people in the equation who don’t make money are the suckers at the bottom.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 7, 2014
“GOP’s Poverty Scam”: Why Does It Suddenly “Care” About The Poor?
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio finally gave his much-anticipated speech on poverty, a hot trend among Republicans seeking the presidency. Rubio emerged from the dense thicket of conservative think tank writing on the subject with one actual proposal: wage subsidies. Which, you know, fine, let’s have wage subsidies! They seem like an OK idea. Sure, they might encourage employers to pay low-wage employees less money in order to receive more subsidies, but if the options are nothing versus wage subsidies, I am going with wage subsidies.
Will any other Republican, though? Unlike raising the minimum wage, any wage subsidy program will actually require the government to spend money, and Republicans are unified in their opposition to the government spending money on poor people. Rubio’s support may not do much to convince them to abandon this core principle; he’s not the potential party savior he once looked to be.
Still, points for actually advocating for an actual policy that would actually help people! That’s more than Paul Ryan, Rand Paul or Eric Cantor have done so far in this rhetorical war on poverty. Thus far, their efforts have run up against the brick wall that is the modern conservative movement’s utter inability to craft policy that hasn’t been completely discredited by the last 30+ years of American political and economic history. So, Cantor has come up with “school vouchers” and Paul has tried “economic freedom zones,” which seem to be like “enterprise zones” — already the most popular urban economic revitalization scheme extant, to mostly middling effect — only with even fewer worker protections or environmental regulations. Also a capital gains tax cut. Always a capital gains tax cut. America is just one more capital gains tax cut away from winning the war on poverty!
The recent spike in Republicans suddenly claiming they care about poor people is, honestly, a bit strange. Their voters, for the most part, do not care, and do not care if their politicians say they care. For those wishing to win elections as Republicans in recent years, it has tended to be more effective to loudly denounce the poor, or at least to denounce those who support making the poor less poor. After all, the poor are only poor because they want to be, or are morally deficient, or because of Democrats who keep them poor to maintain a large voting bloc of poor people.
When Republicans called Barack Obama the “food stamp president,” they claimed that they meant that it was a shame that Obama’s policies had devastated the economy so much that so many people now relied on food stamps. Their actual meaning (well, their actual meaning besides just wanting to blow a racist dog whistle) was that liberal policies had fostered a culture of dependency — that is, that living on the dole was so swell that unemployment was a better option than working for a living. This, again, is the blame-the-poor argument that the right has made forever and that the Republican Party has enthusiastically adopted since Reagan.
And it’s not a terribly ineffective political argument! Americans hate the poor, and deeply resent the idea of any of their money going to help them. That’s why Clinton killed welfare, and why food stamps are now at risk. There’s little political upside in promising to help the poor, and for years Democrats have only ever promised to help “all Americans” and “the middle class.”
But Republicans have decided that part of what hurt Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign was that time he called nearly half the nation moochers. This was, they are well aware, merely a slightly artless restatement of a core conservative belief, but it turns out that in a nation in the midst of an ongoing, seemingly never-ending employment crisis, this is maybe not a popular position among voters not already deeply committed to the conservative project. So saying “I care about poverty” is one way to help shake the correct impression voters have that Republicans are devoted solely to the further enrichment of the already wealthy.
Poverty is also a subject about which it’s incredibly easy to bamboozle most of the mainstream political press. You can get swell coverage merely for saying you care about the poor, as Paul Ryan recently has. Because political reporters are unable and unwilling to analyze policy, and curiously reluctant to speak to anyone who can, you can also claim any program at all will lessen poverty or help the unemployed. And for Ryan, “caring about the poor” is a good way to reestablish Seriousness: He becomes one of the Few Serious Republicans with plans to help the poor. Poverty is a better subject for this act than most other liberal issues — like, say, the environment — because Republicans are at least allowed to acknowledge that it is bad that some people are poor.
If Ryan talks about the poor to burnish his wonk cred (and remove the stink of his association with Mitt Romney), Paul’s new shtick is clearly “compassionate libertarianism” (not to be confused with bleeding-heart libertarianism). Like compassionate conservatism, it is the same as the non-compassionate version, except its proponent publicly expresses compassion for people who will not benefit from it.
The only risk these Republicans have to avoid is supporting any policy at all that will help poor people, because those policies will then be supported by Democrats. If Rubio’s idea shows any sign of being able to pass in Congress, Democrats will support it, and then it will become a Democratic policy, and Republicans will be forced to hate it forever. Just about the only prominent Republican elected official who has actually done anything that will actually benefit actual poor people, as Alec MacGillis notes, is Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who accepted the ACA’s Medicaid expansion. That is, he helped Ohio’s impoverished by enacting a Democratic policy. (He may have done so in part because Ohio is just about 50.1 percent Democratic, according to the 2012 presidential election results, and Kasich is up for reelection this year.)
It’s the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty, and it’s nice to see various liberals defending it. For years after its dismantling, no one (well, no one taken seriously in the political elite) was allowed to say that big government programs were an effective means of eliminating poverty. Now, finally, old-fashioned economic progressivism has begun to become a position people are allowed to advocate for in public. (Though everyone is still encouraged to couch all such advocacy in conservative, “pro-market” tones, because that is what our deeply conservative elite is most comfortable with.) There’s very little reason to be optimistic that Republicans “discovering” poverty will lead to any serious national effort to eradicate poverty, but maybe (maybe!) it will make conventional liberals less terrified of actually embracing the eradication of poverty as a goal.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, January 9, 2014
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