“The GOP’s Poverty Problem”: Views Of Republicans Toward Poor People Run From Active Hostility At Worst, To Indifference At Best
Poverty is all the rage among conservatives this week, and will be for, oh, another few days at least. My guess is that this is happening largely because Democrats have made clear that income inequality is the issue they’ll be pressing from now until the November midterm elections, and Republicans are concerned that it might work. So they’re going to head it off by showing voters that they care about people who are struggling, too. The question is, how do you do that when you’re fighting against extending unemployment benefits, trying to cut food stamps, preventing poor people from getting health insurance through Medicaid, and arguing against increasing the minimum wage?
The answer, it seems, is to make public statements in which the word “poverty” appears. Marco Rubio and Eric Cantor gave speeches on it, Paul Ryan will be doing interviews on it, and you’ll probably be hearing more from Republicans on the topic. Mixed in will be some advocacy for policies they’ve pushed for a long time like school vouchers, and the occasional grand if counterproductive idea, like turning over all federal antipoverty programs to the states.
In seeing this, I couldn’t help but think about one of my favorite tidbits from the 2004 presidential campaign, the Bush website’s “Compassion Photo Album,” which consisted entirely of photos of George and/or Laura Bush hanging out with black and Hispanic people. Put aside how condescending it was to present the very fact of talking to a black person as an exercise in “compassion,” as though they were so pathetic that it took a mighty act of generosity for Bush to deign to place himself amongst them. The point is that things like that, and “compassionate conservatism” in general, were never about winning the votes of minorities. It was about showing moderate white voters that Bush was, in the phrase that was so often applied to him by the press when he first ran in 2000, “a different kind of Republican.” When he weighed in on a 1999 Republican budget proposal by saying, “I don’t think they ought to balance their budget on the backs of the poor,” he wasn’t speaking to poor people, he was showing middle class people that he had a heart.
Republicans are doing the same thing now. The fact is that views in the GOP toward poor people run from active hostility at worst to indifference at best. I’m not saying your average Republican wouldn’t be pleased if cutting the capital gains tax did trickle down to the little guy, but even if it doesn’t, they’re still eager to do it because their hearts are with the wealthy. Conservatives see wealth as an expression of virtue; if you have it, it’s because you work hard and deserve it, and if you don’t, that reflects a defect in your character. That’s why so many of their proposals to address poverty are either of the “tough love” variety—have the government stop helping you as a means of encouraging you to get a firm grip on those bootstraps—or things like “enterprise zones” that involve giving tax breaks and exemptions from environmental regulations to wealthy investors and corporations, in the belief that the largesse will trickle down.
The political problem Republicans are trying to address is that, deny it though they might and protest it with cries of “Class warfare!”, economic populism has always been effective for Democrats. That’s partly because it speaks to people’s genuine sentiments about their own struggles and how society should work, and partly because Republicans are the party of the rich. They’d prefer not to be seen that way, of course. But they just are. So when Democrats say “They’re the party of the rich!”, they don’t have to do a lot of persuading, since it’s what voters already believe. A few speeches about poverty aren’t going to change that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, January 9, 2014
“Returning To The Days Of Recalcitrance”: Rubio Demands States’ Right To Ignore The Poor
For a senator who likes to hold himself out as the future of the Republican brand, Marco Rubio has come up with a remarkably retrograde contribution to the party’s chorus of phony empathy for the poor: Let the states do it.
All anti-poverty funds should be combined into one “flex fund,” he said in a speech on Wednesday, and then given to the states to spend as they see fit. He actually believes that states will “design and fund creative initiatives” to address inequality.
“Washington continues to rule over the world of anti-poverty policy-making, with beltway bureaucrats picking and choosing rigid nationwide programs and forcing America’s elected state legislatures to watch from the sidelines,” he said. “As someone who served nine years in the state house, two of them as Speaker, I know how frustrating this is.”
Do-nothing legislators in states like Mr. Rubio’s Florida feel frustrated precisely because most federal safety-net programs are designed to limit the ability of states to refuse to help their less fortunate residents. As Lyndon Johnson knew from personal experience in 1964, when he began the War on Poverty, states could not be trusted to properly address the poverty in their midst. Or, to put it another way, certain states could be trusted to yell and scream and fight to the end for their right to do as little as possible.
One of the great achievements of the War on Poverty programs was to extend the safety net to the South, where white legislators saw little reason to spend taxpayer dollars on the basic needs of poor citizens, most of whom were black. Southern lawmakers in Congress fought for the right of governors to veto grants made possible by the Economic Opportunity Act, one of the centerpieces of the War on Poverty, and Southern governors exercised those vetoes repeatedly. But Sargent Shriver, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, overrode those vetoes, bypassing the governors and sending anti-poverty money directly to the local agencies and community groups that could do some good with it.
If you think those days of recalcitrance are over, take a look at the map of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The list of 25 includes every one of the states that seceded from the union, with the exception of Arkansas, which is doing only a partial expansion. (Virginia is likely to accept the expansion after its newly elected Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, takes office later this week.)
But long before “Obamacare” became a curse word among Republicans, most of those same states were already stingy with their spending on Medicaid, which lets states determine who is eligible for the program. The 16 states that restricted Medicaid to those making half or less of the federal poverty line included the usual cast of characters: Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia. The most generous states — giving Medicaid benefits to those at the poverty line or higher — were clustered in the Northeast and the upper Midwest, along with California.
That’s undoubtedly fine with Mr. Rubio and other Republicans who see nothing wrong with a country that is a patchwork of generosity and indifference.
“It’s wrong for Washington to tell Tallahassee what programs are right for the people of Florida,” Mr. Rubio said. “But it’s particularly wrong for it to say that what’s right for Tallahassee is the same thing that’s right for Topeka and Sacramento and Detroit and Manhattan and every other town, city and state in the country.”
That battle, though, was fought and lost by Southerners 50 years ago, just as they lost a far bloodier states’ rights battle a century earlier. The country long ago came to the conclusion that economic rights, just like voting rights and criminal rights, had to be uniform. As much as it might frustrate Mr. Rubio, people should not be made to suffer just because they were born in an uncaring state.
By: David Firestone, Editors Blog, The New York Times, January 9, 2014
“The GOP’s Obamacare Obsession Will Sink Them In 2014”: As A Democrat, I Like The Republican Strategy, For It’s Political Suicide
2014 has arrived – an election year. President Obama is surely happy to have 2013 behind him, excited to have a new year ahead to work on issues that the American people care about: immigration reform, the budget, extending unemployment benefits, job creation and raising the minimum wage to name a few.
Republicans are also excited about the year ahead. And their agenda?
Replace, repeal, demonize and continue to oppose Obamacare.
Yes folks, the 47 attempts to repeal this law at your time and expense (literally); weren’t enough.The fact is that the Republicans promised, ‘hey, vote for us, we’ll take over the House and create jobs!’ was a broken, empty promise.
The fact is that Americans still care about the economy (a category into which job creation, extending unemployment benefits and raising the minimum wage fall), still ranks numero uno on their list of must haves for 2014.
The fact is that poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans feel there is a disparity of wages in America, want unemployment benefits extended and support raising the minimum wage to a more livable wage.
The fact is that in the last election, Democrats won landslide victories by hitting home the point of income inequality in America and how it must be changed.
And the fact is that, polls show, the majority of Americans don’t like Obamacare, but do like “The Affordable Care Act” and don’t want it repealed or replaced, just repaired – and they do not want Republicans fighting over it or voting on it anymore. Despite all that, Republicans are still betting that their opposition to Obamacare will help them win and win big in November 2014.
And the machine’s already in motion. It started with the Republican National Committee’s announcement that it would emphasize the Democrats’ support of Obamacare, hoping to gain seats in both the House & the Senate in the next election. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, said Obamacare is going to be the issue of 2014. As the new year starts, so starts the launch of a multistate radio ad campaign targeting Democrats.
Although Republicans see the continued attack of “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” comment by the president as their golden egg, I believe it will eventually fall on deaf ears. Those that aren’t Democrats or don’t like the Democrats won’t vote for them, whether they like their insurance, their plan, their doctor or not.
And by November, the website will be fixed, even more people will be insured as millions more will sign up for Obamacare by the end of March and by November rather than death panels we’ll be hearing about how many people were able to have early detection of cancer and get it treated and be cured, rather than die; due to having health insurance and receive preventative care.
We will hear how no jobs were lost due to Obamacare and the economy will continue to improve; despite Republican claims otherwise. In other words, there will be – and Democrats better drive these points home – more success stories and satisfaction with Obamacare than not.
So as a Democrat I like the Republican strategy, for it’s political suicide; oh but it will gain seats in the House and the Senate … for the Democrats.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, January 8, 2014
“The Social Justice Majority”: We Are Far More United Than Our Politics Permit Us To Be
Why are we arguing about issues that were settled decades ago? Why, for example, is it so hard to extend unemployment insurance at a time when the jobless rate nationally is still at 7 percent and higher than that in 21 states ?
As the Senate votes this week on help for the unemployed, Democrats will be scrambling to win support from the handful of Republicans they’ll need to get the required 60 votes. The GOP-led House, in the meantime, shows no signs of moving on the matter.
It hasn’t always been like this. It was not some socialist but a president named George W. Bush who declared: “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.”
Bush spoke those words, as Jason Sattler of the National Memo noted, in December 2002, when the unemployment rate was a full point lower than it is today.
Similarly, raising the minimum wage wasn’t always so complicated. The parties had their differences, but a solid block of Republicans once saw regular increases as a just way of spreading the benefits of economic growth.
The contention over unemployment insurance and the minimum wage reflects the larger problem in American politics. Rather than discussing what we need to do to secure our future, we are spending most of our energy re-litigating the past.
A substantial part of the conservative movement is now determined to blow up the national consensus that has prevailed since the Progressive and New Deal eras. The consensus envisions a capitalist economy tempered by government intervention to reduce inequities and soften the cruelties that the normal workings of the market can sometimes inflict.
This bipartisan understanding meant that conservatives such as Bush fully accepted that it was shameful to allow fellow citizens who had done nothing wrong to suffer because they had been temporarily overwhelmed by economic forces beyond their control.
The current debate is flawed for another reason: It persistently exaggerates how divided we are. Of course there are vast cultural differences across our nation. It’s not just a cliche that the worldview of a white evangelical Christian in Mississippi is quite distant from the outlook of a secularist on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. African Americans, Latinos, Asians and whites can offer rather diverse interpretations of the meaning of our national story.
But on core questions involving social justice, we are far more united than our politics permit us to be. A survey released at the end of December by Hart Research, a Democratic polling firm, found that Americans supported extending unemployment insurance by a margin of 55 percent to 34 percent. Several recent surveys, including a Fox News poll, found that about two-thirds of Americans support an increase in the minimum wage.
This leads to two conclusions. The first is that most Americans broadly accept the New Deal consensus. We may disagree about this or that regulation or spending program. We may squabble over exactly how our approaches to policy should be updated for a new century. But there is far more agreement among the American people than there is among Washington lobbies, members of Congress or political commentators on the core proposition that government should help us through rough patches and guarantee a certain level of economic fairness.
The second conclusion is that we have to stop letting the politics of culture wars so dominate our thinking that we forget how much we share when it comes to life’s day-to-day struggles and what we can do to ease them. Disputes over personal morals and lifestyle choices may get more page views or rating points, but they do little to improve anyone’s standard of living.
The minimum-wage increase is typically labeled a “liberal” idea. Yet many grass-roots Republicans see respect for those who work hard as rooted in sound conservative principles demanding decent compensation for a day’s labor. An evangelical might see fair pay as a biblical imperative while a secularist might view the question through a more worldly philosophical prism. Nonetheless, their distinctive reasoning processes lead them to the same place.
President Obama’s old line challenging the idea of red and blue Americas unalterably opposed to each other seems terribly outdated or naive. Electorally, at least, those divisions are still painfully obvious. But on matters of economic justice, we shouldn’t let a defective political system distract us from what we have in common.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 5, 2014
“Thanks For Nothing Republicans”: Unemployment Benefits, The Cruelest Cut Of All
To 1.3 million jobless Americans: The Republican Party wishes you a Very Unhappy New Year!
It would be one thing if there were a logical reason to cut off unemployment benefits for those who have been out of work the longest. But no such rationale exists. On both economic and moral grounds, extending benefits for the long-term unemployed should have received an automatic, bipartisan vote in both houses of Congress.
It didn’t. Nothing is automatic and bipartisan anymore, not with today’s radicalized GOP on the scene. In this case, a sensible and humane policy option is hostage to bruised Republican egos and the ideological myth of “makers” vs. “takers.”
The result is a cruel blow to families that are already suffering. On Saturday, benefits were allowed to expire for 1.3 million people who have been unemployed more than six months. These are precisely the jobless who will suffer most from a cutoff, since they have been scraping by on unemployment checks for so long that their financial situations are already precarious, if not dire.
Extending unemployment benefits is something that’s normally done in a recession, and Republicans correctly point out that we are now in a recovery. But there was nothing normal about the Great Recession, and there is nothing normal about the Not-So-Great Recovery.
We are emerging from the worst economic slump since the Depression, and growth has been unusually — and painfully — slow. Only in the past few months has the economy shown real signs of life. Job growth is improving but still sluggish, with unemployment hovering at 7 percent — not counting the millions of Americans who have given up looking for work.
An extension of long-term unemployment benefits should have been part of the budget deal between Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) but wasn’t. Democrats tried to offer an amendment that would extend the benefits for three months, and they identified savings elsewhere in the budget to pay for it. But House Speaker John Boehner refused to allow a vote on the proposal.
In terms of economic policy, this makes no sense. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that extending long-term unemployment for a full year would cost about $25 billion, which would add to the deficit. But the measure would boost economic growth by two-tenths of 1 percent and create 200,000 jobs. Given that interest rates are at historical lows, and given that the imperative right now is to create growth and jobs, refusing to extend the benefits is counterproductive as well as cruel.
Sadly, cruelty is the point.
The Republican far right perceived the budget deal as a political defeat — even though it caps spending for social programs at levels that many Democrats consider appallingly low — because it does not slash Medicare and Social Security. For some in the GOP, accepting an unemployment extension would have been too much to swallow, simply because it was favored by Democrats.
For some other Republicans, unemployment isn’t really about spending, growth, deficits or even politics. They see it as a moral issue.
To this way of thinking, extended benefits coddle the unemployed and encourage them to loll around the house, presumably eating bonbons, rather than pound the streets for any crumbs of work they can find, however meager.
This view is consistent with the philosophy that Mitt Romney privately espoused during his failed presidential campaign. It sees a growing number of Americans as parasitic takers who luxuriate in their dependence on government benefits — 47 percent was the figure Romney came up with. The makers who create the nation’s wealth are not really helping the down-and-out by giving them financial support to make it through tough times, this philosophy holds. Much better medicine would be a kick in the pants.
I wonder if these Ayn Rand ideologues have ever actually met a breadwinner who has gone without a job for more than six months. I wonder if they know that some jobless men and women — and I know this is hard to believe — don’t have well-to-do parents or even a trust fund to fall back on. I wonder if they understand that unemployment benefits don’t even cover basic expenses, much less bonbons.
The Republican establishment doesn’t want this to be a campaign issue for Democrats, so it’s quite likely that the benefits will eventually be extended. Until then, more than 1 million households are being made to suffer privation and anxiety — for no good reason at all. Thanks for nothing, GOP.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 30, 2013
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