“Francis Prods Congress’ Conscience”: We Can Find No Social Or Moral Justification, No Justification Whatsoever, For Lack Of Housing
Wouldn’t it be grand if Pope Francis could be a recurring visitor to the U.S. Congress, a sort of spiritual superintendent who occasionally drops in to chide, cajole, and mostly just remind our legislators when their actions don’t promote the common good? What kind of country would we become?
Watching as the pontiff stepped away from the podium after his electrifying speech to Congress, I wanted the effect to stick. I wanted to see Democrats and Republicans get off their high horses and cooperate on restoring the health and prosperity of the nation. I wanted our elected officials to stop acting merely as the “political class” and instead legislate as men and women of conscience.
I know I’m not alone. A lot of reasonable people in this country wish the pope’s short visit would usher in such an era.
But with his visit to Capitol Hill complete, the pope drove off in his little Fiat, en route to greet the people nearest his heart: the poor and homeless. At St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Washington, he spoke to and looked in the faces of the least among us at a Catholic Charities free lunch for more than 200. It was a sharp contrast to his prior errand. And yet there is a role for government at this table, too.
“Why are we homeless?” Francis asked. “Why don’t we have housing? These are questions which many of you may ask daily.”
Then, he added, “We can find no social or moral justification, no justification whatsoever, for lack of housing.”
Is that clear enough for you? There is no justification whatsoever, and yet homelessness persists — thrives, actually — in this rich and powerful nation. Why?
Unwind the life of virtually any homeless man, woman or child and you may see personal failure or family failure. More likely you will see challenges that people can’t handle by themselves: mental illness, domestic violence, catastrophic job loss, poverty. No one sets out in life wanting to be homeless. No one should be trapped in homelessness, even as a consequence of poor choices.
That they continue to be is an indictment of a society that sanctions discarding — a word Francis often uses — those it finds inconvenient.
It’s also a failure of government. Just as you can track the problems along a person’s road to homelessness, you can track policy maker’s failure — or is it refusal? — to respond. The story of homelessness is a story of policy failure: shortfalls in vision and funding of public education, investment in neighborhoods, job training, access to healthcare (especially mental), affordable treatment for addictions of alcohol and drugs, and treatment for PTSD-afflicted veterans after they fight our wars.
Those are all issues that Congress has an impact on, for better or worse.
The pope’s arrival in the U.S. overshadowed a national headline on homelessness out of Los Angeles. City leaders declared a “state of emergency” because the number of homeless people setting up encampments has grown to an estimated 26,000.
In other words, the homeless have become too numerous to ignore.
So an announcement was made that $100 million would be shoveled at programs, which not surprisingly have yet to be FULLY outlined. That’s because there are no easy answers.
The skyrocketing costs of housing, and the lack of affordable options, are significant factors in why homelessness has grown by 12 percent in Los Angeles in the past two years. But affordable housing is an issue in virtually every American city.
The uneven way the economy is recovering from the recession is another complicating factor. Congress and the president approved bailouts and other deals for some, but that didn’t benefit everyone in the long run. How the U.S. rebuilds its economy will determine who and how many land on our streets in the future.
A central moral teaching of virtually every faith is the responsibility to feed the poor. Yet charity alone is not a solution. We have an obligation as a society, through the policies of our governments, to create the conditions and opportunities for all to house, feed and clothe themselves and their families.
Any honest assessment of homelessness apportions blame and responsibility in many directions. Like the stalemates of Congress, homelessness didn’t begin recently, and it continues through inaction or misdirected action from many, many quarters.
Day by day, struggle by struggle, people fall into being homeless through their own faults and from circumstances they did not create.
There but for the grace of God goes each of us.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-Page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, September 26, 2015
“A Rerun Of What His Brother Tried”: Jeb Bush’s Tax Plan Shows Republicans Can’t Learn From Economic History
Jeb Bush released the first details of his tax plan today in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, so we finally learn the secret that will produce spectacular growth, great jobs for all who want them, and a new dawn of prosperity and happiness for all Americans. Are you ready?
It’s…tax cuts for the wealthy! If only we had known that this amazingly powerful tool was available to us all along!
To be fair, not everything in Bush’s tax plan is targeted at the rich — there are some goodies in there for other people as well. But it’s pretty clear that in addition to wanting to revive the Bush Doctrine in foreign affairs, Jeb is looking to his brother’s tax policies as a model for how we can make the economy hum, I suppose because they worked so well the first time.
While many of the details are still vague, here are the basics of what Bush wants to do. He would reduce the number of tax brackets from its current seven down to three, of 10 percent, 25 percent, and 28 percent. This would represent a huge tax cut for people at the top, who currently pay a marginal rate of 39.6 percent. He also wants to eliminate the inheritance tax and the alternative minimum tax (both paid almost entirely by wealthy people), and slash corporate taxes. On the other end, he’d raise the standard deduction and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps the working poor. He would also eliminate the carried interest loophole, which allows hedge fund managers to pay lower rates on their income.
“We will treat all noninvestment income the same,” he says, which is a reminder that investment income, which is mostly gained by wealthy people, would still be treated more favorably than wage income, which is what working people make.
As Dylan Matthews notes, Bush’s plan is something of a compromise between the supply-siders and flat-taxers who think that cutting taxes on the wealthy is literally the only thing necessary to spur the economy, and the “reform conservatives” who would give the wealthy some breaks but put more of their effort toward changes affecting the middle class. But the biggest problem with Bush’s plan may not so much the particulars, but the fact that he believes that making these changes will “unleash” the American economy.
We’ve had this debate again and again in recent years, and every time, events in the real world prove Republicans wrong, yet they never seem to change their tune. When Bill Clinton’s first budget passed in 1993 and raised taxes on the wealthy, Republicans said it would cause a “job-killing recession”; what ensued was a rather extraordinary economic boom and the first budget surpluses in decades. When George W. Bush cut taxes in 2001 and 2003, primarily for the wealthy, they said that not only would the economy rocket forward into hyperspace, but there would be little or no increase in the deficit because of all that increased economic activity. What actually happened was anemic growth and dramatically increased deficits, culminating in the economic catastrophe of 2008. When Barack Obama raised taxes, Republicans said the economy would grind to a halt; instead we’ve seen sustained job creation (despite weak income gains).
The lesson of all this, to any sane person, is that changing tax rates, particularly the top marginal income tax rate, has little or no effect on the economy. Yet Jeb Bush wants us to believe that his plan will produce sustained growth of 4 percent or more — something no president since Lyndon Johnson has managed — with what is essentially a rerun of what his brother tried.
He’s hardly alone in this belief. Indeed, with the bizarre exception of Donald Trump, all the Republican candidates put tax cuts that would benefit the wealthy at the center of the their ideas for helping the American economy. So why can’t they learn from history?
The answer is that for conservatives, cutting taxes on the wealthy is less a practical instrument to produce a healthy economy than it is a moral imperative. When they talk passionately about the crushing burden taxation imposes on the “job creators,” those noble and virtuous Americans whose hard work and initiative (even when it comes in the form of waiting for their monthly dividend checks) provide the engine that moves the nation forward, you can tell they believe it deep in their hearts. If cutting the top marginal rate hasn’t delivered us to economic nirvana before, well they’re sure it will eventually. And even if it doesn’t, it’s still the right thing to do.
There are some cases where partisans will alter their philosophical beliefs in response to real-world evidence; for instance, right now, many Republicans are reexamining what they used to think about criminal justice and the utility of get-tough policies. But taxes occupy a singular place in the conservative philosophical hierarchy, so much so that many elected Republicans literally take an oath swearing never to raise them for any reason. Fourteen of the seventeen Republican presidential candidates have sworn that oath (though Bush is one of the three who hasn’t).
After all that has happened in the last couple of decades, it’s clear that there is literally no conceivable economic event or development that would dent the Republican conviction that cutting taxes for the wealthy is, if not the only thing that can help the economy, the sine qua non of economic revival. Maybe it’s too much to expect them to learn from history.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, September 9, 2015
“Violent Crime Is Largely Intra-Racial”: Black-On-Black Violence Demands Our Attention
Black lives matter.
That’s the powerful and relevant message that a loosely organized group of young activists have used as a clarion call to bring attention to the crisis of police violence against black citizens, usually unarmed black men. And its mere utterance is a scathing commentary on the current state of race in America, a reminder that it must be said. Shouldn’t it be obvious that black lives matter as much as white ones?
That’s true, by the way, no matter how those black lives are snuffed out, whether by powerful figures acting under the color of law, or by other black men who are angry, violent and unrestrained. The senseless loss of black life demands a response.
So let’s talk, too, about the surging rate of homicides in certain big cities around the country, including Baltimore, Milwaukee, Chicago, and New Orleans. The crimes are occurring mostly in poor neighborhoods, and the victims — and perpetrators — are overwhelmingly black.This is a sensitive subject, a topic rarely broached in public by prominent black political and civic figures. Perhaps that’s because ultraconservatives, especially the racial provocateurs among them, use the numbers as a bludgeon, hammering away in order to muddy the debate about police violence. They try to excuse police brutality by evoking black criminals — as if law enforcement officials should not be held to a very different standard.
Moreover, they fail to note that violent crime is largely intra-racial — that is, committed by people against their own ethnic group. In other words, whites tend to assault and kill whites, while blacks tend to assault and kill blacks. “From 1980 to 2008, 84 percent of white victims were killed by whites and 93 percent of black victims were killed by blacks,” says PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization.
In any event, the ranting of right-wing rabble-rousers is no reason to shield our eyes from the worrisome incidence of black homicides and their debilitating effect on black families and neighborhoods. In 2013, the last year for which figures were available, homicide was the leading cause of death for young black men between the ages of 15 and 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In a special 2014 report, “Black Homicide Victimization in the United States,” the Violence Policy Center wrote: “Blacks in the United States are disproportionately affected by homicide. For the year 2011, blacks represented 13 percent of the nation’s population, yet accounted for 50 percent of all homicide victims.” As stunning as that statistic is, it doesn’t adequately convey the shattered lives, the broken families, the decimated neighborhoods it represents.
If homicide were a disease wiping out black people at this alarming rate, we’d be demanding research, solutions, a cure. If a foreign enemy had laid siege to poor black neighborhoods in the same way, we’d send in massive manpower to root them out. But we’ve been peculiarly passive in response to black-on-black homicides, as if there is nothing we can do, as if it’s too difficult and too controversial to tackle.
Certainly, there is controversy aplenty, starting with legitimate differences among law enforcement experts about how to tackle the problem. Indeed, there are those among law enforcement officials who insist that heavy-handed police tactics, such as New York’s “stop and frisk” policy of random searches, are a useful tool in curbing criminal activity.
That seems unlikely. If oppressive policing were the solution, a city such as Cleveland ought to be one of the safest, given its documented history of out-of-control cops. Instead, it’s one of the most dangerous, according to FBI statistics.
But well-trained and diverse police departments, staffed by officers committed to treating citizens fairly, are certainly one part of the solution. Curbing our cultural obsession with guns would help. And, undoubtedly, so would ameliorating the root causes of the frustration that breeds violent crime, including joblessness, poor educational opportunity and inadequate housing.
None of those fixes will come quickly or easily, but they won’t come at all unless we find the will to acknowledge the problem. Publicly.
Black lives, including those lost to black violence, matter.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, 2007; The National Memo, September 5, 2015
“Sam Brownback’s Kansas Disaster Is Getting Even Worse”: Conservative Policies Are Both A Moral And Practical Disaster
Politics is all too often couched in terms of morality and ethics, rather than simple right and wrong. What I mean by that is that reasonable people can come to different moral value judgments about ethical dilemmas: is it more moral to ensure that everyone has access to a social safety net even if some people game the system, or is it more moral to ensure that people keep all their private property and never have to give it up to someone less hardworking than themselves?
But it’s important to remember that it’s not just about empathy and ethics. It’s about what works and what doesn’t. And every day in every way, we are learning that conservative approaches simply don’t work–not in terms of social policy, and certainly not in terms of economic policy.
Exhibit A in the utter failure of conservative dogma is Sam Brownback’s trainwreck in Kansas. Here are the latest figures, courtesy of Yael Abouhalkah in the Kansas City Star:
This has been a bad week for Gov. Sam Brownback and others who believe his massive income tax cuts are going to dramatically boost employment in the state. A new report Friday showed that Kansas had lost a whopping 4,300 jobs in July from a month earlier.
The unemployment rate climbed for the fourth straight month, up to 4.6 percent, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. And look at this disastrous note: The Sunflower State now has 1,700 fewer jobs than it did at the start of 2015.
One more fact from the latest report shows that Kansas has added a puny 5,600 total jobs in the last year — from July 2014 to July 2015. The new information shows that the tax cuts that have drained the Kansas treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars the past two years are not working to attract employers and jobs.
Keep in mind that Kansas’ atrocious performance has nothing to do with the state of the midwest or the manufacturing sector generally, because both manufacturing and Kansas’ neighbors are actually doing pretty well comparatively:
Meanwhile, Missouri celebrated much better news in the latest BLS report. The Show-Me State gained 11,900 jobs in July, and now has added 30,900 for 2015. Yes, that’s without the huge tax cuts that Brownback and Co. put in place.
Earlier this week, a separate report showed Kansas is missing out on the growth in manufacturing employment, which is happening across much of the rest of America. One key statistic: Kansas lost 39,000 manufacturing jobs during the recession but has added just 4,000 since it ended.
All this as Brownback’s tax cuts are destroying what remains of the state’s educational system and social services. Brownback and his allies suffer under the delusion that supply-side economics really works, and that if they cut taxes enough on rich people and businesses that there will be an explosion of jobs and economic growth. That’s not just immoral because it increases inequality and hurts the poor. It’s as wrong as 2+2=5. In all but the most extreme cases, cutting taxes on the rich does nothing to create jobs, but slashing the salaries of teachers and cutting welfare benefits means less consumer demand, which in turns drives the economy into recession. The immorality would at least be somewhat tolerable if the ideology functioned at a broad utilitarian level, but it doesn’t.
Conservative policies are both a moral and practical disaster.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 22, 2015
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