“The Three Biggest Right-Wing Lies About Poverty”: So Why Do So Many Right-Wing Republicans Tell These Lies?
Rather than confront poverty by extending jobless benefits to the long-term unemployed, endorsing a higher minimum wage, or supporting jobs programs, conservative Republicans are taking a different tack.
They’re peddling three big lies about poverty. To wit:
Lie #1: Economic growth reduces poverty.
“The best anti-poverty program,” wrote Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, in the Wall Street Journal, “is economic growth.”
Wrong. Since the late 1970s, the economy has grown 147 percent per capita but almost nothing has trickled down. The typical American worker is earning just about what he or she earned three decades ago, adjusted for inflation.
Meanwhile, the share of Americans in poverty remains around 15 percent. That’s even higher than it was in the early 1970s.
How can the economy have grown so much while most people’s wages go nowhere and the poor remain poor? Because almost all the gains have gone to the top.
Research by Immanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty shows that forty years ago the richest 1 percent of Americans got 9 percent of total income. Today they get over 20 percent.
It’s true that redistributing income to the needy is politically easier in a growing economy than in a stagnant one. One reason so many in today’s middle class are reluctant to pay taxes to help the poor is their own incomes are dropping.
But the lesson we should have learned from the past three decades is economic growth by itself doesn’t reduce poverty.
Lie #2: Jobs reduce poverty.
Senator Marco Rubio said poverty is best addressed not by raising the minimum wage or giving the poor more assistance but with “reforms that encourage and reward work.”
This has been the standard Republican line ever since Ronald Reagan declared that the best social program is a job. A number of Democrats have adopted it as well. But it’s wrong.
Surely it’s better to be poor and working than to be poor and unemployed. Evidence suggests jobs are crucial not only to economic well-being but also to self-esteem. Long-term unemployment can even shorten life expectancy.
But simply having a job is no bulwark against poverty. In fact, across America the ranks of the working poor have been growing. Around one-fourth of all American workers are now in jobs paying below what a full-time, full-year worker needs in order to live above the federally defined poverty line for a family of four.
Why are more people working but still poor? First of all, more jobs pay lousy wages.
While low-paying industries such as retail and fast food accounted for 22 percent of the jobs lost in the Great Recession, they’ve generated 44 percent of the jobs added since then, according to a recent report from the National Employment Law Project.
Second, the real value of the minimum wage continues to drop. This has affected female workers more than men because more women are at the minimum wage.
Third, government assistance now typically requires recipients to be working. This hasn’t meant fewer poor people. It’s just meant more poor people have jobs.
Bill Clinton’s welfare reform of 1996 pushed the poor into jobs, but they’ve been mostly low-wage jobs without ladders into the middle class. The Earned Income Tax Credit, a wage subsidy, has been expanded, but you have to be working in order to qualify.
Work requirements haven’t reduced the number or percent of Americans in poverty. They’ve merely increased the number of working poor — a term that should be an oxymoron.
Lie #3: Ambition cures poverty.
Most Republicans, unlike Democrats and independents, believe people are poor mainly because of a lack of effort, according to a Pew Research Center/USA Today survey. It’s a standard riff of the right: If the poor were more ambitious they wouldn’t be poor.
Obviously, personal responsibility is important. But there’s no evidence that people who are poor are less ambitious than anyone else. In fact, many work long hours at backbreaking jobs.
What they really lack is opportunity. It begins with lousy schools.
America is one of only three advanced countries that spends less on the education of poorer children than richer ones, according to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Among the 34 O.E.C.D. nations, only in the United States, Israel and Turkey do schools serving poor neighborhoods have fewer teachers and crowd students into larger classrooms than do schools serving more privileged students. In most countries, it’s just the reverse: Poor neighborhoods get more teachers per student.
And unlike most OECD countries, America doesn’t put better teachers in poorly performing schools,
So why do so many right-wing Republicans tell these three lies? Because they make it almost impossible to focus on what the poor really need – good-paying jobs, adequate safety nets, and excellent schools.
These things cost money. Lies are cheaper.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, June 13, 2 014
“No Expert In Election Law Either”: Florida Governor Rick Scott Is Also ‘Not A Scientist’
Florida governor Rick Scott (R) ripped a page from Senator Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) science-denying playbook on Tuesday, when he dodged a question on climate change by insisting “I’m not a scientist.”
As Marc Caputo reports in The Miami Herald, the latest example of Scott’s climate-change trutherism came during a question-and-answer session in Miami:
Q: Do you believe man-made climate change is significantly affecting the weather, the climate?
Scott: “Well, I’m not a scientist. But let’s talk about what we’ve done. Through our Division of Emergency Management — the last few years, three years – we put about, I think, $120 million to deal with flooding around our coast. We also put a lot of money into our natural treasures, the Everglades, trying to make sure all the water flows south. So we’re dealing with all the issues we can. But I’m not a scientist.”
Q: In 2011 or 2010, you were much more doubtful about climate change. Now you’re sounding less doubtful about man-made climate change because now you’re not saying ‘Look, I doubt the science.’ Now you’re saying: ‘I’m not a scientist.’ Am I right in guessing that?
Scott: “Well, I’m not a scientist. But I can tell you what we’ve accomplished. We put a lot of effort into making sure that we take care of our natural treasures – the Everglades, making sure water flows south, any flooding around our coast. So we’re doing the right thing.”
Question (asked by citizen-activist): So do you believe in the man-made influence on climate change?
Scott: “Nice seeing you guys.”
The governor’s dodge is a rather weak case for refusing to fully confront Florida’s looming environmental crisis. After all, Scott is also not an expert in election law, but that didn’t stop him from illegally attempting to purge Florida’s voter rolls.
If Scott is interested in the opinion of actual scientists on the matter, however, they have been very clear that the climate is warming, likely due to human activities.
Scott’s response is nearly a carbon copy of the one offered by Senator Rubio in 2012, when he infamously responded to a question on the age of the Earth by telling GQ reporter Michael Hainey “I’m not a scientist, man.” Rubio has since devolved on the issue, going from refusing to engage with science to flatly denying it.
Scott’s has moved in the opposite direction. Although he now refuses to discuss science, during his first gubernatorial campaign in 2010 Scott proudly stated that he does not believe in climate change.
The governor’s attempt to sidestep questions on the topic will likely resurface during his re-election campaign. Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer has named Scott as one of the top targets of his $100 million campaign to boot climate-change truthers from office in November, and Scott’s awkward answer seems tailor-made for an attack ad.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, May 28, 2014
“The Winds Of No Change”: Defining Moments For The Tea Party Movement And The GOP
In his latest New York Times column, Ross Douthat notes the civil war over the “GOP civil war” narrative of this election cycle, and argues the real proof of the Tea Party pudding will be in the 2016 Republican presidential campaign:
[T]here are several politicians, all elected as insurgents and all potential presidential candidates in 2016, who still aspire to be the Tea Party’s version of Obama: Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. And because each embodies different facets of the Tea Party phenomenon, each would write a very different conclusion to its story.
A Rubio victory would probably make the Tea Party seem a little less ideological in hindsight, a little more Middle American and populist, and more like a course correction after George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” than a transformative event.
A Cruz triumph would lend itself to a more ideological reading of the Tea Party’s impact, but one that fit readily into existing categories: It would suggest that Tea Party-ism was essentially the old Reagan catechism in a tricorn hat, movement conservatism under a “don’t tread on me” banner.
A Paul victory would write a starkly libertarian conclusion to the Tea Party’s story, making it seem much more revolutionary — a true break with both Reaganism and Bushism, with an uncertain future waiting beyond.
I tend to agree with Douthat on his basic point: nothing quite defines a political party like its presidential nominees, which is why presidential nominating contests are important beyond their impact on general elections. But I still think he underestimates the extent to which the GOP has already internalized the Tea Party message, even as the Tea Folk are mostly conservative “base” activists who have been radicalized in recent years. Consider this line:
[T]he one thing about Republican politics that pretty clearly wasn’t “Tea Party” was the man the G.O.P. ultimately nominated in 2012.
Is that really true? Pretty early in the 2012 cycle, Romney embraced the single most important programmatic demand of the Tea Party Movement, the Republican Study Committee’s Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge, which offered a permanent, constitutional limitation on the size and cost and therefore the functions of the federal government. And in the defining moment of the general election campaign, the 47% video, Romney embraced and articulated the resentment of “winners” against “losers” that was at the heart of the Tea Party Movement’s founding event, Rick Santelli’s Rant.
You can object that Mitt was just pandering, and didn’t really mean the things he said in those two instances, just as he really wasn’t the savage immigrant-basher he seemed to be when going after poor clueless Rick Perry–or for that matter, the Movement Conservative favorite he purported to be in 2008. But it really doesn’t matter, does it? He was pushed in that direction again and again by the prevailing winds in his party, and no matter who wins what 2014 primaries, or which flavor of tea is selling best at any given moment, the wind’s still blowing in that direction today.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 27, 2014
“The Midterm Manifesto”: Senate Republicans Want The GOP To Make All Sorts Of Promises It Can’t Keep
Senate Republicans may be about to make the same mistake they often do when attempting to outline a platform: proposing policies that are impossible to implement.
Politico reports that a bloc of Senate Republicans, led by Lindsey Graham, “is agitating for party leaders to unveil a policy manifesto” that would explain to voters what the GOP would do if it took the majority in the midterm elections. This is yet another sign that the Republican Party realizes it needs a new political strategy, now that Obamacare has rebounded. A new “Contract With America”—the party’s midterm platform in 1994, on which this 2014 manifesto would be modeled—could prove successful at the polls.
But as a governing strategy, this manifesto will only make legislating more difficult if the GOP takes the Senate. That’s because Republicans have a bad habit of overpromising.
In 2012, Mitt Romney promised a mathematically impossible tax-reform plan to lower all rates by 20 percent and cut the corporate rate, making up the revenue by closing unspecified tax preferences. When House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp released his tax reform plan in February, he attempted to cut rates and consolidate the tax code, but struggled to make up the lost revenue, eventually creating a top rate of 35 percent, implementing a bank tax, and taxing a percentage of capital gains as ordinary income. Republicans predictably ran away from Camp’s reasonable plan.
Marco Rubio has proposed reforming the federal government’s antipoverty system. But his plan is mathematically impossible: He proposes increasing benefits for childless workers, keeping them unchanged for everyone else, and not increasing the deficit. He has yet to release legislative language for the plan, but those three goals are irreconcilable.
It’s hard to imagine what Senate Republicans could unite behind that would appeal to most of the party. If tax reform ends up in a Senate Republican policy manifesto, it will only reinforce the impossible Republican standard of drastically lowering rates and eliminating tax preferences to avoid increasing the deficit. This is exactly what Representative Paul Ryan did in his budget this year, where he reiterated his support for two tax brackets with rates at 10 and 25 percent. Camp tried to do that, but came up short. The dual-rate structure simply doesn’t raise enough revenue. As the likely replacement for Camp as chair of Ways and Means, Ryan now has made tax reform very hard to accomplish.
Undoubtedly, the midterm manifesto would propose replacing Obamacare—but replace it with what? Senators Tom Coburn, Richard Burr and Orrin Hatch unveiled the Patient CARE Act in January, which actually had a lot in common with Obamacare. It didn’t earn much support among the GOP for that reason. What plan could Senate Republicans unite behind that does more than just repeal Obamacare?
Will the platform contain a balanced budget amendment, as Newt Gingrich and House Republicans included in their “Contract with America”? Republicans would face stiff Democratic opposition to such an amendment, but the GOP may also have to answer how they would close budget deficits if the amendment somehow became law. They certainly wouldn’t increase revenue. Instead, it would require even steeper spending cuts—$1.2 trillion more than even Paul Ryan envisioned in his budget. The Ryan budget already takes such a huge cut from programs for low-income Americans that it is hard to see how another $1.2 trillion in cuts wouldn’t need to come from defense spending or Social Security. Those are two areas Republicans don’t want to touch.
All this speculation may be moot. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has yet to offer an opinion on the proposed manifesto, according to Politico, while John Cornyn, the Senate minority whip, argued against it. “Even if we have a good election, President Obama is still going to be president,” Cornyn said. “I don’t think we should be in the business of overpromising.”
If only the party took that advice more often.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, May 27, 2014
“The Anti-Science Party”: It’s Been A Rough Week For Republicans And Their Support For Science
A few years ago, during the race for the Republicans’ 2012 presidential nomination, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) suggested climate science was an elaborate hoax cooked up by greedy scientists. John Weaver, the chief strategist for former Gov. John Huntsman’s campaign, responded with a sensible declaration: “We’re not going to win a national election if we become the anti-science party.”
Three years later, it’s probably too late to worry about whether the GOP is becoming the anti-science party.
In a little-noticed 2012 interview, Rep. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), the front-runner in Montana’s open 2014 Senate race, expressed support for teaching creationism in public schools.
In an interview that aired on November 2, 2012, Sally Mauk, news director for Montana Public Radio, asked Daines, who was then running for Montana’s lone House seat, whether public schools should teach creationism. Daines responded, “What the schools should teach is, as it relates to biology and science is that they have, um, there’s evolution theory, there’s creation theory, and so forth. I think we should teach students to think critically, and teach students that there are evolutionary theories, there’s intelligent-design theories, and allow the students to make up their minds. But I think those kinds of decisions should be decided at the local school board level.” He added, “Personally I’d like to teach my kids both sides of the equation there and let them come up to their own conclusion on it.”
It’s been a rough week for Republicans and their support for science. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), for example, struggled badly to defend his opposition to climate science, only to make matters worse by saying odd things about reproductive science.
And away from Capitol Hill, two GOP Senate candidates said they too have a problem with climate science, while Republicans in the Oklahoma legislature are balking at new science standards because they treat climate change as true.
It’s against this backdrop that the Pew Forum found late last year that the number of self-identified Republican voters who believe in evolutionary biology has dropped considerably in the Obama era.
To reiterate a point we’ve discussed before, none of this is healthy. There are already so many political, policy, and cultural issues that divide partisans; scientific truths don’t have to be among them. And yet, we’re quickly approaching the point – if we haven’t arrived there already – at which science itself is broadly accepted and understood as a “Democratic issue.”
Is it any wonder the Pew Research Center found a few years ago that only 6% of scientists say they support Republican candidates?
Asked to explain the phenomenon, Brigham Young University scientist Barry Bickmore, a onetime Republican convention delegate, told the Salt Lake Tribune last fall, “Scientists just don’t get those people,” referencing Republicans who adhere to party orthodoxy on climate change, evolution, and other hot-button issues. “They [in the GOP] are driving us away, people like me.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 16, 2014
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