“Authored By Reagan”: It’s Worse Than Paul Ryan, The Right Has A New Ugly, Racial Dog Whistle
While attention focuses on Paul Ryan’s remarks about inner city culture, another dog-whistle theme continues its slow roil: food stamp abuse. More even than Ryan’s twisting narrative, the brouhaha around food stamps helps make clear that conservatives seek to conjure a much bigger bogeyman than “lazy” minorities.
Ostensibly worried that too many people prefer welfare to work, House Republicans this January stripped $8.6 billion from the food stamp program. This threatened to reduce monthly food assistance by an average of $90 per family — from households that are barely hanging on, with average gross monthly incomes of just $744. Yet far from conceding defeat, states are joining battle by adjusting their programs in ways that evade the cuts, bringing the food stamp debate back.
Just last week, House Speaker John Boehner warned that “states have found ways to cheat, once again, on signing up people for food stamps,” and he implored his colleagues “to stop this cheating and this fraud from continuing.” Cheating and fraud constitute stock themes in the conservative assault on food stamps — tropes applied indiscriminately to both recipients and government. And therein lies a clue to the real target.
To see the actual agenda clearly, though, it helps to reach back to Ronald Reagan, for he perfected today’s conservative assault on food stamps.
Reagan frequently stumped by sympathizing with the anger of voters waiting in line to buy hamburger, while some young fellow ahead of them used food stamps to buy a T-bone steak. With this tale, Reagan invoked the stereotype of the welfare recipient who abuses government benefits to live in luxury (Reagan’s other version: welfare queens).
The comedian Jon Stewart recently compiled a montage of contemporary conservative talking heads spinning just these sorts of yarns about food stamps. It would have been funnier if people weren’t actually being pushed into hunger.
Going to the racial dimensions of these hackneyed fictions, when Reagan initially told the T-bone steak story, he identified the food stamp abuser as a young “buck,” a term then commonly used among Southern whites to refer to a strong black man. This veered dangerously toward open racism, and in any event proved unnecessary. Even after Reagan dropped that term from future renditions, the racial element continued just below the surface, with welfare recipients implicitly colored black.
But this was not a simple plot to demonize minorities. Rather, Reagan had another scapegoat in mind, and here we come to the heart of dog-whistle politics. Ostensibly, even more than grasping minorities, the greatest enemy of the middle class was liberal government. After all, it was government that was reaching into taxpayer’s pockets and wasting their hard-earned dollars.
By “darkening” government itself, Reagan provided the kindling for a taxpayer revolt that ostensibly would cut off funds to the lazy and irresponsible — but that in fact generated enormous windfalls for the very rich. In the 1980s, by one estimate, the top 1 percent of Americans reaped tax cuts worth a trillion dollars, and they’ve received a further trillion dollars from the Reagan tax cuts in each ensuing decade.
Tax cuts for the very rich were just the beginning. By trashing safety-net programs as massive giveaways to undeserving minorities and thereby engendering a general hostility toward government, the right has systematically attacked New Deal programs across multiple domains — from education and housing to marketplace and workplace regulation — undoing in area after area the policies that once promoted an equitable distribution of wealth.
Perhaps to understand the full devastation wrought by modern racial politics, we should bring forward another figure from the shadowed background of the T-bone steak story: the cashier. In the 1970s, she was more likely to be unionized and relatively well-paid, with good benefits. Today, whether white or black or some other race, she is likely working without union protection for a minimum wage whose value has sharply fallen and that cannot sustain a small family above poverty. Indeed, like many Wal-Mart employees, it’s the cashier who today is on food stamps.
When House Republicans war against food assistance, just as when Ryan tilts at government poverty programs that don’t work because of a tailspin of culture in our inner cities, their real target is progressive government. Yes, race-baiting superficially aims at minorities and hits nonwhite communities hard, including the 24 percent of food stamp recipients who are black. But just as cuts to food aid also afflict the 38 percent of program participants who are white, dog-whistle politics savages Americans of every race.
And it devastates every class, too, for this sort of racial politics doesn’t just slam the poor, it imperils all who are better off when government protects the broad middle rather than serves society’s sultans. When conservatives blow that dog whistle, government is the target, and you’re a likely victim.
By: Ian Haney-Lopez, Salon, March 22, 2014
“What States’ Rights?”: House GOP Fights For Food-Stamp Cuts
Ordinarily, when conservative policymakers complain about “fraud” and “cheating” in federal programs intended to help poor people eat food, they’re referring to individuals accused of abusing the system unfairly. But over the last few days, congressional Republicans are using familiar rhetoric in an unfamiliar way.
Republican leaders are threatening to take congressional action to stop state governors from flouting the food stamp cuts contained in the 2014 farm bill.
The governors of at least six states – New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Montana and Oregon – have now taken measures to protect more than a combined $800 million in annual Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, and more states are expected to follow suit. Their actions threaten – over time – to wipe out the more than $8 billion in cuts over 10 years to the food stamp program that were just passed by Congress as part of the 2014 farm bill.
But those who initially supported the food stamp cuts are warning that retaliatory actions may be coming.
As a policy matter, the underlying change is a little tricky. Republicans successfully cut food aid to the poor – though not nearly as much as they’d hoped – which mostly affected 17 states that participate in the “Heat and Eat” program, which connects federal LIHEAP (Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program) assistance with SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program).
At last count, six of the affected governors – five Democrats and one Republican – have decided to start fiddling with the books, moving money around so low-income constituents won’t lose their food benefits. Other governors appear eager to do the same.
And this has apparently outraged Republicans on Capitol Hill. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters late last week that he wants Congress to “try to stop this cheating and this fraud from continuing.” Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), who helped write the relevant legislation, wants a full congressional investigation and new measures intended to guarantee food-stamp cuts.
Remember, the “cheating” and “fraud” is in reference to state officials trying to help low-income residents access food.
For its part, the Obama administration seems a lot less concerned than Congress.
Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-Kan.) expressed anger Friday over the possibility that none of the cuts to the SNAP program would be realized and asked USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack during an appropriations hearing whether he had any inside knowledge that states would nullify the benefit reductions.
Vilsack said he didn’t know or suspect what the states would do, but defended their right to take action.
“Frankly, as a former governor and former state senator, I respect the role of governors and legislatures to make decisions that they think are in their state’s best interests,” Vilsack said.
GOP lawmakers found this unsatisfying. Expect to hear quite a bit more about this in the coming weeks.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 17, 2014
“Christianity Vs Ideology”: Christian Conservatives Should Be Christians First And Conservatives Second
Many liberals have long suggested that it’s impossible to be a Christian and a conservative, because the love of the poor preached by Jesus Christ is incompatible with the economic and social policies promoted by conservatives. Christian conservatives, obviously, disagree. They would say that, at least on economic and social policy, Christian liberals and Christian conservatives agree about the ends — policy that promotes the common good with a preferential option for the poor — but disagree about the means. Jesus told us to love the poor. That is not at all the same thing as voting for programs that take money from one group of people to give it to another, whatever the merits.
As a Christian and a conservative, obviously I think that’s true.
But that’s not where the story ends. It’s where it starts.
To most non-Christians — and to many Christians — Christianity is primarily a set of doctrines. But for 2,000 years, Christianity has understood itself to be fundamentally an encounter with a specific person:Jesus Christ. And Christians accept as authoritative the Gospel account of Jesus Christ’s self-description as “the Truth.” Jesus didn’t say that his doctrine was the Truth. He said that he was the Truth.
Why is this important?
Because if you believe that the person of Jesus Christ is “the Truth,” then the corollary that logically follows is that everything that is not Jesus Christ is not “the Truth.”
To put it more practically: To be a Christian is to believe that all political ideologies are suspect. And wrong. It doesn’t mean that Christians should retreat from all political ideologies — as that would also be a political ideology, and also wrong. By all means, be a Christian liberal. Be a Christian conservative. But if you are a Christian liberal, if you are a Christian conservative, then by definition there will be tensions between your Christianity and your political ideology. It’s axiomatic. And if you are a Christian first and an ideologue second, you should confront those tensions instead of papering over them.
Let’s take my own tent of Christian conservatism, since this is about us.
Yes, it is absolutely possible to be a Christian and believe that limited government and free markets are the best ways to advance the prospects of the poor. But when conservatives portray the poor as moochers and divide the world into “Makers” and “Takers,” and hold up those “Takers” quite clearly as objects of contempt, the Christian has to recoil. And not just recoil, but cry injustice.
It’s fine to believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, but a Christian should look at how policies affect the poor first, rather than a byproduct of everything else. (And some Christian conservative politicians like Mike Lee, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio have started to look at that.)
Even if the solution isn’t a new government program, a Christian who is also a conservative should at the very least be concerned about an economy that too often seems to have a playing field tilted in favor of the winners.
A Christian who is also a conservative should also wince at cultural narratives, advanced by some conservatives, that constantly belittle, mock, or dismiss the perspectives of groups that have been historically or are marginalized.
A Christian who is a conservative should at the very least be concerned about how a country with the mightiest armed forces in the world uses its strengt abroad and at home.
In the Gospel, Jesus calls on his followers to be “signs of contradiction.” Christians should stand out of the pack and, frankly, be a little weird. By all means, Christians should enthusiastically join political parties and ideological schools. But they should also stand out inside them as Christians.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, March 17, 2014
“That Old-Time Whistle”: The Kind Of Things Conservatives Say To Each Other All The Time
There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.
So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.
Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.
Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.
We are told, for example, that conservatives are against big government and high spending. Yet even as Republican governors and state legislatures block the expansion of Medicaid, the G.O.P. angrily denounces modest cost-saving measures for Medicare. How can this contradiction be explained? Well, what do many Medicaid recipients look like — and I’m talking about the color of their skin, not the content of their character — and how does that compare with the typical Medicare beneficiary? Mystery solved.
Or we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees. Instead, all the movement’s passion, starting with Rick Santelli’s famous rant on CNBC, has been directed against any hint of financial relief for low-income borrowers. And what is it about these borrowers that makes them such targets of ire? You know the answer.
One odd consequence of our still-racialized politics is that conservatives are still, in effect, mobilizing against the bums on welfare even though both the bums and the welfare are long gone or never existed. Mr. Santelli’s fury was directed against mortgage relief that never actually happened. Right-wingers rage against tales of food stamp abuse that almost always turn out to be false or at least greatly exaggerated. And Mr. Ryan’s black-men-don’t-want-to-work theory of poverty is decades out of date.
In the 1970s it was still possible to claim in good faith that there was plenty of opportunity in America, and that poverty persisted only because of cultural breakdown among African-Americans. Back then, after all, blue-collar jobs still paid well, and unemployment was low. The reality was that opportunity was much more limited than affluent Americans imagined; as the sociologist William Julius Wilson has documented, the flight of industry from urban centers meant that minority workers literally couldn’t get to those good jobs, and the supposed cultural causes of poverty were actually effects of that lack of opportunity. Still, you could understand why many observers failed to see this.
But over the past 40 years good jobs for ordinary workers have disappeared, not just from inner cities but everywhere: adjusted for inflation, wages have fallen for 60 percent of working American men. And as economic opportunity has shriveled for half the population, many behaviors that used to be held up as demonstrations of black cultural breakdown — the breakdown of marriage, drug abuse, and so on — have spread among working-class whites too.
These awkward facts have not, however, penetrated the world of conservative ideology. Earlier this month the House Budget Committee, under Mr. Ryan’s direction, released a 205-page report on the alleged failure of the War on Poverty. What does the report have to say about the impact of falling real wages? It never mentions the subject at all.
And since conservatives can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of what’s happening to opportunity in America, they’re left with nothing but that old-time dog whistle. Mr. Ryan wasn’t being inarticulate — he said what he said because it’s all that he’s got.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 16, 2014
“Just Desert Adherents”: Why The Conservative Defense Of Inequality Makes No Sense
Harvard economist Greg Mankiw is notorious for trying to justify the income of the very rich on the grounds that it’s what they deserve. In this column, for example, he uses the example of Steve Jobs as a person who deserves his wealth, having been in charge of a company that built some hugely popular electronic devices. The idea is plausible at first blush: Jobs’ products are indeed very popular.
But it quickly runs into enormous problems. This “just deserts” way of looking at the world is perennially tempting for conservatives — the flip side being that poorer people also deserve what they get — but they will have to do better than this to justify and valorize the existing social structure.
Consider the case of economic growth. As Matt Bruenig points out, the mysterious “Solow residual” — the source of productivity that can’t be directly attributed to capital, labor, or land — almost certainly consists at least in part of knowledge, which has been piling up for centuries:
If we are being good “just desert” adherents, then we need to divorce out the massive chunk of the total output that constitutes the Solow residual and ensure it makes it to its rightful contributor. All of our national product attributable to the world’s accumulated knowledge of algebra — which includes much of Mankiw’s work it should be noted — rightfully belongs to ancient Babylonians, ancient Greeks, and a whole host of other long-dead historical figures. All of our national product attributable to electricity technology rightly belongs, not to anyone living, but to people like Nikola Tesla and and Thomas Edison. In short, the view that individuals should receive only their marginal product actually generates the conclusion that the substantial part of our national product resulting from inherited technology and knowledge belongs to no living person, or more reasonably to everyone in general. [Demos]
Even that isn’t going far enough! As Thomas Kuhn demonstrated in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, nearly all major scientific breakthroughs were made by multiple people simultaneously and independently, and were critically dependent on certain background conditions in society. In other words, if we could somehow figure out how much of economic output stems from the discovery of calculus, even Newton would not deserve full credit for it.
We can take it even further: what about the English language itself? That is to say, practically every single economic activity depends on a foundation of literacy that has been built into society. No business today can operate without a functional language as a bedrock condition. That is quite obviously the result of thousands of years of communal creation and evolution. Today’s Job Creators can’t possibly claim to have “built that,” and the very idea of trying to single out individuals in the creation of English is ridiculous on its face, with the possible exceptions of Shakespeare or William Tyndale.
Finally, merest existence means being ensnared in a web of obligation that it would be futile to map out. Every person alive is built at great effort and pain from the flesh and blood of another person: your mother. How could one possibly begin to even “repay” such a debt? Presumably, she deserves all of your income less what it takes to keep you alive, since she is literally responsible for your creation. But that’s not even the end — before your mother, there was her mother, and so on, in an unbroken chain of life creating life stretching 3.6 billion years back to the primordial sea. Remove just one of the links, and you wouldn’t exist.
Anyway, one could continue in this vein, but I’ll leave it there. In my view, the sheer impossibility of ever allocating desert in any sort of systematic or consistent way means we should guarantee a minimum of safety and security for every person. But at a minimum, Mankiw and his fellow 1 percent apologists would do well to abandon this line of reasoning.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, March 14, 2014
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