“Paul Ryan Is Victim-Blaming Men Now”: No, Men Don’t Lack A “Culture Of Work”, They Lack Decent Jobs
Last week Paul Ryan provoked an outcry when he claimed that poverty in America was in large part a product of a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working, just generations of men not even thinking of working, or learning the value and the culture of work.” Ever since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, the phrase “inner city” has been criticized as a GOP dog whistle for “black people,” so Ryan has rightly faced a backlash for his comments. (While claiming they were “inarticulate,” he insists his comments had “nothing to do with race whatsoever.”)
But another aspect of this much-remarked-on incident has drawn no notice: his focus on inner city men. Ryan’s comments seem to be based on an unstated assumption that what he calls the “culture of work” is especially relevant to men.
That assumption in turn is a product of an increasingly anachronistic and indeed reactionary world view, in which working for money is the epitome of what it means to be a man. More precisely, to be a man, on this view, is to work a “real job” — that is, a job that at least pays enough to allow him to be the provider, the breadwinner, for his family.
Ryan’s inner city men, who have never “learned the value and the culture of work,” are therefore not merely failing, but failing specifically as men, by failing to provide for their families.
The problem with this neat little morality tale is captured by what ought to be some startling statistics. Note that another unstated assumption behind comments such as Ryan’s is that the American economy actually produces enough decent-paying jobs to allow a reasonable number of Americans to have such jobs, as long as they embrace “the culture of work.”
To say this isn’t the case is an understatement. What is a “good” job, financially speaking? One which pays $50,000 per year? $40,000? $30,000? The latter figure, which represents take-home pay of less than $2000 per month, and which is only twice the minimum wage (which itself has declined sharply in real terms since the 1960s), is an extremely generous definition of what constitutes a decent-paying job.
But let’s use it anyway, to determine how many Americans of working age have such jobs. If we make a couple more unrealistically optimistic assumptions — that nobody under 18 or over 69 is working, and that no one has more than one job — the answer is: three out of 10.
Nearly 70 percent of American working-age adults do not have jobs that pay at least $30,000 per year, because there are only three such jobs for every 10 American adults between the ages of 18 and 69. In other words, the vast majority of working age Americans cannot possibly acquire decent-paying jobs, even if one defines a decent-paying job extremely broadly, because there aren’t nearly enough such jobs, not because people fail to embrace “the culture of work.”
Here’s another statistic that those who embrace the culture of math will find relevant to Ryan’s claims that inner city men in particular are poor because they have a bad attitude toward gainful employment: the labor force participation rate. This is the percentage of non-institutionalized adults who are either employed or actively seeking work.
The year Paul Ryan’s father reached working age (1948), 86 percent of American men, but only 32 percent of American women, were participating in the labor force. (A large portion of women who worked outside the home were poor, usually non-white, domestic workers. It was fairly unusual for a white middle class woman over 30 to work for income).
Since then, the labor force participation rate among men has declined by 18 percent, while the rate among women has nearly doubled. Another consequence of this social shift is that most men make less money than they did 40 years ago, even though the country as a whole is vastly wealthier: for 60 percent of men, real wages are actually lower now than they were in 1973.
Republicans love to talk about the wisdom of the free market in general and the irresistible laws of supply and demand in particular, but Ryan (who is currently touted as his party’s economic whiz kid) seems to be failing Econ 101. Poverty in America has nothing to do with the shiftless “inner city” men haunting Paul Ryan’s all-too vivid imagination, and everything to do with the fact that seven out of 10 American adults of working age can’t get a decent-paying job, because those jobs don’t exist.
In a culture in which it’s now assumed that every non-elderly adult who isn’t a full-time student or the primary caretaker of small children should be working for wages, this fact has especially devastating consequences for precisely those men whose plight Ryan addressed in such an “inarticulate” way.
By: Paul Campos, The Week, March 19, 2014
“Republicans Can’t Win By Attacking Health Care In 2014”: We will Turn The Corner If Progressives Do Not Sit On The Sidelines
For me, the fact that Republicans keep using the Affordable Care Act – Obamacare – as a political football is a tragedy. Sure, the law has problems, but it is already saving lives and improving the health of millions of Americans.
Thankfully, it seems that Republicans who are counting on attacking the health reform system to get them into the end zone will be stopped short of the goal line based on numbers coming out of a March special election for a Florida House seat
For me, the Affordable Care Act comes down to people’s lives and health. Consider the story of a young man I met who told me that this new avenue to becoming insured had saved his life.
He had some symptoms that made him worry about his health. But he, like many Americans without insurance, ignored them, as he couldn’t afford to see the doctor. After the Affordable Care Act became law, he got coverage through his parents’ health insurance plan, and on visiting a doctor, found out he had stage 4 — that’s advanced — cancer. Fortunately, he got to the doctor in time to save his life.
That young man is far from alone. As of the end of February, some 11 million Americans have health coverage under the new law. Repealing it, as Republicans continue to insist, would take away coverage from each and every one of them.
In the Florida election, Republican David Jolly said “I’m fighting to repeal Obamacare, right away.” His opponent, Democrat Alex Sink, countered, “We can’t go back to insurance companies doing whatever they want. Instead of repealing the health care law, we need to keep what’s right and fix what’s wrong.”
The key part of Sink’s message was to remind voters why people wanted health care reform in the first place. As one of Sink’s TV ads said, “Jolly would go back to letting insurance companies deny coverage.”
That’s an effective reminder of the huge problems Americans have had for decades, when insurance companies could deny care because of a pre-existing condition, charge people higher rates because they were sick, and even charge women higher rates than men. The ACA ended all that.
The candidates in Florida pushed especially hard for the votes of seniors, which is not surprising given both Florida’s high senior population and the fact that seniors vote more frequently than other age groups.
In its ads for Jolly, The Republican Congressional Campaign repeated the same misleading charge that Republicans used successfully in 2010 to scare seniors against the ACA, that it cut $716 billion from Medicare. But unlike 2010, when Democrats did not respond to attacks on the ACA, Sink pushed back.
She reminded seniors that the ACA actually provides important new Medicare benefits, including closing the infamous prescription drug “donut hole.” Sink’s ads accurately said, “His [Jolly’s] plan would even force seniors to pay thousands more for prescription drugs.”
By Election Day, voters had a clear contrast between the positions of the candidates on the ACA. It was a close election, with Jolly winning by a small margin (48.4 percent to 46.5 percent) in a district with an 11-point Republican advantage, one that has been represented by the GOP for nearly 60 years.
But polling found that independent voters in the district supported the “keep and fix” position over the “repeal” position by a margin of 57 percent to 31 percent. Sink actually gained ground over Jolly during the election on the question of which candidate had a better position on the ACA.
I am very much looking forward to the time when Congress can start having real debates on how, as Sink said, “we can keep what’s right and fix what’s wrong” with the Affordable Care Act. However, it looks like it will take at least one more election, in 2014, to get us to that point.
We will turn the corner if progressives do not sit on the sidelines, but instead welcome the debate that Republicans insist on having about repealing the ACA.
That debate is an opportunity for people to be reminded in concrete terms that the new health care program, for all its shortcomings, is about providing every American with the peace of mind that comes with having health coverage.
By: Richard Kirsch, Senior Fellow at The Roosevelt Institute; Published in The National Memo, March 20, 2014
“Ryan’s Rhetoric Has Consequences”: First, One Must Understand His Own Culture And History
Reflections upon the recent holiday: The first time my wife saw tears in my eyes was in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, at the tomb of Jonathan Swift. The brilliant 18th-century Irish satirist was my first and most enduring literary hero, a towering figure who Yeats thought “slept under the greatest epitaph in history” — composed by Swift himself.
I knew the Latin by heart, but seeing it engraved in stone moved me, although Swift had been dead since 1745. “It is almost finer in English,” Yeats wrote, “than in Latin: ‘He has gone where fierce indignation can lacerate his heart no more.’”
Reading Swift taught me more about Ireland and my Irish-Catholic ancestors than I ever learned at my alcoholic grandfather’s knee, I can tell you that. An Anglo-Irish churchman who considered himself exiled from London to the city of his birth, Swift condemned British misrule of Ireland in the most memorable satires written in English or any other language.
His 1729 pamphlet “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents” retains the capacity to shock after almost 300 years. Impersonating the ever-so-reasonable voice of a public-spirited reformer of the sort who might today issue proposals from the Heritage Foundation, the narrator advocated genteel cannibalism.
“I rather recommend buying the children alive and dressing them hot from the knife,” he suggested, “as we do roasting pigs.”
It’s the laconic “rather” that chills to the marrow, precisely revealing the pamphleteer’s inhumanity.
Swift was certainly no Irish nationalist. A Tory by temperament and conviction, he’d have been appalled by the idea that the island’s Roman Catholic majority could govern itself. Even so, Professor Leo Damrosch’s terrific new biography makes a compelling case that both his voice and his personal example were instrumental to an evolving Irish national consciousness.
I thought of Swift’s “Modest Proposal” the other day, listening to the ever-so-reasonable Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) explain that America’s poor have only themselves to blame. “We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular,” Ryan explained, “of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”
Any question who he was talking about? As several commentators have noted, this business about “inner city” men not working isn’t so much Republican “dogwhistle” as GOP air-raid siren.
Ryan has since alibied that he’d been “inarticulate” and wasn’t trying to implicate “the culture of one community.” This came soon after a speech in which he’d told a heartfelt tale of a small boy who didn’t want a “free lunch from a government program,” but a Mommy-made lunch in a brown paper bag that showed somebody cared about him.
Coming from a guy busily trying to cut funding for school lunch programs and food stamps, this was pretty rich. Also apparently, apocryphal. The witness who’d told Ryan the tale in a congressional hearing had not only swiped it from a book called The Invisible Thread, but reversed its meaning. Which wasn’t so much that government assistance, as Ryan warned, threatens to leave children with “a full stomach and an empty soul,” as that sermons mean very little to hungry children.
Delivered just before St. Patrick’s Day, Ryan’s disquisition upon the undeserving poor earned him the scorn of the New York Times’ Timothy Egan. Taking note of Ryan’s great-great grandfather, who emigrated to the United States during the catastrophic Irish famine of the 1840s, Egan pointed out that Ryan’s words echoed the rhetoric of Victorian Englishmen content to let his ancestors die lest they become dependent upon charity.
It’s not always understood in this country that the mass starvation of Irish peasants — more than a million died, and another million emigrated — resulted not from the failure of the potato crop but English government policy. Ireland remained a net exporter of food throughout, with British soldiers guarding shipments of foodstuffs as they were loaded.
Rhetoric, see, has consequences. From Swift’s time onward, the native Irish had been depicted in terms justifying their subjugation. Virtually every negative stereotype applied to our “inner city” brethren today was first applied to Paul Ryan’s (and my own) ancestors. Irish peasants were called shiftless, drunken, sexually promiscuous, donkey strong but mentally deficient. They smelled bad.
Understanding that history is exactly what makes Irish-Americans like Timothy Egan, Charles P. Pierce and me — if I may include myself in their company — so impatient with a tinhorn like Ryan. If he wanted to understand his own ancestry, it’s authors like Swift, Yeats and James Joyce that Ryan ought to be reading, instead of that dismal ideologue Ayn Rand.
Nobody should let ethnic groupthink determine his politics. But if a politician like Paul Ryan hopes to be respected, it would help if he showed some sign of understanding the past.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, March 19, 2014
“Mistakes And Subterfuge?”: Rick Scott’s Campaign May Have Violated Campaign Finance Law
On Monday, Florida Democratic Party chairwoman Allison Tant filed a complaint with the Florida Elections Committee, accusing Governor Rick Scott’s (R) campaign of committing campaign finance violations.
According to Tant’s complaint, Scott’s current campaign illegally transferred nearly $27.4 million from the governor’s former 2010 electioneering communication organization, “Let’s Get to Work,” to a new political committee with the same name.
Due in part to lax laws that allow for broad uses of campaign funds, a political committee, such as Let’s Get to Work, can legally give money directly to other political committees. However, an electioneering communications organization — which funds and engages in election-related activities through communication means, such as radio commercials and TV ads — cannot directly contribute to a political committee.
In other words: If the allegation that Scott’s campaign transferred money from a former electioneering communication organization to a political committee is true, it’s a violation of campaign finance law.
Tant now argues the campaign “violated the law,” and that “the governor is supposed to uphold the law.” If she’s right, Scott’s re-election campaign could be fined up to $82 million.
John French, the chairman of Let’s Get to Work, criticized the accusations, saying that the first incarnation of Let’s Get to Work was dismantled before a check for $24.7 million was given to the new committee, which was formed the same day the original organization was discontinued. Hence, according to French, the check received by the political committee could not have come directly from the electioneering communication organization, because it no longer existed at the time the check was written or received.
Still, Democrats maintain that the transfer of money was illegal, even if the check was written after the official close of the first version of Let’s Get to Work.
According to The Huffington Post, two Democratic state elections experts say the same.
“It’s the subterfuge that they went through to transfer the money illegally. It’s allowing them to do indirectly which they can’t do directly,” says Mark Herron, an elections lawyer.
Another expert on state campaign finance laws, Ron Meyer, agreed: “If it’s not blatantly illegal, it certainly violates the spirit of the law.”
This is not the first campaign controversy for Scott’s Let’s Get to Work: His campaign recently addressed a “mistake” that resulted in the committee failing to list a $500,000 donation it received from a private business.
By: Elissa Gomez, The National Memo, March 19, 2014
“Why The GOP Won’t Change”: A Year After Their “Autopsy”, The Recommendations Haven’t Been And Won’t Be Followed
Exactly one year ago, a committee of Republican party bigwigs issued the report of its “Growth and Opportunity Project,” better known as the “autopsy.” The idea was to figure out what the party was doing wrong, and how on earth Barack Obama had managed to get re-elected when everybody knows what a big jerk he is. There were some recommendations on things like improving the party’s use of technology and its fundraising, but the headline-grabbing message was that the party had to shed its image as a bunch of grumpy old white guys and become more welcoming to young people and racial minorities.
It was always going to be a tricky thing to accomplish, both because the GOP is, in fact, made up in large part of grumpy old white guys, and because “outreach” can only go so far if you aren’t willing to change the things you stand for. Mike Huckabee, that clever fellow, used to say, “I’m a conservative, but I’m not angry about it.” Which is all well and good, but if, for instance, you say to young people that you don’t think their gay friends ought to be allowed to get married, saying it with a smile doesn’t really help.
And a year later, it’s not just that the Republican party hasn’t changed, it’s that they don’t have much reason to change. The coming election may or may not be the GOP “tsunami” that Reince Priebus predicts, but they’re certainly going to pick up seats, just because of which seats are up in the Senate, the standard pattern of the president’s party losing seats in the 6th year of his presidency, and the fact that that president isn’t particularly popular right now. So why would a member of Congress—especially one from a conservative district or state—feel any need to undergo some kind of wholesale reinvention? Particularly when the people who put him where he is, and the people who are going to keep him where he is, aren’t the kind of people he’s being asked to “reach out” to. If your job is to get re-elected this fall, everything’s looking just fine.
And even in the upcoming presidential election, the non-old-white-guy-outreach may not look all that important. As Jamelle Bouie notes, things like the economy and President Obama’s popularity at the end of his term are going to matter much, much more than whatever outreach has been accomplished. What that means is that at the moment, no one whose name is or will be on a ballot in the near future has any particular interest in rethinking the party’s identity. The members of Congress are thinking about their next election. Those running for president in 2016 will be thinking about 2016. It’s fine for some party strategist to look 20 years down the road at the country’s inevitable demographic changes and predict doom about the party’s future. But the people who will actually implement the changes they suggest (or not) have no interest in looking that far ahead. And so they aren’t going to change.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 18, 2014
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