“There’s A New Twist This Time”: To GOP Congress, As Usual, It’s Welfare On The Chopping Block
Congress loves to be Scroogey when it comes to helping the poor at Christmastime. Last year, it let an unemployment extension for the long-term jobless expire during the holidays. That was right after food-stamps were cut. This year, a bare-bones welfare program will continue into the New Year without being updated. For some, it’s a mixed blessing: This Congress would likely cut the program even more rather than fix its problems.
In late 2010, Tea Party Republicans first stormed into the House of Representatives with their budget-cutting agenda, one of the first items they nominated for the chopping block was a component of the program once known as welfare.
The program was a $25 billion emergency fund that passed in the stimulus act and encouraged employers to hire low-income workers by subsidizing their salaries through welfare-to-work funds. Throughout 2009 and 2010, it had created 250,000 jobs in 37 states, including conservative states like Mississippi, and was widely popular because it helped bolster employment during the economic downturn.
Despite the program’s popularity, Congress let it die in September 2010. So it was ironic a couple of months later when the Tea Partiers were railing against it—it had already expired.
And that’s how fights over virtually all aspects of the program once known as welfare go. Welfare recipients have had to meet work requirements to receive their checks ever since President Bill Clinton signed the welfare reform law in 1996, and those paychecks are meager: in most states, the average family will receive between $200 and $400, clocking in between 20 and 30 hours of work activities and applying for as many as 20 jobs a week. Yet stereotypes of the program as a large handout to moochers who don’t have jobs remain, and the program is always among the first that the public and conservatives would sacrifice to budget cuts.
And so as the year ends, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, as what we call welfare is officially known, is not being reauthorized again this year. The bill expired way back in 2010. Congress keeps funding it through continuing resolutions, but TANF’s existence has been year-to-year, and supporters of the social safety net have always preferred full reauthorization.
But there’s a new twist: Now, many progressives and policymakers who care about the poor are ironically happy that TANF isn’t being reauthorized again this year. The reason? These folks fear that reauthorizing the bill will hand Republicans who control the house—and as of January, the Senate—the opportunity they’ve been waiting for—to gut it.
The program already operates at a minimum level. In 1997, the first year after the law was passed, state governments spent 70 percent of the funds provided through the program on cash assistance for families. Now they only spend about a quarter of their money by directly helping families, and they send the rest of the money on other welfare-related programs or use it to close holes in their own budgets. Critics noted this led to the program’s lackluster response to the economic crisis. In 2011, only 27 percent of families living in poverty were receiving welfare assistance.
Among the fears are that House Republicans will try to eviscerate funding—which in 2013 totaled about $16.5 billion for the welfare program. The House budget chair, the Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, wants to turn all safety-net programs into a giant block grant to the states—he says it would maintain the programs’ current levels of funding but most experts believe funding would ultimately dwindle and serve fewer families.
Republicans showed their gleeful willingness to go after safety-net programs when they tried to slash food stamps by more than half. And when President Barack Obama attempted to provide waivers to states so that they could be more flexible in how they administered welfare-to-work and do less paperwork for the federal government, Republicans accused him of gutting the work requirements. So not only are Republicans likely to cut funding, but they would also resist any changes that might actually make the program run better.
This is why progressives are just as happy to see TANF not be reauthorized. However, there’s a downside to that. Only eight states have raised the amount of money that families get to keep pace with inflation, which is why so many families in so many states get so little money. Reauthorizing the bill could force states to readjust the formulas they use to determine benefits so that families get more.
The stimulus program that helped low-income Americans find employment during the recession—the one the Republicans were so proud to claim credit for cutting—could be reauthorized as well. While the economy has been inching toward recovery, the long-term unemployed and low-income Americans are still struggling to find good jobs that pay well, and increased welfare funds designed to employ them could bolster the economy again.
There are other programs, including those designed to help states serve their clients better, that have expired or gotten lost in the shuffle. Many advocates want those changed, adjusted, or bolstered, and the only way to do that is to open up the bill and reauthorize it.
Instead, conservatives still view the fact that Americans need help from the government as a disaster, and are more likely to cut benefits than to think about helping them. It was a Republican Congress working with a Democratic president that succeeded in passing the welfare reform bill the first time. But this time around, advocates are too worried Republicans will do something unprecedented, like they did with food stamps—which is try to tear the program completely apart.
By: Monica Potts, The Daily Beast, December 26, 2014
“Vote For Yourself Tuesday”: When The 99% Vote, They’re More Likely To Get What They Want From Politicians
The rich always vote for themselves. They go for their self-interest, their tax breaks, their liability escapes (think Wall Street). Meanwhile, they’ve relentlessly instructed the non-rich that they too must vote for the rich.
They’ve promised for decades that if the 99 percent just comply with the wishes of the wealthy, bow down, kiss their feet, shine their shoes, then some paltry portion of the bucket-loads of dough that the rich are amassing will dribble down upon the 99 percent.
That trickle-down trick didn’t work for the vast majority of Americans. The rich got richer, all right. But the rest slid backwards. Now income inequality is worse than it was during the era of robber barons. It’s time to turn that around. Political leaders must focus on the needs of the 99 percent. For that to happen, the 99 percent must vote for themselves on Tuesday. They must go for their self-interest, their wages, their health insurance, their Social Security.
Vote for higher wages for the 99 percent.
Minimum wage workers in the United States are paid so little that taxpayers subsidize the likes of Walmart and Wendy’s through government programs such as food stamps and Medicaid. That doesn’t happen everywhere.
As the New York Times pointed out last week, McDonald’s, Burger King and Starbucks all pay their workers in Denmark at least $20 an hour and provide paid vacations and pensions. And the companies still make profits.
The one percenter CEOs of these companies, who demand millions in pay for themselves, have squashed efforts to raise the U.S minimum wage, a pittance stuck five years at $7.25. Instead of improving paychecks, McDonald’s told its workers to get second jobs, forego heat in their homes and find health insurance for $20 a month.
When the minimum wage rises, it bumps up pay for everyone else. The 99 percent benefit. And the majority supports lifting the wage.
Voting for raises means voting for Democrats. President Obama has called for an increase, and U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez said the U.S. minimum wage is an international embarrassment. “I mean, we suck. We really do,” he said.
Republicans have consistently blocked a raise. New Jersey’s GOP Gov. Chris Christie, the nation’s fourth highest paid governor at $175,000 a year, said last month that he is “tired of hearing about the minimum wage.”
Vote for health insurance for the 99 percent.
The majority of Americans believe that health insurance should be accessible to everyone. The Affordable Care Act moved the nation closer to that, enabling tens of millions to get covered.
It prevented insurers from dumping clients when they get sick and from denying coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, like diabetes. It covered millions of young people to age 26 on their parents’ plans. It protected millions with an expansion of Medicaid.
National surveys have shown that low-income Americans are obtaining health insurance at a faster rate than the rich. There are two reasons for this. The rich already were covered. And the law was designed to help the working poor. This is creating fairness in access to medical care.
Republicans hate the law. Two dozen GOP governors refused to expand Medicaid in their states, and those places now suffer from the highest rate of uninsured residents. Republicans are so intent on denying health care to the working poor that they rejected a program that would cost them nothing for three years.
Now, Mitch McConnell, the Republican minority leader in the Senate, has again pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act if the GOP takes control of his chamber. Republicans want to regress to higher inequality in health insurance coverage.
Vote to preserve and expand Social Security and Medicare.
These programs are not priorities of the rich. The wealthy are riding high on golden parachutes, gilded pensions, tax-sheltered off-shore accounts, and the built-in security of immense salaries. Social Security wouldn’t pay their country club fees.
For the rest, however, Social Security and Medicare mean fear relief. They’re crucial to the 99 percent.
For years now, however, Republicans have tried to privatize, cut and destroy these programs. U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, repeatedly has issued a “roadmap” for an America in which the rich drive new Ferraris bought with tax breaks and the rest forfeit their wheels because of cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare.
The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose cuts. Among Democrats, there’s a movement to increase benefits by lifting the $117,000 cap, after which income no longer is taxed for Social Security. The cap means that the rich pay proportionately less into Social Security than the rest.
Vote for the overwhelming majority, the non-rich, to get their needs met.
The nation’s richest are more politically engaged and get easier access to high-level politicians than the 99 percent. That isn’t just obvious. It’s also according to surveys and interviews of one-percenters conducted by three university professors. They are Northwestern University’s Benjamin I. Page and Jason Seawright and Vanderbilt’s Larry M. Bartels. Their report is called Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans.
The rich minority gets its way. Bartels and another researcher showed in earlier studies that federal government policy corresponds much more closely with the wishes of the rich than the needs of the rest.
Bartels, author of Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, has noted that no other rich country came close to the United States in cutting the budget based on class preferences. It went this way: the workers lost programs; the wealthy kept perks.
This has got to change. And it could. In states with low voter turnout inequality – that is balloting by the non-rich more closely matching participation rates by the wealthy – there are higher minimum wages, stricter anti-predatory lending laws and better health benefits for the working poor. In other words, when workers vote, they’re more likely to get what they want from politicians.
Vote for yourself on Tuesday.
By: Leo W. Gerard, International President, United Steelworkers; The Huffington Post Blog, November 3, 2014
“Callous, Dumb Policy”: Scott Walker’s Minimum Wage Argument Is Even Dumber Than You Think
The minimum wage is causing a bit of campaign drama, notably in Wisconsin, as John Nichols reports. Republican Governor Scott Walker, running neck and neck against Democrat Mary Burke, inflamed the debate this week when he rejected complaints that the state’s $7.25 an hour wage floor was too low. “I don’t think it serves a purpose,” Walker said of the labor standard.
One of the most bizarre points in the Walker administration’s argument for why $7.25 is a living wage (it’s not) is that some low-wage workers supplement their earnings with public assistance. It’s true that even many full-time employees in Wisconsin and elsewhere rely on government aid—because their wages are too low. Walker, meanwhile, is no supporter of social programs. If he had his way, there would be an even smaller safety net for workers to fall back on.
Walker isn’t the only candidate digging in his heels against efforts to raise the minimum wage while simultaneously bashing public aid. This isn’t just callous—it’s also dumb policy. There are lots of reasons to raise the minimum wage, like the fact that it will boost the economy and that 80 percent of Americans support it. But one reason in particular should get conservatives’ attention: it will help people get off government aid programs and save the government money.
How many people? About 1.7 million, according to a brief released Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute, which examined the implications for public-assistance enrollment of raising the federal wage floor to $10.10 an hour.
Nearly half of all recipients of government aid work full time, but because lawmakers have let the minimum wage stay low while the cost of living rises, many workers can’t get by on their earnings. The result is that roughly half of all workers making hourly wages below $10.10 rely on public assistance directly or via a member of their family, according to EPI. And about half of all the funds for the six main types of government support—food stamps; the Earned Income Tax Credit; the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program; Supplemental Nutrition for Women, Infants, and Children; the Section 8 Housing Choice voucher program; and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—go to people working for less than $10.10 an hour.
Those programs were designed to provide temporary support to people who were down on their luck, noted David Cooper, an economic analyst at EPI and the brief’s author, on a call with reporters. “They were not intended to act as long-term subsidies to employers so businesses could get away with paying poverty-level wages,” he said. As it stands now, the government is essentially giving a $45 billion handout every year to companies that pay less than $10.10 in order to patch the gap between what they pay their employees and what those workers need to survive.
It’s important to note that raising the wage floor wouldn’t justify cuts to the safety net. Even $10.10 is below a living wage in many cities, and there are still an awful lot of people without full-time work. “Given the extraordinarily high rates of poverty and child poverty that persist in the wake of the Great Recession, there is every reason to think that current levels of spending on these programs are woefully inadequate to truly combat poverty and lift living standards for program participants,” Cooper wrote.
But raising wages would free up money that could be used to benefit those who aren’t directly affected by the increase. Cooper estimates that lifting the wage floor to $10.10 would save the government at least $7.6 billion annually—money that could be used to strengthen and expand safety net programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit or be invested in infrastructure projects that create jobs.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, October 16, 2014
“Pity The Poor Plutocrats”: Time’s Winged Chariot Draws Near, And There’s No Baggage Compartment
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt…a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.
–President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a 1954 letter to his brother Edgar
Pity the poor plutocrats, victims of the envious mob. You can hardly open the Wall Street Journal these days without reading a self-pitying screed by some billionaire hungry for love.
A while back it was venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who equated criticism of the wealthy with the Holocaust.
“I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich,’” he opined in a letter to the newspaper.
Makes sense to me. One day they’re saying Wall Street bankers should pay the same tax rate as the guys who rotate their tires, next day they’re flinging them into concentration camps. Soon billionaires will be hiding in attic penthouses, quietly fondling stock certificates. Their limos will be disguised as UPS trucks, their yachts as humble tugboats.
In a subsequent San Francisco speaking engagement, Perkins suggested that the United States formally adopt a one-dollar, one-vote electoral system. Citizens, he said, should be like shareholders in a corporation.
“You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
The audience laughed, but Perkins claimed to be dead serious. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the investment firm he co-founded, called itself shocked, and emphasized its disagreement.
More recently, Charles Koch, the elder of the infamous Koch brothers of legend and song, contributed an op-ed to the Journal bitterly complaining that people targeted by TV attack ads he’s paid for are actually allowed to talk back. The brothers, you see, are pure idealists campaigning for liberty.
So that when their Tea Party front groups oppose a public transport system in Nashville, Tennessee, work to forbid Georgia Power from investing in solar technology, or spend big on a county referendum on open pit mining in Wisconsin, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Koch Industries’ oil, gas and mining profits. It’s all about freedom.
And when the same organizations spend millions on TV commercials featuring actresses reading prepared scripts, pretending to have been injured by the Affordable Care Act and attacking Democratic U.S. senators in Arkansas, Louisiana and Alaska, that too is all about liberty.
However, wicked “collectivists” who “promise heaven but deliver hell,” — hell evidently being reliable health insurance not subject to cancellation on an employer’s whim — have called the Koch brothers out. One such is Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who went so far as to call their secretive methods “un-American.”
“Instead of encouraging free and open debate,” Charles Koch whined, “collectivists strive to discredit and intimidate opponents. They engage in character assassination. (I should know, as the almost daily target of their attacks.) This is the approach that…Saul Alinsky famously advocated in the 20th [century], and that so many despots have infamously practiced. Such tactics are the antithesis of what is required for a free society.”
“Despots,” mind you. Boo-hoo-hoo. Far from being abashed, Senator Reid must have been thrilled that his taunts lured Koch out of hiding. These boys normally prefer to hide the hundreds of millions they spend purchasing U.S. Senate seats behind benign-sounding outfits like “Americans for Prosperity.”
Because who’s against prosperity, right?
That said, I do think it’s wrong to call anybody “un-American.” To the contrary, the Koch brothers are every bit as American as John D. Rockefeller, H.L. Hunt or Scrooge McDuck, dabbling in his private bullion pool. The comic-heroic figure of the tycoon furiously stamping his little webbed feet because people are free to disagree with him has long been a staple of national life.
Like Charles and David Koch, who inherited hundreds of millions from their oilman father — a founding member of the John Birch Society, which famously held that President Eisenhower was a card-carrying member of the International Communist Conspiracy — their legacy often includes crackpot megalomania. Hence “collectivists,” a polite euphemism.
Koch’s Syndrome, you might call it: combining an obsessive-compulsive need to accumulate money — these boys are worth $100 billion, but they’re nevertheless bitter about paying taxes — along with a deep-seated fear of being found unworthy. Surrounded by obsequious underlings all their lives, they’ve no idea if they’ve ever really deserved it.
It may also be significant that Tom Perkins is 82, the Koch brothers 78 and 73, respectively.
Time’s winged chariot draws near, and there’s no baggage compartment.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, April 9, 2014
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