“Isolated From The Rest Of The Public”: The Tea Party And The Hammock Theory Of Poverty
The increased focus on inequality has shifted the conversation away from deficit/austerity mania and towards a discussion of what government should be doing to boost the economy and protect people from economic harm. And it’s also prompted good new polling that goes deep into public views of the economy, the safety net, inequality, and what government should do about it.
On these topics, this week brought two new polls from Pew Research and CBS News.
I’ve asked both firms for a detailed breakdown of their data, and here’s a striking finding: The ideas and assumptions underlying the GOP economic and poverty agenda are far and away more reflective of the preoccupations of Tea Party Republicans. Meanwhile, non-Tea Party Republicans are much more in line with the rest of the public on these matters.
In short, the Tea Party economic worldview, if such a thing exists, is isolated from the rest of the public, and even to some degree from non-Tea Party Republicans – yet it has an outsized role in shaping the GOP’s overall agenda.
Both the Pew and CBS polls find large majorities believe the income gap is growing, and both find that more Americans want government to do something about it. Both also find solid majority support for raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits, and (in Pew’s case) taxing the rich to help the poor.
Both polls also find that far larger numbers of Republicans don’t think government should act to reduce inequality. This is reflected in the GOP economic agenda. As Jonathan Chait explains, this agenda continues to be premised on the ideas that there is, if anything, too much downward redistribution of wealth, that government shouldn’t interfere in the market by, say, raising the minimum wage, and that safety net programs lull people into dependency (Paul Ryan’s Hammock Theory of Poverty).
But here’s the thing. That basic set of assumptions — and the resulting positions on some of the individual policies being discussed – are held overwhelmingly by Tea Party Republicans; and not nearly as much by non-tea party Republicans. Key findings:
On government action to combat inequality:
* The Pew poll finds Republicans divided on whether government should do a lot or some to reduce inequality, versus doing little or nothing, by 49-46. But tea party Republicans overwhelmingly tilt against government doing something by 66-28, while non-tea party Republicans overwhelmingly favor doing something by 60-35.
* The CBS poll is less pronounced, but even here, Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly oppose government acting to reduce the gap between rich and poor by 82-17, while non-Tea Party Republicans believe this by 66-29 (so nearly a third of non-Tea party Republicans believe it).
On unemployment benefits:
* The Pew poll finds Republicans oppose extending unemployment benefits by 53-44. But Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly oppose this by 70-29, while non-Tea Party Republicans support it by 52-44.
* Similarly, the CBS poll finds that Republicans oppose extending unemployment benefits by 49-40. But Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly oppose it by 58-31. Non-Tea Party Republicans favor extending them by 46-43.
On the Hammock Theory of Poverty:
* The CBS poll finds that Republicans believe unemployment benefits make people less motivated to look for a job by 57-40. But Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly believe this by 67-32. By contrast, only a minority of non-tea party Republicans believe this (47-51).
* The Pew poll has a similar finding: Republicans believe government aid to the poor does more harm than good by making people dependent on government, rather than doing more good than harm, by 67-27. But Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly believe this by 84-11, while non-tea party Republicans are somewhat more closely divided, 59-35.
On the minimum wage:
* The Pew poll finds that Republicans favor raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 54-44. But Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly oppose this by 65-33. Non-Tea Party Republicans overwhelmingly support it by 65-33. (All the above Pew numbers include Republicans and GOP-leaners).
* The CBS poll is less pronounced, but even here, Tea Party Republicans tilt against a minimum wage hike by 52-47, while non-tea party Republicans favor it by 50-48.
A number of conservative reform types, such as Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner, and Michael Strain, have written at length about the need to break from tea party orthodoxy on economic matters, and to begin to envision an affirmative government role when it comes to strengthening (and reforming) the safety net, and even spending government money to combat the near term jobs emergency. I don’t know if non-tea party Republicans can be reached and split off from the tea party on these matters or not, but it does seem at least plausible, if the above numbers are an accurate picture of things.
Meanwhile, some Republican lawmakers do seem sincere about charting a new course on poverty. But the party agenda remains in thrall to a set of ideas that remain largely the province of a small tea party minority, and are not nearly as widely held among Republicans overall.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, January 24, 2014
“Enemies Of The Poor”: Republicans Are Doing All They Can To Hurt The Poor
Suddenly it’s O.K., even mandatory, for politicians with national ambitions to talk about helping the poor. This is easy for Democrats, who can go back to being the party of F.D.R. and L.B.J. It’s much more difficult for Republicans, who are having a hard time shaking their reputation for reverse Robin-Hoodism, for being the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich.
And the reason that reputation is so hard to shake is that it’s justified. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that right now Republicans are doing all they can to hurt the poor, and they would have inflicted vast additional harm if they had won the 2012 election. Moreover, G.O.P. harshness toward the less fortunate isn’t just a matter of spite (although that’s part of it); it’s deeply rooted in the party’s ideology, which is why recent speeches by leading Republicans declaring that they do too care about the poor have been almost completely devoid of policy specifics.
Let’s start with the recent Republican track record.
The most important current policy development in America is the rollout of the Affordable Care Act, a k a Obamacare. Most Republican-controlled states are, however, refusing to implement a key part of the act, the expansion of Medicaid, thereby denying health coverage to almost five million low-income Americans. And the amazing thing is that they’re going to great lengths to block aid to the poor even though letting the aid through would cost almost nothing; nearly all the costs of Medicaid expansion would be paid by Washington.
Meanwhile, those Republican-controlled states are slashing unemployment benefits, education financing and more. As I said, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the G.O.P. is hurting the poor as much as it can.
What would Republicans have done if they had won the White House in 2012? Much more of the same. Bear in mind that every budget the G.O.P. has offered since it took over the House in 2010 involves savage cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and other antipoverty programs.
Still, can’t Republicans change their approach? The answer, I’m sorry to say, is almost surely no.
First of all, they’re deeply committed to the view that efforts to aid the poor are actually perpetuating poverty, by reducing incentives to work. And to be fair, this view isn’t completely wrong.
True, it’s total nonsense when applied to unemployment insurance. The notion that unemployment is high because we’re “paying people not to work” is a fallacy (no matter how desperate you make the unemployed, their desperation does nothing to create more jobs) wrapped in a falsehood (very few people are choosing to remain unemployed and keep collecting benefit checks).
But our patchwork, uncoordinated system of antipoverty programs does have the effect of penalizing efforts by lower-income households to improve their position: the more they earn, the fewer benefits they can collect. In effect, these households face very high marginal tax rates. A large fraction, in some cases 80 cents or more, of each additional dollar they earn is clawed back by the government.
The question is what we could do to reduce these high effective tax rates. We could simply slash benefits; this would reduce the disincentive to work, but only by intensifying the misery of the poor. And the poor would become less productive as well as more miserable; it’s hard to take advantage of a low marginal tax rate when you’re suffering from poor nutrition and inadequate health care.
Alternatively, we could reduce the rate at which benefits phase out. In fact, one of the unheralded virtues of Obamacare is that it does just that. That is, it doesn’t just improve the lot of the poor; it improves their incentives, because the subsidies families receive for health care fade out gradually with higher income, instead of simply disappearing for anyone too affluent to receive Medicaid. But improving incentives this way means spending more, not less, on the safety net, and taxes on the affluent have to rise to pay for that spending. And it’s hard to imagine any leading Republican being willing to go down that road — or surviving the inevitable primary challenge if he did.
The point is that a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor.
Will this ever change? Well, Republicans weren’t always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs — Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit — used to have bipartisan support. And maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P.
For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America’s poor. And that will remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us otherwise.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 12, 2014
“The War Over Poverty”: The Problem Of Poverty Is Part Of The Broader Problem Of Rising Income Inequality
Fifty years have passed since Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. And a funny thing happened on the way to this anniversary. Suddenly, or so it seems, progressives have stopped apologizing for their efforts on behalf of the poor, and have started trumpeting them instead. And conservatives find themselves on the defensive.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For a long time, everyone knew — or, more accurately, “knew” — that the war on poverty had been an abject failure. And they knew why: It was the fault of the poor themselves. But what everyone knew wasn’t true, and the public seems to have caught on.
The narrative went like this: Antipoverty programs hadn’t actually reduced poverty, because poverty in America was basically a social problem — a problem of broken families, crime and a culture of dependence that was only reinforced by government aid. And because this narrative was so widely accepted, bashing the poor was good politics, enthusiastically embraced by Republicans and some Democrats, too.
Yet this view of poverty, which may have had some truth to it in the 1970s, bears no resemblance to anything that has happened since.
For one thing, the war on poverty has, in fact, achieved quite a lot. It’s true that the standard measure of poverty hasn’t fallen much. But this measure doesn’t include the value of crucial public programs like food stamps and the earned-income tax credit. Once these programs are taken into account, the data show a significant decline in poverty, and a much larger decline in extreme poverty. Other evidence also points to a big improvement in the lives of America’s poor: lower-income Americans are much healthier and better-nourished than they were in the 1960s.
Furthermore, there is strong evidence that antipoverty programs have long-term benefits, both to their recipients and to the nation as a whole. For example, children who had access to food stamps were healthier and had higher incomes in later life than people who didn’t.
And if progress against poverty has nonetheless been disappointingly slow — which it has — blame rests not with the poor but with a changing labor market, one that no longer offers good wages to ordinary workers. Wages used to rise along with worker productivity, but that linkage ended around 1980. The bottom third of the American work force has seen little or no rise in inflation-adjusted wages since the early 1970s; the bottom third of male workers has experienced a sharp wage decline. This wage stagnation, not social decay, is the reason poverty has proved so hard to eradicate.
Or to put it a different way, the problem of poverty has become part of the broader problem of rising income inequality, of an economy in which all the fruits of growth seem to go to a small elite, leaving everyone else behind.
So how should we respond to this reality?
The conservative position, essentially, is that we shouldn’t respond. Conservatives are committed to the view that government is always the problem, never the solution; they treat every beneficiary of a safety-net program as if he or she were “a Cadillac-driving welfare queen.” And why not? After all, for decades their position was a political winner, because middle-class Americans saw “welfare” as something that Those People got but they didn’t.
But that was then. At this point, the rise of the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else is so obvious that it’s no longer possible to shut down any discussion of rising inequality with cries of “class warfare.” Meanwhile, hard times have forced many more Americans to turn to safety-net programs. And as conservatives have responded by defining an ever-growing fraction of the population as morally unworthy “takers” — a quarter, a third, 47 percent, whatever — they have made themselves look callous and meanspirited.
You can see the new political dynamics at work in the fight over aid to the unemployed. Republicans are still opposed to extended benefits, despite high long-term unemployment. But they have, revealingly, changed their arguments. Suddenly, it’s not about forcing those lazy bums to find jobs; it’s about fiscal responsibility. And nobody believes a word of it.
Meanwhile, progressives are on offense. They have decided that inequality is a winning political issue. They see war-on-poverty programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and the earned-income tax credit as success stories, initiatives that have helped Americans in need — especially during the slump since 2007 — and should be expanded. And if these programs enroll a growing number of Americans, rather than being narrowly targeted on the poor, so what?
So guess what: On its 50th birthday, the war on poverty no longer looks like a failure. It looks, instead, like a template for a rising, increasingly confident progressive movement.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 9, 2014
“Still Playing Games”: House Votes To Undermine ACA, Again
The House of Representatives held its first meaningful floor vote of 2014 this morning, sending a clear signal about the Republican majority’s priorities. Did they vote on unemployment benefits? The farm bill? One of the many other unfinished bills from 2013?
No, the GOP majority is still playing games with health care.
A significant number of Democrats broke party lines to vote on the House’s first anti-Obamacare vote of 2014 on Friday, a blow to party unity and leadership’s advice that rank-and-file members stand strong against GOP “gotcha” bills.
The legislation, which would require victims of security breaches through HealthCare.gov insurance exchanges to be notified within two days, passed 291-122. Sixty-seven Democrats sided with all voting Republicans to hoist the bill over the finish line.
The fact that so many Democratic lawmakers broke ranks wasn’t a huge surprise – it’s now an election year and they seem reluctant to create attack-ad fodder by opposing pointless “messaging” bills.
As we discussed last week, the proposal comes by way of Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), who has a lengthy record of preferring partisan games to actual governing. It also dovetails with a coordinated messaging campaign championed by House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
Indeed, today’s vote was unusually vapid. As has been reported many times, there have been no security breaches; literally zero Americans’ personal information has been compromised; administrative security testing for healthcare.gov is constant; and when rare vulnerabilities have popped up, the problems have been identified and resolved quickly and safely.
What’s more, while the bill approved by the House today would require HHS to notify consumers if their personal information is accessed improperly, it’s worth noting (a) HHS is already required to make these notifications, making the legislation unnecessary; and (b) since consumers’ personal information is not actually stored on healthcare.gov, the underlying concern really doesn’t make a lot of sense.
So what’s the point of pushing a pointless bill and making it the first proposal voted on in 2014? I found remarks from Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, quite compelling.
“Despite all these positive results, Republicans are still obsessed with killing this law. Since they cannot do so legislatively, they have shifted to a different tactic: scaring people away from the website.
“So my second point is this: there have been no successful security breaches of Healthcare.gov. Nobody’s personal information has been maliciously hacked. […]
“These are important facts for the American people to know. But the Republicans disregard them and omit them because they undermine their claims. Many of us would support efforts to strengthen requirements for the entire federal government and private sector to notify consumers of breaches. But today’s bill does not do that. Today’s bill is the latest attempt to attack the Affordable Care Act and deprive millions of Americans of the healthcare they deserve.”
As for actual security threats, Jennifer Bendery makes a point that can’t be emphasized enough: “[T]he most credible threat to the website’s security may be the loudest critic of the website’s security: Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 10, 2014
“Sorry, GOP Reformers”: Your Own Party Isn’t Interested
Republican reformers are getting excited. For years, Ross Douthat and David Frum have been stubbornly making the case for a more moderate and economically populist GOP that would speak to and offer solutions for the problems facing struggling Americans. They are no longer voices crying out in the wilderness.
David Brooks has joined them in a column touting several reform-minded articles in the latest issue of National Affairs, a center-right policy journal. This comes in the wake of a recent speech by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and some not-so-recent speeches by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on how the GOP might begin to combat poverty.
Taken together, these columns, articles, and speeches show that the movement for Republican reform has begun to persuade…at least a dozen people.
That’s no doubt an exaggeration on the low end, but it goes a long way toward explaining why I’m skeptical about reform efforts. By all means, such efforts are to be applauded and encouraged. But until Republican voters begin to express their support for them in opinion polls and at the ballot box, reform proposals will remain the impotent pet projects of pundits and politicians.
The fact is that there’s no sign so far that those voters want anything to do with new government initiatives to help the poor — or to do anything else for that matter. “Government is too big!” “Taxes are too high!” “Washington is the problem, not the solution!” Those are the only messages the Republican base wants to hear — and thus the only messages most Republicans dare deliver on the campaign trail or act on in the halls of Congress.
There’s a reason why the first tentative expressions of support for reform have come from senators, who are elected by entire states every six years. That distance from those partisan passions, which have produced a deep right-wing skew in gerrymandered House districts, gives senators more ideological freedom of movement.
Still, Republican senators must deal with irascible primary voters. And in the House there is no such freedom, which is why that chamber’s Republican majority refuses to budge on extending unemployment benefits or reversing cuts to food stamps. It is also why Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) efforts to revive immigration reform is likely to fail as well. Republican voters want none of it, and that’s exactly what they’ll get.
Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) is the proverbial exception that proves the rule. He, too, has been trying to rebrand himself as a reformer — talking about the problem of poverty, and reaching a bipartisan deal to pass the bill that temporarily ended gridlock over the budget. All of it is an effort to make himself palatable as a general election presidential candidate. (Nothing inspires donors like “electability.”) But his position is only possible because he established himself as a leading conservative warrior on economic issues, which got the Romney ticket in so much trouble in 2012; indeed, it remains to be seen whether Ryan’s commitment to centrist reform is anything more than PR gloss.
That points to the depth of the GOP’s problem. Its base uncompromisingly demands that party members toe a line that places them far to the right of the median American voter. As long as that continues, Republicans will find themselves out of serious contention for the White House — and unable to follow through on any serious proposals for reform.
By: Damon Linker, The Week, January 10, 2014
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