Why Americans Can't Have a Decent Social Safety Net

When the teabaggers and rethuglicans pine away for the Gilded Age, it's not just for the Lords-and-serfs economy. What they really crave is the society of, by and for rich white men.

Where women had no rights, gays stayed in the closet, and oh, most wonderful of all, blacks were barely a step removed from slavery.

Try this thought experiment: Imagine that President Obama proposes a massive expansion of the welfare state (yeah, I know, but stay with me): generous cradle-to-grave government-provided health care, college education, unemployment compensation and pensions. A system that eliminated hunger, homelessness and poverty. A system available only to native-born white citizens.

That's a fair trade: a full social safety net to rival any in Europe, in return for excluding people conservatives don't consider to be "Real Americans."

How many congressional republicans would vote for it?

Yes, the real reason we don't have a European-style system of civic responsibility is racism. Since long before the New Deal, conservatives have opposed any tax-supported government program no matter how much it benefitted millions of white people, as long as it gave so much as a dime to a single black person.

From FDR excluding heavily-black occupations like farm and domestic work from Social Security in order to get republican votes, to congressional repugs condemning court-ordered compensation to black farmers as "reparations," it's always been about preventing blacks from getting tax dollars, even at the price of hurting working-class whites.

Today, conservatives deny basic government services to people on the orders of their obscenely wealthy masters. But public health care, unemployment compensation and pensions were weak enough to attack in the first place because racists have kept them weak.

So when Europeans wonder why Americans tolerate levels of poverty and suffering unbefitting a civilized nation, the answer is simple: the richest country in the world is not insane; it's so racist it's destroying itself.

Susie Madrak:

Why did the insurance industry try so hard to destroy the credibility of Michael Moore's "Sicko"? Because once Americans saw what other countries had, they would begin to see what was possible -- and that would be bad for health insurers.

I'm pretty sure Americans would feel the same way if they saw the kind of safety net available to citizens in other countries -- Germany, for instance. Via Democrats Ramshield, an American expat, writing for Alternet:

The European Union has a larger economy and more people than America does. Though it spends less -- right around 9 percent of GNP on medical, whereas we in the U.S. spend close to between 15 to 16 percent of GNP on medical -- the EU pretty much insures 100 percent of its population.

The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps. Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave. When you realize all of that, it becomes easy to understand why many Europeans think America has gone insane.

Der Spiegel has run an interesting feature called "A Superpower in Decline," which attempts to explain to a German audience such odd phenomena as the rise of the Tea Party, without the hedging or attempts at "balance" found in mainstream U.S. media.

[...] The piece continues with the sobering assessment that America’s actual unemployment rate isn’t really 10 percent, but close to 20 percent when we factor in the number of people who have stopped looking for work.

Some social scientists think that making sure large-scale crime or fascism never takes root in Europe again requires a taxpayer investment in a strong social safety net. Can we learn from Europe? Isn't it better to invest in a social safety net than in a large criminal justice system? (In America over 2 million people are incarcerated.)

Unlike here, in Germany jobless benefits never run out. Not only that -- as part of their social safety net, all job seekers continue to be medically insured, as are their families.

In the German jobless benefit system, when "jobless benefit 1" runs out, "jobless benefit 2," also known as HartzIV, kicks in. That one never gets cut off. The jobless also have contributions made for their pensions. They receive other types of insurance coverage from the state. As you can imagine, the estimated 2 million unemployed Americans who almost had no benefits this Christmas seems a particular horror show to Europeans, made worse by the fact that the U.S. government does not provide any medical insurance to American unemployment recipients. Europeans routinely recoil at that in disbelief and disgust.

[...] It's important to note that no country in the European Union uses food stamps in order to humiliate its disadvantaged citizens in the grocery checkout line. Even worse is the fact that even the humbling food stamp allotment may not provide enough food for America’s jobless families. So it is on a reoccurring basis that some of these families report eating out of garbage cans to the European media.

For Pam Brown, last winter was the worst. One day she ran out of food completely and had to go through trash cans. She fell into a deep depression ... For many, like Brown, the downfall is a Kafkaesque odyssey, a humiliation hard to comprehend. Help is not in sight: their government and their society have abandoned them.

Pam Brown and her children were disturbingly, indeed incomprehensibly, allowed to fall straight to the bottom. The richest country in the world becomes morally bankrupt when someone like Pam Brown and her children have to pick through trash to eat, abandoned with a callous disregard by the American government. People like Brown have found themselves dispossessed due to the robber baron actions of the Wall Street elite.