Repugs are just lumpy bags of projection.
Republican apparatchicks are obsessed with the idea of poor people, especially poor minorities, sitting around doing nothing because that’s what they do. If they were smart they’d be worried the poor are sitting around planning where to put the guillotines.
The policy of deliberate impoverishment is not new; it's been around at least as long as the idea of some people having more than others.
But it's conservative America in which the policy has reached its highest achievement. Not coincidentally because in America the policy has been from the beginning justified by racism.
One of the two fundamental problems with American welfare policy is that at its core, it assumes that the poor are morally deficient and need to be fixed instead of just poor. So rather than just increase the money in these programs, politicians blather on about the morality of the poor, which is an excuse not to fully fund them.We know growing up poor is bad for kids. But instead of focusing on the money, U.S. anti-poverty policy often focuses on the perceived moral shortcomings of the poor themselves. We don’t try to address poverty directly, or alleviate it; we simply try to change the way poor people behave, especially poor parents. Specifically, we offer two choices to poor parents if they want to escape poverty: get a job, or get married. Not only does this approach not work, but it’s also a cruel punishment for children who cannot be held responsible for their parents’ decisions.
Policy that addresses poverty by punishing the poor for their perceived misdeeds plays on some popular misunderstandings, especially about marriage and parenting. Many non-poor people mistakenly believe that our lax attitude toward marriage is behind the child poverty problem. That’s why a Heritage Foundation claim that marriage reduces the chance of living in poverty by 82 percent has been a staple on the Republican campaign trail this season, and welfare money has been diverted from alleviating poverty to promoting marriage among the poor.…First, single parenthood doesn’t just cause these social ailments, it also reflects them. Some of these problems are merely the consequence of whatever caused their parents to be single in the first place: poverty, illness, incarceration, weak relationship skills, and so on. In other words, successful people are more likely to raise successful children and to have successful marriages. Research on marriage among poor Americans clearly shows that the majority want to be married, but they aren’t for a variety of reasons related to their poverty. Faced with poor prospects in a marriage partner, some women reason, “I can do bad by myself,” as reported in the book “Promises I Can Keep,” by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. Some couples place marriage on a pedestal, and plan to postpone it until they are financially stable. As one young man with a pregnant girlfriend put it, “I’d rather get engaged for two years, save money, get a house, make sure … the baby’s got a bedroom.” For too many, however, that moment never arrives.
Poverty clearly lowers the chance of a successful marriage, even as being single may make it harder to escape poverty. This pattern is the subject of a long-running debate among social scientists. Although we can’t agree on the exact breakdown of cause and effect, any reasonable researcher will concede it runs both ways.
This has always been a problem with the nation’s response to the poor. From the early charity programs of the antebellum period to Social Darwinism to the Salvation Army to the present, the poor’s poverty is consistently seen as their own fault and something that can be fixed if we intervene in the right way. So the problem becomes unwed mothers instead of a lack of economic opportunity. Why blame capitalists when you can blame 23 year old women who lack a GED?But the second answer is perhaps more important for today’s poverty debates. It is that the number of single-parent families doesn’t drive the poverty rate – rather, it mostly helps determine which families and children will be poor, not how many will be. How many people live in poverty is largely the outcome of our policy choices, about jobs and wages, and support for poor families. A key study compared poverty rates and family structure in 18 countries, finding that the United States had the highest rate of poverty among single-mother families – more than 40 percent, compared with 5 or 10 percent in the Nordic countries. No country had as large a difference in poverty rates between single mothers and the rest of the population as the United States – that’s our unique penalty for single parenthood.
Meanwhile what the poor actually need are good-paying jobs for people without college educations, which are fewer and farther between in our outsourced, automated, subcontracted, franchised, temp worker economy.The other fundamental problem with our welfare policy is racism. While not all the poor are people of color or immigrants, many are. And if West Virginia and eastern Kentucky they are mostly white, we find ways to denigrate them anyway. The problem of the poor is also “the problem of black people.” Or Mexicans. Or the Irish in 1850. Or Italians in 1910. Or whatever. But always black people. Focusing on actual poverty alleviation would mean having to deal with the inequalities at the heart of our society, which means dealing with white supremacy and structural racism. And we can’t be having that, now can we.
David Atkins is an excellent analyst of Democratic voting behavior, especially at the local level, but I think he misses the obvious solution on this one.
If formerly Democratic strongholds in Eastern Kentucky are going repug because the working class votes and the poor don't, the solution is not to keep digging the bottomless hole of pandering to the middle class.
The solution is to get the poor who are not voting out to the polls to vote.
And the way to do that is to provide government assistance only to people who prove they are voting.
Repugs are so enamored of piling conditions on people who are starving and homeless; Democrats should propose this one and make repugs explain why not.
It's the turnout, stupid.
David Atkins at Political Animal:
Alex McGillis at the New York Times has one of the most intriguing and important pieces of political analysis I’ve seen in quite some time today. Most of us are familiar with analyses reliant on racial and cultural resentments to explain why poor white communities seem to vote against their own interests: voters with racist tendencies and those who fear the changing of social mores vote for Republicans in order to thumb their nose at minorities and coastal social liberals—even if the impact of conservative policies is worst in their own communities. But McGillis’ analysis suggests that conservative voters in these areas are just as resentful of their white neighbors on public assistance, and that most of the poor whites on public assistance aren’t voting for Republicans but have simply stopping voting altogether:
In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.McGillis points to data showing that people who struggle economically are most likely to hold liberal views on economics, but are also least likely to vote. The more they need government help, the less connected they feel to their communities and the less interested they become in politics. Crucially, 57% of these nonvoters are white—mostly living in conservative communities.
In the meantime, those who vote Republican in these areas are the ones doing somewhat better economically who feel not just sublimated racism and generalized cultural resentment against coastal elites, but also direct anger at the increasing number of their neighbors and acquaintances in need of assistance:
SNIP
Democrats don’t really have a good answer for this problem. As a matter of public policy, obviously reducing inequality and improving working-class economics broadly should make progressive politics more palatable in these communities. But that’s a long-term project. From a communications standpoint, if voters are willing to give away tax breaks to Wall Street while intentionally voting for policies that will throw their friends and neighbors into the street and deny them lifesaving medical care, there’s not much you can do.
These mostly suburban and rural communities are infused with a Calvinist ethic that attributes success to moral virtue and failure to moral weakness. The cultural and psychological pull of that doctrine is incredibly powerful and buoyed by hucksters preaching the prosperity gospel that God will make you rich if you are faithful enough and want it badly enough. This toxic stew creates an instinct to push down the person below them rather than up against the person above them, and transcends simple racism and cultural resentment at this point.
From a communications standpoint, one approach Democrats can and should take is to strongly promote policies that not only help those who have fallen through the cracks, but also those who have middle-class jobs as well. Many of those policies already exist, but are hidden from voters in the form of tax credits rather than direct transfers. A more radical analysis would suggest that the forces of mechanization and globalization may require a universal basic income that would supplement the incomes of the employed and unemployed alike in a way that might make welfare payments seem fairer and more democratized to these voters. And, of course, a more full-throated progressive economic message (and laws that create easier access to voting) from Democrats may be able to encourage more of the downtrodden to make their voices heard at the polls.
Ultimately, though, there may be little Democrats can do to win over these surburban and rural white voters. Their shift to the GOP has been overwhelming, and if they’re willing to throw their friends and neighbors under the political bus there’s not all that much to be done. We can excuse it with economic, religious and social analysis, but at the end of the day that approach to life and ethics is usually described with negative moral language designed to invoke shame. Urban voters and minority communities don’t share this dog-eat-dog moral value system, and their numbers are growing. A more powerfully aggressive progressive politics and economic egalitarianism would likely help, but ultimately the solution may simply be a matter of waiting for demographic change and limiting the impact of gerrymandering designed to artificially increase the influence of these voters.
Contrary to the fever dreams of wingnut racists, no, there really is not a secret welfare fund giving billions of dollars to black families in poverty while white families in poverty starve. Not even in Obama's America.
And here's the proof:
Why should you care? African-American families with 11 percent less income spend at least 11 percent less money at restaurants and clothing stores and car lots and on college tuition and rent and ball games.According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, African-Americans living in Kentucky saw their average yearly incomes drop by more than 11 percent in one year.The Courier-Journal (http://cjky.it/1L0s1lr ) reports that the data released last week show that for black Kentuckians, household income fell from $30,183 annually to $26,735. The state's overall median household income fell by 2 percent from 2013 to 2014, from $44,097 in to $42,958.During that same time period the poverty rate went up for African-Americans in Kentucky from 28.8 percent in 2013 to 32.4 percent. The state's overall poverty rate sat at 19.1 percent in 2014.Incoming Louisville Urban League President and CEO Sadiqa Reynolds says the trend is troubling and underscores an urgency to create policies that will end cycles of poverty.
A: Name three people who were on welfare when you offered them a job, and who subsequently flunked a drug test. Name one. Yeah, thought so.Republican gubernatorial candidate Matt Bevin called for drug testing of those receiving public assistance at a forum Tuesday organized by the Council of Agency Executives.SNIPDuring the hour-long debate, Bevin gave few specifics on his programs if elected governor, but said that he would push for drug testing of welfare recipients."We need random drug testing for the people who are receiving benefits from the state," he said. "I'll tell you, as an employer, one of the first things these people are needing in order to assimilate back into society is to pass a drug test, and they can't."
Actually, conservatard racism is literally why we can't have anything decent or humane in this country: universal health care, living wages, workers' rights, decent housing, free higher education and all the other social goods enjoyed for decades by people in prosperous European countries are denied to all Americans, including white people, because racists would rather millions of their fellow whites get nothing than a black person get a single penny.
At some point, the insistence of the repugs and guntards on preventing the poor from spending their tiny welfare allotments on anything except guns is going to backfire.
Rude Pundit:
If you're middle-class, you can negotiate your way out of a great deal of the grief. If you're poor, you are subject to the whims of a justice system that seeks to punish you for existing.
At some point, we're going to have to do something about how we treat the poor in this country. If the nation doesn't, if politicians continue to ignore the issue of poverty, the poor might just realize that all those guns the NRA has guaranteed they can bear might have another use. And the United States will have no one to blame but itself.
Let's be honest: repugs - and they are always repugs - who deride poor people for not working are not exactly bent over from a lifetime of manual labor for "wages" that wouldn't keep a gerbil fed.
Their lack of compassion is exceeded only by their greed and hypocrisy.
Courier-Journal editorial:
As Congress and some candidates in Kentucky debate the value of federal benefits to people, a new study out of The University of California offers some surprising findings about just who receives those benefits.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans who receive help from programs such as Medicaid or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) are members of working families, living in households where where adults earn wages so low they qualify for such assistance.
Of the total $226.8 billion a year in federal benefits, more than half of that, $127.8 billion a year, goes to families where someone is earning a paycheck, according to the study from the Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education.
About 52 percent are fast food workers, 46 percent are child care workers, 48 percent are home care workers and 25 percent are part-time college instructors, the study found.
Thus, taxpayers not only are helping the poor, they are providing an enormous subsidy to employers ranging from giant corporations to small businesses that offer low wages, part-time work and few or no benefits.
“This is the hidden cost of low-wage work,” Ken Jacobs, a co-author of the report, told The New York Times.
These findings come as House Republicans in Congress offer a proposed a budget that includes massive cuts in such programs including billions of dollars in cuts to food stamps, which help more than 800,000 Kentuckians get enough to eat.
House Republicans also want to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, which now helps more than 500,000 Kentuckians obtain health coverage. The study found that even before the federal health law took full effect, more than half of Americans with Medicaid benefits worked at least part-time but were still poor enough to qualify for the health program.
Stereotypes about “welfare queens” and slackers sponging off the government persist but this study finds that the majority of those who benefit from government programs — 73 percent — are members of working families.
The solution is not to strip support from such families. Rather, government efforts should focus on creating a better-prepared workforce and better-paying jobs.
If Congress wants to cut welfare, it should start with cutting corporate welfare.
Start wioth the Kentucky assholes who tried to ban trans kids from using the restroom. Make repug C.B. Embry and the rest drop trou and expose their genitals any time they try to enter a public restroom.
Because the motherfuckers could not survive a single day - fuck, a single HOUR - under the burdens they create to crush poor people, minority people and female people.
Think Progress:
The Kansas legislature has sent a bill to Gov. Sam Brownback’s (R) desk that limits welfare recipients to withdrawing just $25 a day from their benefits and enacts a range of other restrictions.via Hullabaloo:
Emily Badger of the Post's Wonkblog writes that from drug-testing aid recipients to passing new laws restricting what foods the the poor can buy with SNAP benefits, the odd double standard applied to government support for the poor raises several questions about why, one of them moral:Tom Sullivan:
We rarely make similar demands of other recipients of government aid. We don't drug-test farmers who receive agriculture subsidies (lest they think about plowing while high!). We don't require Pell Grant recipients to prove that they're pursuing a degree that will get them a real job one day (sorry, no poetry!). We don't require wealthy families who cash in on the home mortgage interest deduction to prove that they don't use their homes as brothels (because surely someone out there does this). The strings that we attach to government aid are attached uniquely for the poor.
Missouri's proposed surf-and-turf law prohibits food-stamp recipients from using them to purchase, among other things, seafood or steak. This might include prohibiting the poor from purchasing canned tuna. (Sorry, Charlie.) Where's a seafood industry lobbyist when you really need one?
Dana Milbank writes:
The surf-and-turf bill is one of a flurry of new legislative proposals at the state and local level to dehumanize and even criminalize the poor as the country deals with the high-poverty hangover of the Great Recession.We kiss up and kick down here. Steal trillions through your too-big-to-fail bank, and at most you'll draw a fine. Plug in a cell phone on the street and go to jail if you're lucky enough not to be tasered or shot. The new impoverishment is one of the soul.
Wonkette, on the fact that drug tests for welfare recipients don't work:
As of this writing, no recipients of corporate tax credits, farm price supports, federal military contracts, oil subsidies, or tax incentives to build union-free factories are required to prove that they can pass a piss test.
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