Generous Welfare, Not Austerity, Creates Jobs

This is actually not counter-intuitive, at least to those of us who understand how difficult it is to find a job when you're drowning in student debt, you can't make the rent or afford food for your kids.

Starving families = starving economy. 

From the New York Times:

It is a simple idea supported by both economic theory and most people’s intuition: If welfare benefits are generous and taxes high, fewer people will work. Why bother being industrious, after all, if you can get a check from the government for sitting around — and if your choice to work means that much of your income will end up in the tax collectors’ coffers?

Here’s the rub, though: The idea may be backward.

Some of the highest employment rates in the advanced world are in places with the highest taxes and most generous welfare systems, namely Scandinavian countries. The United States and many other nations with relatively low taxes and a smaller social safety net actually have substantially lower rates of employment.

When Freakazoids Are In Charge of Welfare

We've tried this for millenia. It never works, except to add fuel to the "all poors are worthless and deserve their suffering" fire.

That's why we gave the job to government, which saved millions of lives during the Great Depression, and lifted millions more out of poverty for the next four decades.

The twist now is that instead of letting churches use their own donations to keep the poor poor, repugs want to give churches tax dollars to keep the poor poor.

Zandar:

Alternet's Adam Lee has a theory about why Republicans want to destroy the safety net for America's poor and let church charities deal with them instead: putting millions of Americans under a new theocratic state is exactly what they want.

Cutting government charity on the scale that Republican Congresses propose would be Armageddon," according to local charities and food banks. But I think there's an explanation that runs deeper than indifference. I suspect many religious conservatives are well aware that what they propose would mean throwing millions of people into destitution. In fact, they may be counting on it. 

Under the law, churches have wide latitude to discriminate and to put conditions on whom they'll hire and whom they'll serve, far more than any private business. In exchange for ladling out soup, they can make people sit through a sermon; they can impose an ideological loyalty test; they can refuse to serve people they think might be gay; they can discriminate for any reason or for no reason at all. (The one thing that churches can't legally do is tell their members how to vote - at least, they can't do this if they want to retain their tax exemption - but they're fighting hard to repeal even that trivial restriction, with right-wing pastors all around the country repeatedly flouting the law and daring the IRS to punish them.) 

While most evangelical churches proclaim that they want people to convert voluntarily, their actions show otherwise. When given the chance to coerce their audience, they'll do so gleefully, as we've seen in prison ministries all over the country where inmates are given special rewards and privileges in exchange for their cooperation with religious indoctrination. 

What they want, in short, is a captive audience. If government charity were to be cut off, the churches wouldn't be able to come close to supplying the wants of everyone, and so they'd have strong incentive to impose stringent conditions on the people they did help. Only the most faithful, the most compliant, the most submissive would be able to get through the door. 

And that's precisely the state of affairs that the religious right yearns for. What they want is to build a theocracy from the ground up, where the poor and the needy are abjectly dependent on a church that can yank away the necessities of life if it judges them insufficiently compliant, and so the masses will have no choice but to be corralled and steered. Even today, we can see this conservative vision put into practice, and witness the terrible consequences that result when it blocks the government from helping the needy. Consider Mississippi, which is both the most religious and has the most churches per capita of any U.S. state. If rosy visions like Ernst's were true, Mississippi would be the best place in the country to live. But in reality, it's the poorest and (by life expectancy) sickest state.

If you thought right wing Christians were furious with poor people getting tax money and having to jump through hoops to show they're really needy, wait until they have to go through the church to get basic needs met.  Millions of ready souls to be cared for, and the church can set whatever rules they want in exchange for help, including listening to whom they should vote for.

Which is exactly what the GOP wants.

Welfare Has Always Been White

It's a testament to the power of racism that anybody thinks otherwise.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

Via the NY Times:

Black people, who make up 22% of the poor, receive 14% of government benefits. White people, who make up 42% of the poor, receive 69% of government benefits. 

Oh dear. If this gets out.... nah, it won't change a damned thing.

Because it's not as if Teabaggers pay any attention to facts. See, they can't simply say, "Oh, good, I was wrong and I don't need to worry about that. Apparently the people I thought were freeloaders are carrying their share of the load, and then some."

Their heads might explode.

So they'll simply point out you can't believe anything you read in the New York Times. See how that works?

Rationality Breaks Out in Kansas

Hmm. Gov. Bareback Brownback's approval is heading for congressional repug territory; maybe that's given Kansas Democrats a breath of life.

From Firedoglake:

“Drug testing of lawmakers added to Kansas bill . . . [requiring] drug tests of any welfare or unemployment recipient who state officials reasonably suspect is using illegal substances.” A proposal that didn’t make it would have added “state-assisted company owners”.

And:

KS’ Supreme Court “issued a ruling protecting the rights of same-sex couples to both be recognized as the legal parents of the children they are raising together.”

Still Despicable After All These Years

Yes, the repugs really are racist motherfuckers. They always have been racist motherfuckers. They always will be racist motherfuckers.

They're not even trying to hide it any more - hell, they're not even denying it.

So call them out for what they are. Make them pay for every racist crime from the three-fifths compromise through the murder of ACORN.

Any attempt to fight them on any other ground is doomed to failure.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

I’ve been examining my conscience to figure out exactly why the Romney-Ryan campaign’s “Obama killed welfare work requirement” large and continuing series of ads and speech references and talking points enrages me so very much.

Yes, I used to be something of a welfare policy wonk, and know how incredibly mendacious and wrong-minded this line of attack is, and how deeply hypocritical Republicans are for complaining that Obama doesn’t want welfare recipients to work even as they are trying to destroy every single public policy that “makes work pay” for people trapped in poverty. And when Romney’s ads and surrogates claim that the administration’s willingness to entertain state waivers from the specific rules of the 1996 law represent a “gutting” of that law, it does trip across memories of the perpetual willingness of Republicans prior to and ever since 1996 to dump the whole income-maintenance issue on the states with no strings.

But lying and hypocrisy have become standard weapons in Team Mitt’s arsenal, going back to the savage primary attacks on fellow-Republicans, so why does this particular example bother me egregiously?

And then the obvious finally hit me: the Romney campaign is reviving the single oldest tactic of southern reactionaries: race-baiting white working class voters to distract them from the many issues on which this segment of the electorate is naturally unsympathetic to policies that reinforce economic and social privilege. It’s how the Bourbons reasserted control over the Populists in the late nineteenth century. It’s how conservatives undermined southern support for the economic policies of the New Deal and Fair Deal and New Frontier and Great Society. It was ultimately the fulcrum for the realignment of the whole region from the Democratic to the Republican Party.

So it’s a familiar tactic, but what makes it novel is that it is not being narrow-cast into North Carolina or Virginia or northern and western Florida or Missouri, but broadcast everywhere. And there is zero way it can be rationalized as a part of an overall GOP message supposedly focused on economic recovery and job creation—or even, given the ridiculously small quantities of federal money that go to the Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) program, as part of a budget austerity message. It’s a flat-out racial appeal aimed at convincing non-college educated white voters that this black president wants to take their tax dollars to give them to his shiftless black brothers and sisters.

This very non-southern national Republican ticket is going far out of its way to replicate the most despicable tactics of old-school southern racial demagoguery, and is apparently so invested in this strategy that no end of fact-checking and shaming will convince them to let up for a moment. I should hope that any fair-minded Republicans (and yes, there are some left, impotent as they often are in party counsels) or “neutral” MSM observers, regardless of what they think about the two campaigns generally, would bury this particular blast from the disreputable past in an avalanche of denunciation. If not, then progressives owe it to the country to raise hell about it until it stops or is repudiated by voters.

Digby:

They'd better hope this works because elderly whites are their only growing demographic. If they can't run this game, there's not much hope for their national prospects over the long haul and probably not over the short haul either. It's going to require some fancy footwork --- as much as these voters may resent Obama giving "their" healthcare to the you-know-whos, the know better than anyone which Party has been trying to destroy Medicare and Social Security for over half a century. They were there, after all.

RMoney Ad Libels Whites

Because Welfare is White.

Not that  facts and reality have any place in a repug political campaign, but just for the record, as Tintin pointed out back in May in a different context:

 Of course, Sowell’s argument is based on a central tenet of the white wingnut worldview that most entitlement benefits go to the ni**ers and b**ners. Sadly, No!

Also, contrary to what a substantial share of Americans may assume, non-Hispanic whites receive slightly more than their proportionate share of entitlement benefits. Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 64 percent of the population in 2010 and received 69 percent of the entitlement benefits.

David Dayen says BTW, welfare reform failed.

Don't miss the hands-down best rant on this in the blogosphere, by Zandar.