|
The GOP's War on the War on Poverty |
 |
|
Thursday, 09 January 2014 09:04 |
|
Milbank writes: "Well, yes, 10 million more Americans are in poverty now than there were in 1963 - but the overall population has increased by 125 million. If you include all of the financial assistance from anti-poverty programs, the poverty rate dips to below 8 percent today. And people who are poor suffer less because they receive health care through Medicaid and nutrition through food stamps."
President Lyndon Johnson with a poor family. (photo: Michael Harrington)
The GOP's War on the War on Poverty
By Dana Milbank, The Washington Post
09 January 14
 onservatives marked the semi-centenary by reviving something nearly as old: the War on the War on Poverty.
Some of the more strategic-minded Republicans, including Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor, have been talking about how the party might do better by the poor. But if you want to get a sense of where the GOP consensus is on the have-nots, you'd learn more from the news conference held Wednesday by the conservative Republican Study Committee, which claims as members 174 of the 233 House Republicans, a full 75 percent of the caucus.
The chairman of the RSC's "anti-poverty initiative" is one Rep. Steve Southerland, a funeral director from the Florida Panhandle who is best known for heading an effort to dismantle the food-stamp program.
Southerland led five other white men in suits onto the stage Wednesday and declared the War on Poverty a failure. "It's clear we're now engaged in a battle of attrition that has left more Americans in poverty than at any other point in our nation's history," he said. There are 46 million in poverty, he added, "despite more than $15 trillion to fight this War on Poverty. Clearly the big government ideas of the past need to be improved and aren't working to the extent that they should. We have a moral obligation to break the mold."
CNN's Dana Bash asked the mold-breaker what he thought of the White House's claim that the poverty rate fell from 25.8 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012. "The percentage of people in poverty today as compared to 50 years ago as a percentage is less," he acknowledged. "But I also want to make sure it is very clear that there are more Americans living in poverty."
Well, yes, 10 million more Americans are in poverty now than there were in 1963 - but the overall population has increased by 125 million. If you include all of the financial assistance from anti-poverty programs, the poverty rate dips to below 8 percent today. And people who are poor suffer less because they receive health care through Medicaid and nutrition through food stamps.
But that will change if Southerland succeeds. After his food-stamp fight, he is perhaps not the ideal Republican messenger on poverty, but House Speaker John Boehner (Ohio), at a separate conference Wednesday, praised Southerland's position as "a step in the right direction," and Southerland reacted angrily when a reporter mentioned his efforts to cut food stamps.
"I have no cuts in my amendment," he said. "Let's just be crystal clear."
Okay, let's. Southerland didn't name a specific level of cuts, but the whole idea was to reduce spending, which he complained had tripled (largely because of the economic crisis). The amendment - to a bill that would have cut food stamps by $39 billion over 10 years - offered to let states keep half of the savings they got from dropping people from the program.
Southerland proposed to accomplish this by requiring able-bodied recipients (including those with children as young as 12 months) to work - an impossible standard because not enough jobs are available and because Southerland didn't provide new funding for training. "If enacted, this amendment will help reduce federal expenditures," Cantor trumpeted on the House floor.
Southerland and his RSC colleagues cited the example of 1996 welfare reform, enacted before all but one of them was in Congress. I covered that debate, and part of the justification for attaching time limits and work requirements to cash welfare payments was that recipients wouldn't fall through the cracks because they could get food stamps.
Other than making food-stamp recipients take nonexistent jobs, the RSC had few specific ideas for replacing the War on Poverty. Some were old: reform the tax code, open the Keystone XL oil pipeline, issue private-school vouchers, remove restrictions on states. Others were mostly beyond the reach of policy: extolling the virtues of two-parent families and the good work of charities.
Southerland bristled at a reporter's question about the perception that Republicans don't care about poverty. He mentioned his past service as chairman of the Salvation Army of Panama City and other good works, and those of Rep. Frank Wolf (Va.), who wasn't in attendance. "Every 90 days, Frank meets with every food bank in his district. I dare one of you to print that!"
I'm not sure what I get for taking Southerland up on his dare. But I know this: Food banks, the Salvation Army and other private charities, though vital, are not a replacement for the federal government.
After 50 years, there are shortcomings in the War on Poverty. But the answer is not to scrap it and to return us to the 19th century.
 |
|
Republicans Have Unveiled Their 2014 Agenda: Do Nothing |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=28222"><span class="small">Rep. Alan Grayson, Reader Supported News</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 08 January 2014 13:58 |
|
Grayson writes: "So it may seem that the Republicans are doing nothing about nothing. But they're actually doing nothing about everything."
Speaker of the House John Boehner. (photo: AP)
Republicans Have Unveiled Their 2014 Agenda: Do Nothing
By Rep. Alan Grayson, Reader Supported News
08 January 14
 few weeks ago, the Republicans unveiled their 2014 agenda, and it was... nothing.
I kid you not. Here is how it was reported in Politico:
"Last Thursday, a group of House Republicans filed into Majority Leader Eric Cantor's Capitol office suite and received a blank piece of paper labeled 'Agenda 2014.' ... A Republican aide .... said ... 'The problem is we don't know where we are headed...'"
Many people saw the absence of an agenda as a problem. I think that it understates the problem. My concern is that the Republicans don't know where to go, not that they don't know how to get there.
To give you an idea of where they seem to think we should go, here are some actual bills that were actually introduced by actual Republicans last year:
- a bill to allow the states to nullify any federal law (didn't we settle that in 1865?);
- a bill to require every high school student to read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (mandatory libertarian indoctrination -- oh, the irony...);
- a bill to prohibit lap dancing and jello wrestling (which contained fascinating definitions of the terms "nudity" and "sexual device");
- a bill establishing a state religion (not Islam, that's for sure); and
- a bill authorizing restaurants, hotels, hair salons and other businesses to deny service to gay customers.
If you're trying to do stuff like that, then doing nothing is a massive improvement.
But more importantly, you just can't do nothing about nothing. You're always doing nothing about something. When the Republicans say that they have no agenda for 2014, then in effect, they're saying this:
- "We're going to do nothing about the 20 million Americans who can't find full-time work."
- "We're going to do nothing about the fact that America now has the highest inequality of wealth in history."
- "We're going to do nothing about the fact that our military expenditures are roughly equal to that of every other country combined, even though we face no conceivable threat of invasion, and we spend approximately50 billion spying largely on ourselves."
- "We're going to do nothing about the fact that the United States has run a trade deficit of at least 350,000,000,000 every single year since 2000, with no end in sight."
- "We're going to do nothing about the fact that the Arctic ice cap is disappearing, the release of methane greenhouse gas from tundra is snowballing ('snowballing' -- hah!), and global temperatures may rise by 10 degrees by the end of the century."
- "We're going to do nothing about the fact that there are so many corporate income tax loopholes that corporate tax revenue is at its lowest in 50 years."
- "We're going to do nothing about the fact that according to some tests, American students have the lowest math scores in the entire world."
- "We're going to do nothing about the fact that 434 out of 435 House members and 99 out of 100 senators raised most of their campaign funds from big donors [the only exceptions being Sen. Sanders (I-VT) and moi]."
- "We're going to nothing about the fact that the federal minimum wage buys less today than it did in 1968, and the bottom 20 percent has a far lower household income today than it did in 1999."
- "After we repeal Obamacare, we're going to do nothing about the 50 million Americans who can't see a doctor when they're sick." [The Republican healthcare plan: Don't Get Sick. And if you do get sick, Die Quickly.]
So it may seem that the Republicans are doing nothing about nothing. But they're actually doing nothing about everything. Whatever the problems we face, their infantile solution is always the same: close your eyes, and it will go away. Close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears, and repeat "La-la-la-la-la-la-la."
Will that work? No. All of these problems have solutions, but none of them is going to solve itself.
That's our job.
|
|
|
GOP Is Losing on Unemployment Insurance - And Running Scared |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23847"><span class="small">Joan Walsh, Salon</span></a>
|
|
Wednesday, 08 January 2014 09:04 |
|
Walsh writes: "Newly assertive Democrats force Republicans to scramble to defend their insurance-cutting cruelty to the unemployed."
Sen. Rand Paul thinks unemployment checks enable laziness. (photo: Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)
GOP Is Losing on Unemployment Insurance - And Running Scared
By Joan Walsh, Salon
08 January 14
Newly assertive Democrats force Republicans to scramble to defend their insurance-cutting cruelty to the unemployed
 t's way too early to declare victory on extending unemployment insurance benefits to the long-term jobless. Yes, six Republicans joined Democrats to let the measure come up for debate and a vote. That shouldn't even make headlines, but given the filibuster-happy GOP Senate minority in the age of Barack Obama, it's news. Still, not all of the six are likely to support the bill, though it will almost certainly pass the Senate. It faces real trouble in John Boehner's House, where the tanned and rested speaker returned from his long vacation telling Democrats they'll have to cut other safety-net programs to pay for it.
But it's worth noting how much Democrats have already changed the UI debate. Republicans have gone from flat refusals to extend long-term unemployment to insisting they'll consider an extension, as long as it's paid for. That's progress worth acknowledging.
Sure, Congress extended UI 14 of 17 times without finding funds to pay for it, including five times under George W. Bush. The party's recent extremism on unemployment insurance is just another measure of how far it has shifted right in the last five years. But Democrats' new boldness on issues of economic populism and income inequality has Republicans scrambling for a politically palatable reply - on UI as well as the larger issue of poverty and opportunity.
Sen. Rand Paul is the poster boy for the GOP's ideological scramble. In early December he flatly dismissed a UI extension by saying it did a "disservice" to the unemployed. Four weeks later, after spending some of his winter break back in Kentucky, where unemployment remains high and 38,000 jobless people lost benefits Dec. 28, Paul shifted a little, agreeing to consider an extension as long as it's paid for.
But Paul continued to push the line that UI hurts the unemployed by creating a "disincentive" to seek work. The lightweight freshman senator apparently has been bulking up on economics research lately, citing studies that he says prove that extended insurance impedes recipients from getting jobs. The only problem is that the economist Paul cited, Rand Ghayad, says the Tea Party senator is misrepresenting his work. In fact, Ghayad's research says the opposite of what Paul claims and makes the case for extended benefits.
President Obama gleefully took Paul to task in brief remarks urging Congress to restore the benefits. Noting that some Republicans say UI "saps their motivation to get a new job," Obama savored a chance to rebut that argument. "I wanna go at this for a second," he said. "That really sells the American people short. I can't name a time when I met an American that would rather have an unemployment check than the pride of having a job."
Why do Republicans hate America?
The new aggressiveness is working. No longer are the unemployed merely "takers" leeching off "makers," to use Paul Ryan's old lexicon. In the new GOP poverty rhetoric, they're victims of Democratic government. Of course, that's actually old rhetoric, going back to Ronald Reagan falsely declaring, "We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won."
But in the last decade Reagan came to look like a bleeding heart liberal for even appearing to care about the poor. Republican rhetoric became increasingly harsh and judgmental, and once-bipartisan programs like food stamps and unemployment insurance became radical redistributionist schemes to reward the "47 percent" - the slackers and moochers who Mitt Romney claimed sought and received "gifts" for supporting Obama.
That's changing, slowly. Maybe because of polls like the one just completed by Hart Research (on behalf of the National Employment Law Project). Surveying likely 2014 midterm voters the pollsters found they overwhelmingly supported extended benefits 55 to 34 percent. Significantly, key Republican groups like seniors and white non-college educated voters were among the most supportive; white women, a swing group that leaned to the GOP in 2012, support maintaining the benefits 53-33 percent.
Democrats still don't have the votes to extend unemployment or restore food stamp cuts. It's too early to celebrate. But Republicans are on their heels, and some apparently see political pain in continuing to mock the struggles of unemployed Americans - especially the older, white, non-college educated voters who make up their base.
|
|
Exposing Public Wickedness Is More American Than Apple Pie |
|
|
Tuesday, 07 January 2014 14:30 |
|
Scheer writes: "What is at issue in the information Snowden's courageous actions have revealed is our government's denial of the core principles of the enlightenment: rule by, and of, an informed and thoughtful citizenry that has come to be smothered by the omnipresent corporatized national security state."
A demonstrator in Sau Paulo, Brazil, shows discontent in July against his government's rejection of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden's asylum application. (photo: Andre Penner/AP)
Exposing Public Wickedness Is More American Than Apple Pie
By Robert Scheer, Truthdig
07 January 14
t's the revolt of the geeks. Edward Snowden is John Peter Zenger digitized, a post-Internet free-press hero soaring above the security obsessions of the past decade to assert the inalienable requirements of individual sovereignty in a wired world.
It was Zenger whose journalistic efforts to expose the wrongdoing of a colonial governor appointed by the crown landed him in jail facing the charge of "seditious libel," quite similar to that brought against Snowden for exposing the NSA's illegal spying.
Their defense is the same: True patriotism demands a vigilant confrontation with government infamy. "I know not what reason is," Zenger published in his defense back in 1734, "if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason." After Zenger spent more than eight months in jail, a jury of his peers exonerated him and his cry for an unfettered free press came to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
Continue Reading: Exposing Public Wickedness Is More American Than Apple Pie
|
|
