Rand Paul's Answer to Poverty: Wage More War on Women

I've never been extremely impressed with Kentucky's freshman Senator Rand Paul. He seems keenly proud of his own brilliance -- despite the fact that few people other than himself can manage to find any evidence of it. His desire to be a Senator seems to stem more from his need to be a Very Important Person than his desire to serve his country. And you don't take it upon yourself to respond to the President's State of the Union Address -- in no official capacity whatsoever -- unless you think people need to appreciate the beneficent fruits of your towering intellect.

In short, Rand Paul is an incredible egotist, made even more insufferable by the fact that he's not actually all that smart.  He's five gallons of smart in a 50 gallon drum -- and the rest of the barrel is filled up by bullcrap. That's my impression. And it's an impression he recently did very little to dispell.

ThinkProgress: At a luncheon for the Chamber of Commerce in Lexington, KY, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) floated the idea of capping government benefits for women who have children out of wedlock, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports.

While he said that preventing unplanned pregnancies should be in the hands of communities and families, he added, “Maybe we have to say ‘enough’s enough, you shouldn’t be having kids after a certain amount.”‘ He went on to say, “I don’t know how you do all that because then it’s tough to tell a woman with four kids that she’s got a fifth kid we’re not going to give her any more money. But we have to figure out how to get that message through because that is part of the answer.”

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Economics, the State of the Union, and the Ever-Dimming Appeal of the GOP

As State of the Union speeches go, President Obama's 2014 appearance before the joint chambers of congress went well. Of the people who watched the speech, 53% had a "very positive reaction to his speech." Conservatives will no doubt point out that the sample is skewed left, but the poll can hardly be blamed for not including people who refused to watch the speech. The audience was largely Democrat and indie, so the sample is largely Democrat and indie.

Still, there's some nasty news for Republicans here. The CNN flash poll's respondents were "44% Democratic and 17% Republican." Yet, when asked if "the president's policies will move the country in the right direction," 71% said they would -- a number way too high to be explained by Democratic boosterism. That number has to include a lot of indies and even some Republicans. CNN reports that the number of dems in the sample is "about 12 points more Democratic than the population as a whole," so 71-12=59.

But let's not get all teabagger about things and start "unskewing" polls to advantage Republicans. Let's look at numbers that need no adjustment.

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Economic Hardship; the Other Demographic Shift that Dooms the GOP

It would be hard to think of a more poorly placed set of priorities. While Americans struggle to get by in an economy that seems to be recovering only for a few, Republicans wage ideological warfare. When employment and the economy should be job one, the GOP has wasted time with nearly forty votes to repeal Obamacare, chased around phantom "scandals," and worked on measures to restrict abortion that have zero chance of ever becoming law. It's bad out there, but the party is acting as if all other problems have been solved, freeing them up to dick around with trivial pet projects.

How bad is it? This bad:

Associated Press: Four out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor and loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend.

The findings come as President Barack Obama tries to renew his administration’s emphasis on the economy, saying in recent speeches that his highest priority is to “rebuild ladders of opportunity” and reverse income inequality.

Add this to the slow-motion suicide the Republican Party has been committing by trying to alienate everyone. Other than the trickle-down BS that has been disproved by practice so many times,  a hallmark of conservative economic mumbo-jumbo is the belief that people in poor economic situations are there by their own choice -- and if you punish the poor for being poor, the unemployed for being unemployed, their situation will improve. You slash spending on food stamps, cut off people from unemployment benefits, and they'll soon discover that it's too difficult to be poor or unemployed, "pull themselves up by their bootstraps," and just stop be poor. The conservative conception of economic hardship seems to be informed entirely by Ronald Reagan's "welfare queen" myth, not by anything resembling the real world.


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But why is this approach to economics suicidal for the party of the rich white people? Well, because rich white people are becoming an endangered species. According to the AP, "Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy 'poor.'"

The "welfare queen" story has always been about dog whistle racism. The politics of division had previously worked so well for Republicans. But now the people struggling to get by are the people they seek to appeal to, while pushing the most unappealing economic policies imaginable to those same people. There are plenty of poor whites who vote Republican -- without checking, I'd guess the majority of them who actually vote -- but at a certain point the law of diminishing returns kicks in and you begin to run out of chumpish poor people. Right now, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that "83 percent of Americans disapprove of Congress' job" and "nearly six-in-10 voters say they would vote to defeat and replace every single member of Congress if they had such an option on their ballot."

MSNBC reports that "Republicans are shouldering more of the blame for the situation in the nation's capital: just 22 percent say they believe the GOP is interested in unifying the country in a bipartisan way, versus 45 percent who say the same about Obama."

Those aren't numbers you can win with.

Any those numbers can only get worse. White Americans are learning from personal experience that being economically disadvantaged isn't the sweet deal that everyone in the GOP says it is. Trying to get by on food stamps or unemployment benefits isn't the gravy train and cutting those benefits is the opposite of being helpful. While the racial divide in economic inequality still exists, there's a lot of crossover now and GOP lies are exposed. It's awfully hard to tell someone who's fallen into the social safety net that that net is actually a cushy "hammock."

If it didn't hurt so many people, I would invite Republicans to continue to be economic flatearthers, continue to attack consumer demand wherever it rears its head, and throw themselves off that particular cliff. But the fact is that as the GOP sinks with their own fiscal mismanagement, they're taking a lot of innocent Americans down with them. Unfortunately, they really don't have anything else left. They've mocked real world economics for so long that they can't win a primary espousing anything other than Reaganaut fantasy -- the base demands to be lied to.

So they continue along, ruining lives and harming America, until their con finally runs completely out of steam. Given what that con is doing to the country right now, that end can't come soon enough.

-Wisco

[photo via Wikimedia Commons]


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Blaming the Treatment for the Disease

Bass-ackward reasoning 101: Imagine a patient with kidney disease. This patient has be treated with dialysis regularly or the blood toxins normally filtered out by the kidneys will eventually kill him. It's not cheap, but it's necessary. Everyone knows that the solution to this problem is a kidney transplant. But a group of quacks -- without any real research at all -- insist that the problem isn't the failing kidneys, the problem is the dialysis. Stop giving the patient the treatment and they'll recover.

I bring this up to draw a parallel. After Mitt Romney said he wasn't "concerned about the very poor," head wingnut and US Senator Jim DeMint suggested a better way of putting it -- the dialysis is the problem, not the disease.

Roll Call:

DeMint said that portion of Romney’s comments also need to be reframed. While Democrats have been using Romney’s comments to argue he is callous toward the poor, conservatives have expressed concern that the former governor might be OK with having Americans who are dependent on government-subsidized social programs.

“He needs to address it,” DeMint told Roll Call. “Because I know he does care about the poor. But I think he was trying to make a case that they’re taken care of. But, in fact, I would say I’m worried about the poor because many are trapped in dependency, they need a good job; they don’t need to be on social welfare programs. I think he needs to turn that around because — the middle class is key, and we have to focus on that. And, really, the problem with the middle class is not successful people, it’s politicians — but the key to making our country successful it to get everyone on that economic ladder.

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Welfare Reform's Failure

In 1996, Bill Clinton signed a bill ending Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). "Today, we are ending welfare as we know it," Clinton said. "But I hope this day will be remembered not for what it ended, but for what it began."

What this began was a change in the way the United States looked at welfare and the poor. Recipients were capped at five years in the program. After that, you couldn't collect anymore benefits, no matter what your situation. There was a "welfare to work" requirement, which put people into job training programs -- regardless of what education they already had. TANF would be funded through block grants, which states would administer and spend as they saw fit.

What had happened was that Clinton caved to pressure created by decades of Republican propaganda. Welfare recipients were lazy, Republicans said, they had kids just to get benefits, they made a lifestyle of AFDC. When it came to slinging BS about welfare and the poor, then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan set the standard in his stump speech:

There’s a woman in Chicago. She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veterans benefits on four nonexisting deceased husbands. And she’s collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.

Reagan called this woman a "welfare queen" and claimed she -- along with many like her -- were draining America's resources at public expense. Of course, it wasn't true. There was no woman in Chicago. It was all lies.





But this became the public perception of the AFDC recipient. At the time that Clinton signed Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, ending AFDC, researchers with Public Eye ran the numbers and found that just about everything that people had been told about welfare recipients was wrong; the average recipient was in the program for less than a year, had statistically fewer children than the rest of the population, and the vast majority of the children of welfare recipients weren't becoming recipients themselves. What the right had called a "culture of dependency" was their own invention -- it didn't actually exist. Republicans had simply found a new scapegoat to attack and, cowardly as they always are, the group they chose to attack for political gain was relatively powerless. A problem was invented, complete with a fix -- end AFDC.

Later, in looking for signs of success to the new program, people were hard-pressed to find any. Payday loan and rent-to-own stores, both of which charge usurious interest rates for short-term loans, sprung up all over the nation like mushrooms. Despite the rhetoric predicting that forcing people off AFDC would decrease poverty, there was no decrease. In fact, it increased. But this was an ideology-based program, not a reality-based program. No matter how badly it failed, it had to be portrayed as a great success.

"How We Ended Welfare, Together," Bill Clinton, New York Times, 2006:

In the past decade, welfare rolls have dropped substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million today. At the same time, caseloads declined by 54 percent. Sixty percent of mothers who left welfare found work, far surpassing predictions of experts. Through the Welfare to Work Partnership, which my administration started to speed the transition to employment, more than 20,000 businesses hired 1.1 million former welfare recipients. Welfare reform has proved a great success, and I am grateful to the Democrats and Republicans who had the courage to work together to take bold action.

So, a program that required states to kick people off welfare rolls succeeded in reducing welfare rolls. Success! This is like saying a law aimed at clearing streets for ambulances succeeded because it resulted in a lot of traffic tickets. If 60% of mothers leaving TANF found work, what happened to the 40% who didn't? Are we supposed to forget about those families?

"Clinton masterfully blurred [reducing welfare rolls with reducing poverty] in a recent New York Times opinion column, as did most others on the 10th anniversary of the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, writing as if getting mothers and their children off the welfare rolls is the same as getting them out of poverty," wrote Robert Sheer for The Nation. "In the absence of any evidence that poverty is tamed, he celebrates a 'bipartisan' victory, which was good for his image but not necessarily for those it claimed to help."

It's only now that the economy's in the tank that the real consequence of welfare reform is being seen. The New York Times reports that, as the economy sinks, welfare aid isn't growing.

Despite soaring unemployment and the worst economic crisis in decades, 18 states cut their welfare rolls last year, and nationally the number of people receiving cash assistance remained at or near the lowest in more than 40 years.

The trends, based on an analysis of new state data collected by the New York Times, raise questions about how well a revamped welfare system with great state discretion is responding to growing hardships.

Michigan cut its welfare rolls 13 percent, though it was one of two states whose October unemployment rate topped 9 percent. Rhode Island, the other, had the nation’s largest welfare decline, 17 percent.

"Of the 12 states where joblessness grew most rapidly, eight reduced or kept constant the number of people receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the main cash welfare program for families with children," we're told. "Nationally, for the 12 months ending October 2008, the rolls inched up a fraction of 1 percent."

The problem? TANF moved the responsibility for dealing with poverty from the feds to the states. And the states are broke. TANF isn't bringing in new recipients because the states can't afford to pay any more. In fact, as the economy continues to slide and state budgets become more and more pinched, they're cutting assistance.

What are the odds that a program that was based on phony assumptions and political scapegoating would fail so badly? As any critic could've told you at the time Clinton signed it into existence, pretty damned good. Clinton claimed the program would be tweaked as time went on, that obvious problems with the bill he signed would later be fixed. Instead, the bill was signed and forgotten.

"What crystal ball does he have that he knows he can fix it," said Deborah Weinstein, an official at the Children's Defense Fund, at the time. "What powerful constituency would be treated that way? If he knew there were problems, why did he sign it?"

To win an election, that's why. It was Clinton's "triangulation" strategy of taking Republican issues away from them by solving them -- or pretending to solve them -- himself. Welfare reform would've been a big issue in 1996, but Clinton knocked that stool out from under Bob Dole. The consequences of this political maneuver continue to reverberate today. The New York Times again:

“There is ample reason to be concerned here,” said Ron Haskins, a former Republican Congressional aide who helped write the 1996 law overhauling the welfare system. “The overall structure is not working the way it was designed to work. We would expect, just on the face it, that when a deep recession happens, people could go back on welfare.”

“When we started this, Democratic and Republican governors alike said, ‘We know what’s best for our state; we’re not going to let people starve,’ ” said Mr. Haskins, who is now a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “And now that the chips are down, and unemployment is going up, most states are not doing enough to help families get back on the rolls.”

In fact, it's probably hurting our economy not to increase welfare rolls at this time. Retail sales are down and the best way to get people to spend money is to get money to people who absolutely need it; these are the only people who are guaranteed to spend. This is the reasoning behind extending unemployment benefits.

But we can't, because we've given up control of one of our economic tools. The states can't use it, because they can't afford to, and the feds can't use it, because they don't have it anymore.

The moral of this story is beware Democrats trying to appease Republicans. When you pass laws that don't have a rational basis and instead are based in ideology, demagoguery, and false information, the results can't possibly be good. Welfare reform, widely claimed as a success story, is a failure. It failed because it had no logical or factual basis, only emotional appeal.

That failure should've been as obvious in 1996 as it is today.

-Wisco

Bush on Compassion

Reading the news paper can often be a jarring experience. You can read one story, then move on and find other stories that completely contradict it. At least, this has been my experience for the last six or seven years. The Bush administration has a very bad habit of saying one thing, while doing the exact opposite. Orwell's Newspeak slogans "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength" would seem right at home in the White House press room, where contradiction is embraced with a big bear hug.

So, it wasn't really surprising to see Bush practicing his own brand of cognitive dissonance on the occasion of the King Holiday.

Associated Press:

President Bush today hailed Martin Luther King Jr. as a towering figure and called on the country to honor his legacy by showing compassion to those in need.

"It's fitting that we honor his service and his courage and his vision," Bush said during a visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library with first lady Laura Bush.

His comments came on the federal holiday honoring the birthday of King, who would have been 79 on Jan. 15. An advocate of peaceful resistance and equality for people of all races, King was assassinated in April 1968.

The entire speech is here.

Yeah, I know -- you're thinking Iraq. So was I. Not a lot of compassion is wasted on those people over there. But all I had to do was turn the page and a couple of stories undercut Bush's message of "compassion" a lot closer to home. Another AP piece, titled "Dems, Bush at Odds on Rebate Recipients" in my paper, offered the first contradiction:

The poor are the people most likely to spend a tax rebate, if they are handed one in an economic revival plan. Whether that happens depends on who prevails - the White House or the Democrats who run Congress.

Democrats want to make sure rebates get to more of the poor, including those who have jobs but earn too little to pay income taxes.

The idea is the more that people spend, the more it will energize an economy threatening to slide into a recession for the first time since 2001. According to many economists, the lower that people are on the income ladder, the more probable it is that they will spend a rebate and spend it quickly - just the shot for the ailing economy. These people are more likely to be living from one paycheck to the next, without other assets to draw on.

"The White House, for now, envisions providing one-time rebate checks to people who pay federal income taxes," the piece goes on. "That would leave out millions of the working poor, who do not make enough to pay income taxes but do pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes."

And here's where things get weird. AP quotes Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as saying that Bush "is focused on broad-based tax relief for those who are paying taxes. And that's - that was the principle he laid out. This is something that has worked well before. It's worked in 2001, worked in 2003."

Yeah, except it didn't work in 2001 and 2003. Bush added zero net jobs in his first term -- the first time that had happened since Herbert Hoover. Bush is so committed to top heavy tax breaks that he's willing to ignore the obvious -- if you want money to move, you get money to people who need it. The CEO of MegaCorp isn't going to look at his rebate check and say, "Honey, look! Now we can finally get that new fridge we need!" The fact is that money moves up the economic ladder a lot easier than it does down. Bush's supply-side economic voodoo doesn't work because it's bass-ackward and anti-capitalist. It's actually trying to force capitalism to work in a way that it doesn't. If the idea that money moves up the ladder wasn't true, capitalism would be a failed system and there would be no wealthy. There have been wealthy capitalists a lot longer than there's been a "trickle down theory" -- hell, there have been wealthy capitalists a lot longer than there's been the word "capitalists."

But the real story here is that Bush went one place to talk about " compassion to those in need," then formulated a policy that did the exact opposite. Screw the poor -- they don't pay taxes. Well, not real taxes, anyway. Just rinky-dink payroll taxes like Social Security and Medicare. In Bush world, this is equal to paying no taxes at all.

Bush's commitment to compassion for those in need takes another hit in another AP piece -- this one was "Bush Strategy: Hold Dems on Health Care" when I read it:

The Bush administration's health agenda this year will consist largely of fending off Democratic lawmakers until a new president and Congress take charge.

In a preview of what is ahead, Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt says the administration will work to limit the government's role in the delivery of health care. That goal is at odds with several Democratic proposals, such as giving the health chief the power to negotiate drug prices and greatly increasing enrollment in federally sponsored health insurance for children.

So pharmaceutical companies will still be able to rake you over the coals and uninsured sick kids remain sick and uninsured. I know there's "tough love," but is there "tough compassion?" In fact, never mind how compassionate this isn't, this story is another story about how Bush is working directly against a strong economy.

For one thing, the lack of universal coverage is actually making US manufacturers less competitive than foreign companies. By providing health insurance and drug coverage to employees, a factory in Boise has an added expense that a factory in Japan does not. If you're really committed to trickle down BS, then call expanded health coverage "corporate welfare." The supply-siders will become instant fans.

And, in terms of economic stimulus, expanding coverage would be a long term boon. In 2007, 63% of Americans saw their health care costs rise. 50% put off going to see a doctor and 28% didn't fill or skipped doses of their prescribed medications. If coverage expanded, not only would we all be healthier as a whole, but consumers would get a boost in the money they'd be free to spend.

Economics is like a tree -- starve the roots and you starve the branch. It's the people at the bottom who move the money and it's the people at the top who collect it. The economy won't improve if you're only getting money to the people on top. Get money to people who need it and they'll spend it pretty much that same day. A hungry person doesn't lose a lot of time getting a lunch and people who need stuff -- as opposed to those who only want stuff -- don't lose a lot of time buying what they need.

Long, long ago, President Bush used to talk about "compassionate conservatism." But, in the intervening years, he's proved that his compassion is reserved for fetuses and stem cells -- in other words, hypothetical people. When it comes to compassion for actual people, Bush doesn't have any. He talks a good game, but he doesn't play.

So, the next time Bush manages to string together a few pretty words, remember that he doesn't mean them. They're just things he has to say, because saying the things he'd like to say are impossible in the circumstances. At the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Library, Bush couldn't say that wealthy people need more money, that the taxes the poor pay aren't real taxes and don't really count, or that sick kids don't really matter much in the grand scheme of things.

So he talked about "compassion" and meant it as much as when the cashier at Burger King tells you to "Have a nice day." It's just something appropriate you say at the appropriate time. It doesn't mean a damned thing. And, since it's meaningless, it doesn't matter that his words don't match his deeds, that his commitment is to the least compassionate route or that his plans are to comfort the comfortable. In doesn't matter if none of his words are true.

They're just something meaningless and pretty you say when the moment calls for it.

--Wisco

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