This is only one piece of an insidious agenda of abject austerity being pushed in Washington, on Wall Street, in the corporate media, and in many state capitals -- a cold demand that governments abandon the poor. The pushers are the usual cabal of 1-percenters who view themselves as "the creators" and everyone else as moochers.
Through PR campaigns, hoked-up "studies" by for-hire academics, targeted outlays of political donations, and various voodoo incantations, those austerians have been able in the last couple of years to fabricate a climate of crisis -- almost a panic -- over government deficits. They screech in unison that the sky is falling, that America faces imminent financial ruin unless federal and state budgets are balanced, pronto.
The place to start, declared the "deficit scolds" (as they were dubbed by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has been a splendid and tenacious debunker of their doomsday cries) is with those "wasteful" welfare programs that "entrap" the poor in an "immoral" dependency on government "largesse." No less of a social scholar than Newt Gingrich has offered a specific example of the austere Dickensian utopia that the plutocrats envision for poor people: "It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child [labor] laws which are truly stupid," he clucked in 2011. "These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to come take care of the school."
Right-wing governors in Wisconsin, Ohio, Maine, Florida, Indiana, Arizona, Texas, and elsewhere have gleefully embraced the austerity flimflam, using it as a cudgel not only to bust unionized janitors, but also to crush all public employee unions and eliminate hundreds of thousands of good jobs.
Meanwhile, Ryan's budget bludgeoners and such goofball governors as Rick "Oops" Perry have teamed up to hammer Medicaid, leaving millions of low-income Americans (about 75 percent of them children) without the basic human right of a civilized society: Health care. Also, tens of thousands of children have already been cut from Head Start; untold numbers of homebound seniors had to be dropped by Meals on Wheels; and hundreds of thousands of low-income veterans (many of them homeless) have had their housing, tuition, job-training, and suicide-prevention assistance eliminated.
Abandoning America's most vulnerable people in a time of both rising poverty for the many and rising wealth for the few is economically stupid, socially destructive, and utterly immoral. And to assert that such shameful austerity is necessary for the nation's economic health is a lie. In fact, even Wall Street analysts are now alarmed over the damage being done by the austerians. One leading financial firm reports that extreme budget cutting "has detracted from growth in five of the past seven quarters," while also adding at least a percentage point (more than two million people) to the ranks of the unemployed.
Punishing the poorIt's said that poverty is its own punishment, but that's not harsh enough for Scroogians who view those in need of a helping hand as failed humans who must not be coddled, but chastened by both government and corporate forces.
Indeed, In Dickens' classic Christmas novel, old Ebenezer was the perfect personification of 19th century England's nasty rich. Asked to make a charitable donation to aid the poor, he curled his lip in contempt and snarled: "Are there no prisons?"
Ah, the old days. But wait -- Scrooge lives! Right here in the USA of 2013, debtors' prisons are back. A third of our states presently allow collection agencies to sue and local judges to jail people who're too broke to make a credit card payment or pony up the cash for a traffic fine, etc.
This is happening to thousands of poor Americans, even though the Supreme Court ruled in 1983 that it's unconstitutional to imprison people solely because they're unable to pay such fines. In April, ACLU of Ohio issued a chilling report documenting this outrage. Titled "The Outskirts of Hope," it found that municipal courts across that state are routinely wasting taxpayer dollars and ruining lives by repeatedly (and illegally) jailing debtors who owe only a few hundred bucks, but are out of work, out of money, and out of hope (read it at he ACLU's blog.)
Making it far worse, many states have privatized the supervision of misdemeanor offenders--and these corporate enforcers can really put the mean in misdemeanor. In Georgia, for example, not only must debtors scrape up cash to pay their fines, but the probation corporation hits them with at least $35 a month in supervisor fees. The system is a trap -- an impoverished debtor might finally be able to pay off a $600 fine to the court, but then owes $650 to cover corporate fees. Can't pay? Go back to the judge, be assessed another fine, then get turned over again to the probation company to rack up more fees.
Right-wing lawmakers seem to have a sociopathic compulsion to pile on the poor. For example:
- Tennessee State Representative Stacey Campfield proposed this year that parents on temporary welfare assistance be punished if their children are struggling in school. A child's failure to make "satisfactory progress," the bill decreed, would result in a 30-percent cut in that needy family's $185-a-month payment (second lowest in the nation). So, learn kids -- or Mommy will feel the lash of the state! Campfield rejected arguments that his proposal would put an unfair burden on people already burdened with poverty. After all, he explained, parents could have the family's benefits restored by simply hiring a tutor for their children. Even his fellow GOPers gagged on that, so he was forced to pull the bill.
- Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst and Governor Perry pushed a new welfare law this year, with Dewhurst declaring: "It is a legitimate function of government to help people who are not able to help themselves." However, these two peacocking, right-wing millionaires were not offering a helping hand to the needy, but a gratuitous slap. Every Texan who applies for unemployment benefits or welfare payments, demanded these "small government" poseurs, should be forced to pee-in-the-cup for drug testing. This is shameful piss-on-the-poor grandstanding. Drug-testing for benefits has proven to be a total waste of taxpayer funds (beneficiaries actually have a much lower rate of drug use than the general public). But, spread by the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council. (See Lowdown, June 2011), such gestures of spite are the latest right-wing fad, having been submitted in some three dozen states.
- On the other hand, the far right does want to give something to the poor: A tax increase. Perry, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and other prominent Repubs express dismay that the bulk of the poor and near poor pay no income tax. Hello: LOW INCOME PEOPLE HAVE LOW INCOMES -- too low to reach the threshold for owing federal income taxes.
Who are we? As a nation, as a people -- how do our actions (as opposed to our ideals) define us?
A society's response to poverty is one measure that speaks directly to its essential character. In particular, a wealthy society's nonchalant tolerance of poverty in its midst, the willingness of that society's leaders to disregard the spread of poverty, and the callous calculations by some that it is permissible and even profitable to denigrate those mired in poverty -- these are three flashing indicators of a meltdown in our society's moral core.
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