General Discussion

xchrom

(108,903 posts) Sun Nov 10, 2013, 09:09 AM Nov 2013

The GOP’s Poverty Denialism

http://www.thenation.com/article/177032/gops-poverty-denialism

A homeless man in New York, December 15, 1995. Today, homelessness in the city is at a record high. (AP Photo/Adam Nadel)

Here is how little the Republicans care about the increasingly harrowing situation of the poor: they can’t even be roused to blame President Obama for it—because to do so they’d have to acknowledge that it matters.

The news recently has been full of stories of mounting desperation in America. In The New Yorker, Ian Frazier reported that there are now more homeless people in New York City than at any time since the concept of “modern homelessness” arose in the 1970s. Nationwide, new Education Department data reveal that the number of homeless schoolchildren has hit a record high of 1.2 million. Meanwhile, on November 1, the benefits of every food stamp recipient in the country were cut by an average of 7 percent and already overburdened food banks prepared to ration distributions or turn people away. “It is too bad we have come to this in our country,” the head of the Ohio Association of Foodbanks told the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

In a minimally functioning political system, there would be a debate about potential solutions to these unfolding disasters. After all, conservatives once claimed they had superior answers to the problems of poverty. Richard Nixon lambasted welfare for encouraging family breakups and penalizing work, but he sought to replace it with a guaranteed minimum income. Poverty obsessed 1996 vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp, who used to call himself a “bleeding-heart conservative.” George W. Bush dubbed himself a “compassionate conservative” and made the channeling of public funds to religious charities a signature issue. There was much to criticize in conservative approaches to poverty, but they at least emerged from a modest political consensus that the suffering of the poor was real and that something should be done about it.

Now, instead, we see on the right a combination of poverty denialism and outright contempt. Fox News constantly regales its viewers with tales of the lavish lifestyles of aid recipients. Between food stamps and tax credits, Fox’s Charles Payne argued in March, “it gets a little comfortable to be in poverty.” A recurring Fox segment called “Entitlement Nation” begins with an animated grasping hand smashing through a map of the United States. Recently, it featured a libertarian think-tanker criticizing free school lunches on the grounds that poor kids suffer from “obesity, and not the fact that they’re not getting enough calories.”