OPINION
The poor, with us again in 2014
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merica’s poor have risen and fallen as objects of politics in cycles of 30 to 50 years, and in the era of Barack Obama and the tea party they have scaled yet another peak. The great battles of our time are altogether about whether to provide federal subsidies to buy health insurance for people who are too poor to afford it and whether to reduce or eliminate the government’s food aid, unemployment benefits, housing assistance and Medicare and Social Security benefits — the safety net that is supposed to relieve people of the circumstances of low incomes and meager assets. But for one side in this ancient skirmish, which we may generically refer to as the Republican Party, the terms of the poverty argument are starkly different from the past. The argument was always what to do about the underclass, what with all the Bible’s pronouncements about the prevalence of the poor and its exhortations that the privileged of society help them, sometimes with heaven or hell as the reward or punishment for doing so or not. Democrats proposed government intervention to help the poor — Social Security, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, work programs and food and credit
relief in the Great Depression’s New Deal and the antipoverty programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. ERNEST Republicans had DUMAS a different, often vaguer, approach that generally included a smaller government role, but they did have an approach. President Nixon’s antidote to poverty and to the failures of Johnson’s Great Society was a universal health insurance program, much like Obama’s except it would have put the burden on all American employers to provide health insurance for their employees with the government taking care of the others. He proposed a guaranteed minimum income for all workers — the government, of course, providing the guarantee. Democrats didn’t give him the pleasure on either plan, although another Republican, Ronald Reagan, carried through modestly in 1986 on Nixon’s idea of a guaranteed income: the earned-income tax credit. Reagan bragged that he had achieved the biggest antipoverty program in history. He sent checks to people who didn’t earn enough to pay much if any federal income
Tis the season to remember the wall
“W
e have just enough religion to make us hate,” wrote Jonathan Swift “but not enough to make us love one another.” A lifelong religious controversialist, the 18th century Irish satirist definitely knew whereof he wrote. After all, it’s fewer than 20 years since Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland quit dynamiting each other’s gathering places. Even here in the United States, it often seems that picking fights over religion increases during the Christmas season. Everywhere you look, somebody’s insulting somebody else’s religion. To me, the cultural left’s only marginally better than the right. I recently witnessed a remarkable online colloquy concerning a Catholic organization’s shipping 3,000 rosaries to the Philippines to victims of Typhoon Haiyan, “so that they can thank God” as one cynic wrote. “Do these people ever use their minds for one second?” one person asked. “Hearing this is thoroughly depressing. It shows how ignorant and warped so many people are and how daunting is the amount
of education there needs to be to cure the world.” Cure it of what, I wondered. Of typhoons? Of charGENE ity? Or merely of LYONS belief? Almost needless to say, Roman Catholic churches worldwide were taking up special collections for storm victims in that largely Catholic nation — along with religious and humanitarian organizations worldwide. News flash: the world will never be cured. Meanwhile, how this kind of free-floating rage differs from Bible-beating preachers who blame earthquakes and tornadoes on other people’s sexual sins escapes me. The main characteristic of the fundamentalist mind is an inability to refrain from expressing contempt for beliefs different from one’s own — whether one’s spiritual leader is Pat Robertson or Christopher Hitchens. Which brings us back to Sarah Palin’s remarkable appearance at the late Jerry
taxes. 2012 Republicans, following the lead of Mitt Romney, looked askance at the people Reagan bragged about helping — the freeloading 47 percent who didn’t, in 2011, owe income taxes. For three years, during the angriest national debate since secession, over whether the government should try to provide health insurance for people who can’t afford it, economic reports have steadily announced a widening disparity in incomes, a sharp growth in poverty, especially among children, a downward plunge in the prosperity of the median American and a rise in homelessness. Democrats have offered nothing new, except health reform and a continuation of the safety net, while Republicans, or at least the outspoken varieties, have offered something new, denial: Poverty is not a problem, or not one that begs to be solved, and those who are labeled as poor really don’t have it bad at all. The real problem is government efforts to help the poor. At root, that is the debate in 2014 elections across the country, including races for Congress here in Arkansas, notably the expensive battle for the Senate between the evangelical Sen. Mark Pryor, who cites the teachings of Jesus, and Rep. Tom Cotton,
who joined the fight to slash food aid, unemployment, Medicaid and Medicare. The slick ads put it in more elegant terms (it’s all about Barack Obama), but that is the fight. Both the deniers and the defenders are armed with research from the dueling ranks of academic economists, which tender their views in lengthy tracts and in op-ed articles in the likes of the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Economists at George Mason University and the University of Michigan-Flint — and others as well — make the case that the life of the poor and the middle class has not been worsening and is much better than it seems. While middleand lower-class incomes have indeed been stagnant for quite some time while the rich get far richer, the inequality between what people actually consume from week to week — a measure of their relative well-being — has not been growing at all in recent years. The other side is not bereft. Joseph Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank, wrote a piece contending that rapidly rising disparities in income and wealth was wreaking havoc on the country’s well-being and its future and is the principal reason for the nation’s economic collapse in 2008 and its continuing torpor. And then there are your own eyes. When food stamps were slashed Nov. 1, soup kitchens and food banks from Little Rock to New York City were overwhelmed.
Falwell’s Liberty University last week — ity scenes at courthouses, city halls and the last stop on a tour publicizing her book state capitols around the country are about. “Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting Instead, they’re about an “establishment of the Heart of Christmas.” religion” that the same First Amendment “I say in a very jolly Christmasy way,” categorically forbids. the Alaskan babbler claims “that, ‘Enough In typical scattershot fashion, Palin even invoked Virginia’s own Thomas is enough.’ Say enough is enough with this politically correct police out there that is Jefferson, a conventionally pious Foundacting to erode our freedom to celebrate ing Father in her mind, who would, like, and exercise our faith. Some Scrooge totally object to the persecution of people wants to force Christ out of Christmas like her who can’t make everybody admit and wants to ban Jesus out of the reason that their God is America’s God: for the season?” “I think Thomas Jefferson would cerTo hear Palin tell it, there’s a veritable tainly recognize it and stand up and he army of “angry atheists armed with an wouldn’t let anybody tell him to sit down attorney” who “want to try to abort Christ and shut up.” Now it’s definitely true that Jefferson from Christmas” by filing lawsuits “when they see a plastic Jewish family on some- was rarely shy about his religious views. body’s lawn — a nativity scene, that’s basi- Courtesy of Martin Longman in Washcally what it is right?” ington Monthly, here’s his opinion about Actually, no. what Palin calls “the reason for the seaBut never mind theology, here’s the son” from an 1823 letter to John Adams: deal: If Palin or anybody else can provide “the day will come when the mystical gena single, verifiable instance of somebody eration of Jesus, by the supreme being as being successfully sued for exhibiting a his father in the womb of a virgin will be crèche, a cross or any religious symbol classed with the fable of the generation of on private property anywhere in the U.S., Minerve in the brain of Jupiter.” they’d have something to complain about. Like Swift, Jefferson recognized the They’d also have the certain support dangers of religious strife. That’s precisely of the American Civil Liberties Union in why, he assured Connecticut Baptists in defense of their First Amendment rights. 1802, the First Amendment decreed “a wall But of course that’s not what these (to of separation between church and State.” A wall that protects us still. my mind overblown) fights over Nativwww.arktimes.com
DECEMBER 12, 2013
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