Musings and books
The silver lining to the shit-filled cloud
Now that the Republicans have half of Congress, they have to start delivering, or the same wave of populist anger that swept them into the House of Representatives will sweep them right back out again. And I think they're completely incapable of actually getting anything fixed, because the greedy ( Read more... )
Now that the Republicans have half of Congress, they have to start delivering, or the same wave of populist anger that swept them into the House of Representatives will sweep them right back out again. And I think they're completely incapable of actually getting anything fixed, because the greedy ( Read more... )
Your reason.com link is a little confusing here; I think welfare reform is important, but there are lots of people who are poor for reasons that have nothing to do with failing to work sufficiently hard - just take a look at any of the thousands of people bankrupted by their medical bills when they get screwed over by their insurance companies, or the millions of people that have been looking for jobs for the last couple years because the Republican economic policies damaged the economy. The meme of "the poor are poor because they're lazy" is just one of the talking points that the right wing uses to justify their classism. There are certainly some poor people who are lazy, but there are some rich people who are lazy as well, and the difference is that the rich lazy people were lucky enough to be set for life from the day they were born.
More generally, history shows pretty clearly that the last thirty years or so, with Reagan-era economic policies dominating the country, has grown GDP while leaving median real wages stagnant, or even declining against inflation. So where's all that money going? It's pretty clearly going to the top few percent. If those Republican policies were actually going to decrease the percentage of poor and middle-class people, making them upper-middle-class or rich, median wages should have climbed as a result of those policies.
If nothing else, look at the fact that the Republicans refuse to pass tax cuts for the middle class without stapling on $700 billion of deficit's worth of tax cuts for the rich. That pretty easily puts the lie to the idea that the Republicans are fighting for the success of the middle class.
(Also, the idea that Obama isn't interested in compromise is full of shit, considering he's done practically nothing else since he got into office. He's hardly a hard-left president.)
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The reason article ties into the last time we had a republican legislature and a democrat president. Poverty had been rock solid for the entire 30-40 years of the "war on poverty" until the Republican Legislature and Democrat president pushed through welfare reform. I'm hoping that Obama will actually work with the republicans and we'll see another era of reasonable budgets and rational reforms, but everything I've seen from past "compromises" indicates that he isn't going to be Bill Clinton.
It's not about "lazy" people at all, it's about people dependent on government. The new people are avoiding the cultural and governmental trap that has kept our existing populations impoverished. The reliance on government to take care of all of your needs. Until we change the structure of these programs to reward those who get off the program, and reward those who get people off of the program instead of punishing both, we're going to keep people impoverished... (The social worker who actually helps their client and gets them a job that lasts loses out because they have a smaller base of people, they won't get promoted if they have less clients...)
The Upper middle class can become rich without the median income budging, btw. The median is just that, 50% above, 50% below. If you're working on moving the top 20 percent into being rich, it isn't necessarily going to budge the bottom 70% of people. Especially when you have tax credits and programs that are spreading further and further out into the population that are designed to keep people poor and dependent. If you look at the median income earners, they're either not paying any income taxes, or are very close to not paying any income taxes, and a very good chance that they are being subsidized by the top 50% of people who do pay taxes.
I still wonder what he's compromised on, past talking of compromising. No single payer? Yeah, but there's triggers in there that will lead to single payer if the system gets bad enough, combined with regulations designed specifically to make sure the system gets bad enough. You can keep your health insurance? Oh, sure, as long as it meets all of these new regulations... The republicans put forth a number of health insurance ideas that were all struck down, from tort reform to opening up markets to reducing regulations from the FDA. A few extreme positions were compromised, but they were like the really bad jokes that script writers put in when they give a script to the standards and practices censors. Throwaways to make the other stuff look tame by comparison. We still have government dictating what has to be in an insurance plan and what things can and can't be paid for and controlling what treatments that the doctors can use instead of leaving that up to the doctor.
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And it absolutely is about demonizing poor people as lazy. That's one of the major emotional arguments the right wing makes when they talk about cutting social services. Go ahead and search for the word "lazy" in that article. I guarantee you that the article's quoting that person as support for their argument. I agree that the way a lot of these programs get carried out may need to change, but that's a far cry from the social service budget cuts and program cancellations that Republicans are always pushing for. (And further, I have serious doubts that the social workers are actually incentivized to prevent their clients from doing well; if you like, I'll ask a couple of social-worker friends what would happen in their jobs if the number of their clients that got steady jobs tripled tomorrow. From my conversations with them, I'm pretty sure there are far more cases than workers that can handle them right now anyway.)
I understand that in theory, as long as nobody below the 50% line moves, the median can stay the same. You specifically said that Republican policies would reduce the number of poor and middle-class people, which is why I'm calling bullshit on that one.
The entire health-care reform bill was one big compromise, yes. Between the progressives' argument for single-payer and the conservatives' desire to keep the insurance industry as intact as possible. He's certainly been compromising on civil rights issues, dragging his feet on DADT and actually defending both DADT and DOMA in court, likely because he doesn't want to risk the political battle right now - it may not be a legislative compromise, but it is one nevertheless. He's compromised on a lot of the military issues as well, backing away from his stances during the campaign.
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The problem with calling BS on that one issue and saying that all republican policies are bad because of it is that only 2 of the policies have even been implemented. Tax cuts and welfare reform. Tax cuts have helped the upper 20-40% improve, but haven't improved it for the lower class for reasons I describe below. Welfare reform was passed and had an impact on the poverty rate, but not enough to raise the median wage because it wasn't done in concert with a number of other fiscal conservative policies that I'm referring to as being things that would help the poor. In fact, both the republicans and democrats have been pushing the opposite direction on those policies.
The only thing that can reduce the number of poor is reforming the corrupt government systems that keep them poor. In particular, business licensing/regulation, education and welfare. The welfare system is designed to create massive disincentives for people who might want to work. If they work, they lose a huge chunk of money. It costs them money to work rather than earning them money up until a certain threshold. The business licensing and regulation creates barriers to anyone including minorities who want to start a business up for themselves. Poorly implemented government-run education makes it difficult for people to get more than the most menial of jobs, so they won't get the higher paying jobs that would let them beat the threshold where they start earning more than welfare. These 3 things combine to create a massive trap that keeps people impoverished. People new to the country are avoiding falling into that trap to begin with by not getting on welfare, and starting with better education...
The fact that both parties are at fault is particularly obvious in education. Studies of other countries that have better education results than we do with less money indicate that the two things you need are independence of schools so they can try new things, and having competition with the money following the student to whichever school they choose.
Both parties are 50% wrong and 50% right. The democrats at least partially have that independence of schools and the ability to set their own curriculum is an essential part of making schools work, declarations from politicians and central institutions are doomed to failure. But they're utterly wrong on the school funding and competition, as well as unionization of schools. The republicans have the funding thing down, where the money follows the student to whatever school they choose, but they put in the NCLB which is a massive intrusion into the school's independence.
The same is true of many things. Both parties have good ideas, but the compromises tend to go the opposite direction of the good ideas. They compromise on education, and get a system where it's top-down control, throwing lots of money at schools, and that money can only go to public schools. A recipe for failure. They compromise on taxes and spending, doing moderate tax cuts without cutting spending, borrowing money to spend on projects that do not actually do any long-term good.
I'm certainly not saying that recent past republican administrations have improved any of those things. A great many things were done during the Bush admin that irked fiscal conservatives, and we complained about it, but those complaints fell on deaf ears just like our complaints over the last 4 years of democrat dominance of congress have fallen on deaf ears... Up until the election, at least.
But demonizing the tea party republicans and saying the republicans have no principles is essentially demonizing the people who actually intend to fix those 3 things. The washington democrats and washington republicans both have stakes in keeping the system the way it is, only the new republicans and libertarians have any chance of pushing reforms in these areas. I think this congress is more like the 1994 one than they are like the 2000-2006 republicans...
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Tax cuts and welfare reform aren't the only Republican economic policies to have been implemented, either. The massive financial-industry deregulation that caused the current recession is another Republican policy.
I do see where you're coming from re: concerns about the social service programs becoming a self-perpetuating institution; I'm emailing the social workers I know to get their take on it.
I agree that any welfare system that incentivizes staying on welfare is horribly broken, and that does need fixing. The fix isn't cutting funding to the services, though, it's restructuring the requirements around them so they work better - or even moving the funding from there to a new class of social service that does actually incentivize getting off of welfare. And there are plenty of people who do manage to get off welfare, because pride in making a living for oneself is incentive enough for them; and others actually find a job that pays more than they're making in welfare checks.
Business licensing is not that painful; I know, having just gone through the process myself. Setting up an LLC was kind of annoying and required a few hours of a lawyer's time to draw up a bunch of documents, but a sole proprietorship is really damn easy to set up. Maybe it's worse elsewhere, I don't know.
Education definitely needs to be improved, but it still needs to be kept freely available to everyone. I'd love to see a system where everyone got a voucher and schools were run like business, competing for the tax dollars that came with the vouchers - but only if there were a way to guarantee that there wasn't a way to price poor people out of the better schools.
In general, and I realize this distinction has been lost in a lot of this conversation because I forgot to make the point like I usually do - I think there are a lot of good ideas coming out of the actual fiscal-conservative wing of the Republican Party. However, the fact is that the priorities of the party as an institution are largely set by the party leaders, who appear to be wholly bought and owned by corporations seeking the freedom to extract profit without any regulations, and by wealthy people who are pushing for tax cuts so they can hold on to more of their money, the country's economic stability be damned. And between that and the fact that the Republican leaders enforce a lot more party-line discipline than the Democratic ones do, as far as I'm concerned they've earned this criticism.
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I'm not saying we cut welfare, a better solution is to make it so that the benefits slowly phase out as income grows, rather than stopping suddenly. Also, one thing Benjamin Franklin said would be helpful is to make those who are poor uncomfortable in their poverty. Finding ways of making it slightly shameful to be getting that assistance would encourage people to make their way away from it, combined with making it so they could ease themselves off of it until they can stand on their own. If you're successful and you do it right, the cost for welfare will go down on its own without needing cuts.
As for the voucher system, such a system was in place in washington DC. It did a very good job of getting the poorest of students into very good schools, and did so until it was canceled by the current administration. Only because of huge backlash did they permit current students to continue, but they shut it down for all new students. I imagine that they wouldn't need to get into the best schools, just that there were multiple choices available for all students that were reasonable... The existence of multiple options for all should improve the education for all (as long as it also lets the schools experiment and find better ways of teaching.)
BTW, you do know for whom they are getting that profit, right? It's profit that goes to things like 401k programs for people to retire, for pension programs for unions, for the savings of the elderly, etc. It's not just going to a bunch of wealthy people.
Is it better to have limited sane regulations, or to have overarching extremely powerful regulations whose crafting is done to the specifications of the largest corporations? I vote for limited regulations with more protections of individual rights.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about.
The EPA is meant to reduce pollution in the environment, right? Well, when you have an oil spill, the obvious course would be to use any technology that you have available even if it's not perfect if the alternative is to leave all of the oil in the water. We had a number of foreign oil skimmers that were available very soon after the spill, but they weren't permitted to help with the effort. The EPA regulations though state that any water put into the ocean must have less than 15 parts per million of oil. Theoretically this is to protect from people dumping pollution into the ocean, but it's stupid in this case because it is an operation to reduce the pollution in the ocean. With rigid rules like this, greater good is sacrificed for adherence to the letter of the regulation and trying to get an exemption in this case proved futile and the result came far too late...
A sane regulation would permit putting some oil back in the ocean if the quantity is being reduced compared to the intake. A sane regulation would permit those harmed by the pollution to easily bring a complaint about it in court, rather than having the EPA just unilaterally block things and bring suit themselves. In this case, if they had to prove that the small amount of oil left in the water was pollution being added by those doing the cleanup, they wouldn't be able to do that in court.
Of course, you want there to be lawyers available that people who do not have the means to get their own can use to help them protect their rights in court as a replacement for these sprawling, inefficient, and bloated bureaucracies. Allow people whose rights are directly affected to easily and at little cost to themselves sue to force the company to either do the cleanup themselves, or pay for the cleanup and other improvements to the areas involved.
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The debate on if income tax in general is a good thing, or if another method of funding would be better is left for another time...
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