And yes, I mean the phenomenon, not the man. Mr. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the principal author of the last two Congressional Republican budget proposals, isn’t especially interesting. He’s a garden-variety modern G.O.P. extremist, an Ayn Rand devotee who believes that the answer to all problems is to cut taxes on the rich and slash benefits for the poor and middle class.
No, what’s interesting is the cult that has grown up around Mr. Ryan — and in particular the way self-proclaimed centrists elevated him into an icon of fiscal responsibility, and even now can’t seem to let go of their fantasy.
The Ryan cult was very much on display last week, after President Obama said the obvious: the latest Republican budget proposal, a proposal that Mitt Romney has avidly embraced, is a “Trojan horse” — that is, it is essentially a fraud. “Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.”
The reaction from many commentators was a howl of outrage. The president was being rude; he was being partisan; he was being a big meanie. Yet what he said about the Ryan proposal was completely accurate.
Of these, $4.6 trillion is the revenue cost over the next decade of the tax cuts embodied in the plan, as estimated by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. These cuts — which are, by the way, cuts over and above those involved in making the Bush tax cuts permanent — would disproportionately benefit the wealthy, with the average member of the top 1 percent receiving a tax break of $238,000 a year.
Mr. Ryan insists that despite these tax cuts his proposal is “revenue neutral,” that he would make up for the lost revenue by closing loopholes. But he has refused to specify a single loophole he would close. And if we assess the proposal without his secret (and probably nonexistent) plan to raise revenue, it turns out to involve running bigger deficits than we would run under the Obama administration’s proposals.
Meanwhile, 14 million is a minimum estimate of the number of Americans who would lose health insurance under Mr. Ryan’s proposed cuts in Medicaid; estimates by the Urban Institute actually put the number at between 14 million and 27 million.
So the proposal is exactly as President Obama described it: a proposal to deny health care (and many other essentials) to millions of Americans, while lavishing tax cuts on corporations and the wealthy — all while failing to reduce the budget deficit [ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/ryan-obama-and-deficits/ ], unless you believe in Mr. Ryan’s secret revenue sauce. So why are centrists rising to Mr. Ryan’s defense?
Well, ask yourself the following: What does it mean to be a centrist, anyway?
It could mean supporting politicians who actually are relatively nonideological, who are willing, for example, to seek Democratic support for health reforms originally devised by Republicans, to support deficit-reduction plans that rely on both spending cuts and revenue increases. And by that standard, centrists should be lavishing praise on the leading politician who best fits that description — a fellow named Barack Obama.
But the “centrists” who weigh in on policy debates are playing a different game. Their self-image, and to a large extent their professional selling point, depends on posing as high-minded types standing between the partisan extremes, bringing together reasonable people from both parties — even if these reasonable people don’t actually exist. And this leaves them unable either to admit how moderate Mr. Obama is or to acknowledge the more or less universal extremism of his opponents on the right.
Enter Mr. Ryan, an ordinary G.O.P. extremist, but a mild-mannered one. The “centrists” needed to pretend that there are reasonable Republicans, so they nominated him for the role, crediting him with virtues he has never shown any sign of possessing. Indeed, back in 2010 Mr. Ryan, who has never once produced a credible deficit-reduction plan, received an award for fiscal responsibility from a committee representing several prominent centrist organizations.
So you can see the problem these commentators face. To admit that the president’s critique is right would be to admit that they were snookered by Mr. Ryan, who is the same as he ever was. More than that, it would call into question their whole centrist shtick — for the moral of my story is that Mr. Ryan isn’t the only emperor who turns out, on closer examination, to be naked.
Hence the howls of outrage, and the attacks on the president for being “partisan.” For that is what people in Washington say when they want to shout down someone who is telling the truth.
Given the well-known Republican antipathy to evolution, President Obama’s recent description of the Republican budget as an example of “social Darwinism” may be a canny piece of political labeling. In the interests of historical accuracy, however, it should be clearly recognized that “social Darwinism” has very little to do with the ideas developed by Charles Darwin in “On the Origin of Species.” Social Darwinism emerged as a movement in the late 19th-century, and has had waves of popularity ever since, but its central ideas owe more to the thought of a luminary of that time, Herbert Spencer, whose writings are (to understate) no longer widely read.
Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” thought about natural selection on a grand scale. Conceiving selection in pre-Darwinian terms — as a ruthless process, “red in tooth and claw” — he viewed human culture and human societies as progressing through fierce competition. Provided that policymakers do not take foolish steps to protect the weak, those people and those human achievements that are fittest — most beautiful, noble, wise, creative, virtuous, and so forth — will succeed in a fierce competition, so that, over time, humanity and its accomplishments will continually improve. Late 19th-century dynastic capitalists, especially the American “robber barons,” found this vision profoundly congenial. Their contemporary successors like it for much the same reasons, just as some adolescents discover an inspiring reinforcement of their self-image in the writings of Ayn Rand .
Although social Darwinism has often been closely connected with ideas in eugenics (pampering the weak will lead to the “decline of the race”) and with theories of racial superiority (the economic and political dominance of people of North European extraction is a sign that some racial groups are intrinsically better than others), these are not central to the position.
The heart of social Darwinism is a pair of theses: first, people have intrinsic abilities and talents (and, correspondingly, intrinsic weaknesses), which will be expressed in their actions and achievements, independently of the social, economic and cultural environments in which they develop; second, intensifying competition enables the most talented to develop their potential to the full, and thereby to provide resources for a society that make life better for all. It is not entirely implausible to think that doctrines like these stand behind a vast swath of Republican proposals, including the recent budget, with its emphasis on providing greater economic benefits to the rich, transferring the burden to the middle-classes and poor, and especially in its proposals for reducing public services. Fuzzier versions of the theses have pervaded Republican rhetoric for the past decade (and even longer).
There are very good reasons to think both theses are false. Especially in the case of the Republican dynasties of our day, the Bushes and the Romneys, success has been facilitated by all kinds of social structures, by educational opportunities and legal restrictions, that were in place prior to and independently of their personal efforts or achievements. For those born into environments in which silver spoons rarely appear — Barack Obama, for instance — the contributions of the social environment are even more apparent. Without enormous support, access to inspiring teachers and skillful doctors, the backing of self-sacrificing relatives and a broader community, and without a fair bit of luck, the vast majority of people, not only in the United States but throughout the world, would never achieve the things of which they are, in principle, capable. In short, Horatio Alger needs lots of help, and a large thrust of contemporary Republican policy is dedicated to making sure he doesn’t get it.
Second, even if rigorous competition enables the talented — or, better, the lucky — to realize their goals, it is completely unwarranted to suppose that their accomplishments will translate into any increased benefit for the overwhelming majority of those who are less fortunate. The strenuous struggle social Darwinism envisages might select for something, but the most likely traits are a tendency to take whatever steps are necessary to achieve a foreseeable end, a sharp focus on narrowly individual goals and a corresponding disregard for others. We might reasonably expect that a world run on social Darwinist lines would generate a cadre of plutocrats, each resolutely concerned to establish a dynasty and to secure his favored branch of industry against future competition. In practical terms it would almost certainly yield a world in which the gap between rich and poor was even larger than it is now.
Rather than the beauty, wisdom, virtue and nobility Spencer envisioned arising from fierce competition, the likely products would be laws repealing inheritance taxes and deregulating profitable activities, and a vast population of people whose lives were even further diminished.
Yet, even if stimulating competition would achieve greater economic productivity, and even if this would, by some miraculous mechanism, yield a more egalitarian distribution of economic resources (presumably through the provision of more remunerative jobs), these welcome material benefits are not all that is needed. To quote a much-cited book, we do not “live by bread alone.” If the vast majority of citizens (or, globally, of people) are to enjoy any opportunities to develop the talents they have, they need the social structures social Darwinism perceives as pampering and counter-productive. Human well-being is profoundly affected by public goods, a concept that is entirely antithetical to social Darwinism or to contemporary Republican ideology, with their mythical citizens who can fulfill their potential without rich systems of social support. It is a callous fiction to suppose that what is needed is less investment in education, health care, public transportation and affordable public housing.
So long as social Darwinism is disentangled from the ancillary eugenic and racist ideas, so long as it is viewed in its core form of the two theses about the glories of competition, the label President Obama pinned on the Republican budget is completely deserved. Because the central ideas of social Darwinism are equally false and noxious, a commitment to truth in advertising should welcome the label. And all of us, including President Obama and the many people whose less spectacular successes have been enabled by social structures and public goods, should hope that the name leads Darwin-hating conservatives to worry about the Republican budget.
by Frederick ClarksonFollow . Thu Apr 05, 2012 at 08:16 PM PDT.
You know that old time dog-whistle you heard the other day -- you know the one -- the one that helps demagogues to name a problem in society, or people who do or say things they don't like, and assign blame? Well, that was Mitt Romney engaging in a foundational part of his campaign to appeal to the Religious Right voters he needs by denouncing "secularism."
While this has been part of the narrative of the Religious Right for decades, few of us outside of the Religious Right and those who study and write about it, have much appreciation for how important this is for the pols who engage in it, and for their audiences that are conditioned to hear it in a certain way.
I wrote an essay [ http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v23n1/secular_fundamentalist.html ] about this in 2008 when the dog whistling had gone bipartisan and Mitt Romney had begun his presidential campaign by whistling for the dog while also trying to claim that he supports the separation of church and state. The Democrats who were afflicted at the time, seem to have since come to their senses about the politics of secular baiting. But it has become a standard part of Romney's act, as it has with Rick Santorum [ http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/2/26/15021/5154/Front_Page/The_JFK_Speech_That_Made_Santorum_Want_to_Throw_Up ] -- and if we listen carefully, we are likely to hear much more of it as the campaign season heats up.
The demagogic pols who do this know that their intended audience is hearing something different than the rest of us. For most of us, secularism means one of two main things: A non-theistic belief system; or the idea that a "secular" government, is neutral with regard to religion, and yet an uncompromised guarantor of the right of religious and non-religious belief. But Religious Rightists hear something different [ http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v23n1/secular_fundamentalist.html ].
Chip Berlet, the senior analyst at Political Research Associates, explained in 1998 that for decades, the Religious Right had already promoted a conspiracy theory that Christianity is under attack by “secular humanists.”
The idea that a coordinated campaign by “secular humanists” was aimed at displacing Christianity as the moral bedrock of America actually traces back to a group of Catholic ideologues in the 1960s. It was Protestant evangelicals, especially fundamentalists, who brought this concept into the public political arena and developed a plan to mobilize grassroots activists as foot soldiers in what became known as the Culture Wars of the 1980s….
The idea of a conscious and coordinated conspiracy of secular humanists has been propounded in various ways by a variety of national conservative organizations and individuals.
The late D. James Kennedy offered a characteristic use of the term:
“God forbid that we who were born into the blessings of a Christian America should let our patrimony slip like sand through our fingers and leave to our children the bleached bones of a godless secular society. But whatever the outcome, one thing is certain: God has called us to engage the enemy in this culture war.”
“I think there is in this country a war on religion. I think there is a desire to establish a religion in America known as secularism.”
“They gave it a lot of thought and they decided to say that in this country that a church — in this case, the Catholic Church — would be required to violate its principles and its conscience and be required to provide contraceptives, sterilization and morning after pills to the employees of the church."
"Those of us who are people of faith recognize this is — an attack on one religion is an attack on all religion."
Actually, churches and houses of worship are explicitly exempt from the coverage requirement, and President Obama announced his intention that the final rule should likewise exempt religious organizations that object to the mandate on religious grounds. HHS has asked for public comment on how best to accommodate the views of religious organizations like schools and hospitals while providing women with access to effective health care. How can that be a national religion of secularism?
Of course, a rule that makes such sweeping exemptions can hardly be called an attack on religious freedom or the establishment of a "religion of secularism," whatever that is.
When Romney and Santorum claim that president Obama, or anyone else, is trying to foist a religion of secularism on America, their audience hears something like what D. James Kennedy said without any need for elaboration. It has been stated so many times in so many ways as the fundamental battle of our time. If there is a culture war, this is what it is about. When you hear about the "war on Christmas" this is what it is about.
There is no more crass, calculated or profound a pander to the Religious Right than when Mitt Romney claims that minor federal rule making constitutes an effort to establish a "religion of secularism."
Romney's weekend: Family photos or political fodder?
Mitt Romney's California beach house has been in the news because of renovation plans that include a car elevator.
From The CNN Political Unit updated 7:10 PM EDT, Mon April 9, 2012
(CNN) -- It's not the way most Americans spent Easter weekend, but then again, most Americans aren't Mitt Romney. And that's the potential problem that will be leveraged against him in the battle for the White House.
The former Massachusetts governor and likely Republican presidential nominee spent the past few days with his family at his beach house in expensive and exclusive La Jolla, California. That's the same three-bedroom home, purchased for $12 million four years ago, that has made headlines over the past couple of years after reports of plans for a major remodeling and expansion.
The home was in the media spotlight again just a few weeks ago, amid reports that the proposed renovations, which would quadruple the size of the structure, included an auto elevator for a four-car garage.
Romney's GOP presidential campaign released a photo on Friday of Mitt and wife Ann Romney decorating Easter eggs with their grandchildren. On Sunday, Romney's son Matt tweeted out a photo of the family taking part in an Easter egg hunt on the expansive lawn belonging to their next-door neighbor.
Also over the weekend, a photo of Romney walking across the beach, wearing a wetsuit and holding a boogie board, made its way onto the political blogs. A day later, in response, son Matt, who's seen in the beach picture with his father, tweeted "water temp was low 60s. I was freezing in my full-length wetsuit. Guess my dad was just happy to be out there."
Are the photos much ado about nothing? Or are they an example of a candidate who might be tone-deaf to how most of the public actually lives.
In 2004, opponents used images of then-Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts windsurfing to tag him an elitist, lumping in windsurfing with some of his other expensive pastimes, including skiing and flying himself between vacation homes.
But boogie-boarding is not an expensive hobby, and a source close to the Romney campaign says it doesn't see a problem with the photos, and that like millions of other Americans, Romney spent the holiday weekend with his family.
"We had 11 of our grandkids staying with us and three of my boys and three of their, of course, their spouses," Romney said Monday, describing his weekend in an interview on former Arkansas governor and former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's radio program. "We had the Easter egg roll over the neighbor's lawn. He has a big lawn we use. We made Easter eggs, we went swimming and surfing in the water. We are in California. It is absolutely delightful."
Romney made millions at Bain Capital, the investment firm he founded in 1984, and at Bain and Company, a management firm he eventually ran. According to a financial disclosure form released by his campaign last year, Romney has assets totaling $190 million to $250 million in value.
He made $42.7 million over the past two years and paid $6.2 million in taxes, according to tax documents released earlier this year by his campaign. Mitt and Anne Romney filed a joint 1040 reporting $21.7 million in 2010 income and $3 million in federal taxes. They also said their 2011 income was $21 million and the tax bill was $3.2 million.
Besides the beach home in La Jolla, Romney owns a property along Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. He used to own a multimillion-dollar ski home in exclusive Deer Valley, Utah.
The "rich guy" and "Wall Street" images were issues for Romney when he first ran for the GOP presidential nomination four years ago. This time around, Romney has been more casual, often shedding the suit for a less buttoned-up look.
But he was attacked earlier in this primary season by rival Republican candidates, including Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, over his wealth.
According to a CNN/ORC International poll released two weeks ago, Republicans nationwide said that Santorum cares more about average Americans than Romney by 47% to 34%.
On the campaign trail, Romney talks bluntly about his financial status, saying, "I've been very successful and I'm not going to apologize for that."
And GOP strategist Ana Navarro says the worst thing Romney can do is be insincere.
"The worst thing Romney can do is pretend to be what he's not. We all know he's a wealthy man. He's a successful man. He's made his money. He doesn't need to apologize about it and the best he can do is embrace it, accept it, and not be awkward about it," Navarro told CNN.
"It's part of a package deal and -- let's face it -- we live in America. In America, being successful and being wealthy is a good thing, not something we resent," she added.
Another GOP strategist said Romney's success should be admired.
"The fact of the matter today, though, is that the American people are hurting. They're worried about their financial future, they're worried about their kids' financial future, and they look at Mitt Romney, who is a self-made guy and very successful, very successful over a number of different enterprises, and I think he's the kind of guy that the American people can look at and say we need this kind of success as a country," said Gentry Collins, who served as political director for both the Republican National Committee and the Republican Governors Association and who ran Romney's 2008 operations in Iowa, but who says he is neutral this cycle.
Will photos of Romney on the beach, or at the La Jolla beach house, be used by the Democratic National Committee or the Obama re-election campaign? Stay tuned.
But Democrats are already making an issue of Romney's wealth through his opposition to the so-called "Buffett Rule," a push by the president and congressional Democrats to get those making more than $1 million a year to pay a higher percentage of their income in federal income and payroll taxes than those who make less.
The bill is named for billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who has argued that it's unfair that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. The measure would require that millionaires pay at least 30% of their income in taxes.
The legislation is opposed by most Republicans, and the Obama re-election team is targeting Romney for his opposition.
"Romney supports tax policies that reward people like him, and now he's just trying to obscure just how much he would benefit," said Obama re-election campaign manager Jim Messina, in a conference call Monday. "... Our message to Mitt is simple: If you don't have anything to hide, release your taxes just like every other candidate for president."
CNN Senior Correspondent Joe Johns contributed to this report.
This Week in Poverty: Will Pennsylvania Rip Another Hole in the Safety Net?
Greg Kaufmann on April 13, 2012 - 8:23 AM ET
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett unveils his 2012-13 state budget proposal before the Pennsylvania House Chamber Tuesday, Feb. 7 2012 in Harrisburg, PA. (AP Photo/Bradley C Bower)
If you’ve never heard of state-funded General Assistance (GA) .. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3603 .. programs, you’re hardly alone. A “safety net of last resort” for very poor people—often childless adults—who don’t qualify for other forms of public assistance, there aren’t too many of them still in existence. Not too long ago most states offered them, but in recent decades they have been eliminated or severely restricted. Now, only thirty states maintain GA programs, and the benefit level for most falls below one-quarter of the poverty line, or less than $2,750 per year.
In a recent report for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), Liz Schott and Clare Cho call this trend “especially troubling” since “a growing number of jobless and elderly” are exhausting their unemployment benefits and continue to be unable to find work.
“Poor, childless adults are becoming even more vulnerable to severe hardship than in the past and are doing so in greater numbers,” write the authors.
One state that still maintains a GA program is Pennsylvania where 68,000 people—or just about one in every 200 residents—receive about $205 per month (five counties offer a little more, twenty-eight counties a little less). But when Republican Governor Tom Corbett released his budget in February he proposed eliminating the program entirely as of July 1. A final budget must be passed and signed by that date, and with Republican majorities in the House and Senate, legal aid lawyer Michael Froehlich of Community Legal Services .. http://www.clsphila.org/Default.aspx .. in Philadelphia says, “It’s not looking good.”
The prospect of the sudden elimination of the safety net of last resort is especially troubling when one considers who is eligible for it: disabled or sick adults without children; domestic violence survivors, many of whom have just fled abusers (lifetime benefit capped at nine months); adults participating in alcohol and other drug treatment programs (also capped at nine months); adults caring for someone sick or disabled, or an unrelated child; and children living with an unrelated adult. In all, over 90 percent of recipients are temporarily or permanently disabled.
“Only twelve states have GA programs for employable people, and Pennsylvania isn’t one of them,” says Schott. “It just serves unemployable people or a small number of persons for whom work is not appropriate, most of whom are children.”
The GA program also serves as a sort of bridge loan while people wait for the Social Security Administration (SSA) to consider a disability claim. Froehlich says that process may take eighteen to twenty-four months, and upon approval of the claim the SSA reimburses the state for the GA benefits it paid during the wait.
“Individuals with pending disability claims use their General Assistance as a bridge that keeps them alive while their claim is pending,” says Froehlich.
Froehlich and Community Legal Services are part of PA Cares for All, .. http://pacaresforall.org/ .. a coalition of more than 100 organizations that are trying to save the program. They press their case on both moral and economic grounds. The moral argument is pretty clear, and the coalition lays it out in a letter to state legislators: “These cuts will eliminate a lifeline for people in desperate crisis. This is not how Pennsylvanians want our government to treat abused women, people with disabilities, orphaned children, and people struggling to overcome drug addictions.”
But it’s the economic case that is perhaps more convincing in these times of budget cuts that routinely target the most vulnerable and least politically powerful people. The $205 per month enables many people to rent a room, pay for transportation to needed appointments, cover co-pays or escape abuse.
“If you eliminate the only source of income for these 68,000 Pennsylvanians overnight—folks who’ve already been determined by their doctors to be temporarily unable to work—it’s not like they are just going to disappear,” says Froehlich. “They are going to show up in the shelter system. Worst case scenario they’re going to show up in the criminal justice system.”
According to the coalition, GA’s $205 monthly payment is a bargain compared to the monthly costs that would be incurred by the state if people are left destitute: homeless shelters run $1,050 per month, per person; foster care $600 to $1,800; incarceration $2,750; and state psychiatric hospitals average $20,584.
“Why are we ditching a system that keeps people off the street and housed in favor of a shelter system that costs five times that?” asks Froehlich.
One current GA recipient, 62-year-old “Suzy,” has been receiving assistance for two years while waiting on the SSA to process her application for disability benefits. She lost her home three years ago after working as a college professor, in catering and food service, and as a tutor, and then caring for her two elderly parents until their deaths.
“I’ve had a bit of an eclectic career, but it has suited me,” she says.
After losing her home Suzy found herself on the streets—“a place I never imagined I would be.” The GA assistance enables her to rent a room in transitional housing. Even though her disability prevents her from working, she’s interviewed for jobs anyway (to no avail) because she’s so desperate for more money. She says the prospect of losing this last bit of assistance is overwhelming.
“It’s too enormous and it’s to the point where I almost go into a willful forgetfulness because I really don’t know that I can deal with it,” she says. “At this point I don’t even have money to buy a toothbrush or a toiletry, and I’m not talking fancy, the dollar store will do.”
Suzy says that a friend recently asked her what she would do if her assistance is cutoff on July 1? She replied, “Jump off a roof.” The friend told her not to do that.
“And I said, ‘You know something? I’m beyond at this point—I’m too tired. I’m beyond saying, Oh no, I won’t do that anymore.’ I just don’t know, because it leaves you with nothing and a crushing burden,” she says.
Suzy did manage to write a letter to her legislators lobbying them to vote against cutting the program, and Froehlich is hopeful that more Pennsylvanians will join in that effort .. http://pacaresforall.org/?page_id=174 .. and also participate in a lobbying day .. http://pacaresforall.org/?p=269 .. on May 7 as they become aware of the issue. But it’s a tough road ahead. The governor’s budget proposes significant cuts to K-12 education, higher education and programs for homelessness, mental health and other disability services. Without additional pressure, the GA program might be last in line for restored funding if any of the governor’s cuts are reversed.
Froehlich says educators, colleges, universities and human services people are all doing an excellent job turning their people out to lobby.
“But it’s very difficult for somebody who is really at the end of their rope to get on a bus, go to Harrisburg, and meet with their legislators,” he says.
What frustrates Froehlich and the coalition most of all is that none of these cuts would be necessary—to any of the programs—if the Legislature would take up the revenue side of the equation. For starters, a planned phased reduction of a corporate “capital stock and franchise tax” .. http://pennbpc.org/commentary-making-better-budget-choices .. beginning this year could be delayed; and corporate loopholes .. http://pennbpc.org/sites/pennbpc.org/files/2012-ten-tax-loopholes.pdf .. could be closed—like “the Delaware loophole,” which allows three out of four companies in Pennsylvania to avoid paying state taxes by claiming a Delaware address. These loopholes represent billions in potential revenues, while the state’s Department of Public Welfare estimates that eliminating the GA program will save just $150 million per year.
“I’m bewildered by these people, I really, really am,” says Suzy. “They are just throwing people away. I guess it’s their solution for the poor, if everybody just dies then that pesky, pesky, little problem will go away.”
TANF: Front-Page New York Times and More
New York Times reporter Jason DeParle did his characteristic outstanding job showing the severe limits of the welfare system—in this case, .. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/us/welfare-limits-left-poor-adrift-as-recession-hit.html [the post this is in reply to] what happens to single mothers and their children when they can’t get Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits, or cash welfare. He does a real service by challenging this assertion by President Bill Clinton’s in 1997: “The debate is over. Welfare reform works.” DeParle notes that this “image of success formed early and stayed frozen in time.”
But the fact is that prior to welfare reform in 1996, 68 of every 100 poor families with children received cash assistance through Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). By 2010, with federal spending capped at 1996 levels and states having discretion about eligibility and time limits, just 27 of every 100 .. http://www.offthechartsblog.org/hardship-in-america-part-2-safety-net-withering-for-poor-families-with-children/ .. poor families received TANF assistance, and benefits in most states are less than 30 percent the federal poverty level. Simply throwing people off of welfare does not success make, and DeParle notes that just one in five poor children now receives cash aid and the average benefit is $350 per month for a family of three.
DeParle vividly depicts an underground economy where single mothers without TANF “have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners—all with children in tow.”
While this story might not be new to Nation readers, it is nonetheless important to see it on the front-page of the Times at a moment when welfare seems completely off the political radar unless a Republican presidential candidate says something totally ignorant or provocative, and even then the debate is limited and doesn’t seem to sustain much beyond the news cycle.
But there is another significant part to this TANF story that DeParle doesn’t go into: that same desperation that forces women who are denied benefits to turn to an underground economy is also present for women and children who are in the TANF system. It’s a system that traps women in low-wage work, and they look for alternative means to survive. The entrepreneurship and the bonds that develop between women as they fight to improve their situation is something that could be harnessed, encouraged and supported through a reformed TANF, rather than punished.
The last couple of months I’ve been researching the experiences of single mothers on TANF in Philadelphia—experiences that seem similar to those of women in many cities. I’ll be writing in more detail about it in coming weeks, but here are some general observations on how many end up trapped in low-wage work and turn to an underground economy.
TANF reauthorization in 2005 made it more difficult for recipients who want to improve their job skills to count education .. http://www.thenation.com/article/160533/worst-ive-seen-far-budget-cuts-meet-poverty-heartland .. toward their work requirement. Instead, they are channeled to for-profit training programs that contract with the city—to train as medical assistants, for example. Completion of the training program doesn’t necessarily lead to a job, and if it does it isn’t anything close to a living wage job. Sometimes the training program is then repeated with the same disappointing result.
Another option is “community service.” These volunteer jobs often involve filing or cleaning and the women don’t receive paychecks, just welfare benefits. One company benefiting from this labor is Comcast, which has TANF recipients cleaning toilets in the Comcast Building. An advocate calls it “being an indentured servant”—paying off benefits with no paycheck as long as women remain on TANF.
In the event a woman finds a better job that pays her more than welfare she sometimes faces a conundrum. She’s still eligible for subsidized childcare but she has to get on a long waiting list—I’ve heard months to years—because TANF participants receive priority. Without affordable, reliable childcare, the pay raise might be negligible or even a net loss. It can also lead to children being placed in childcare situations that increase the risk of abuse or neglect.
In these instances, a parent might choose to stick with the low-wage or “community service” job that provides childcare.
Needing more cash for their families to survive, some women in Philadelphia turn to the underground economy. Side businesses pursued by women on TANF include: hair-braiding; selling used clothes out of the front door; setting up a thrift shop on the corner with knick-knacks, household items, pots and pans, stuffed animals; making dinners and selling them off the front porch; doing nails; housekeeping for mildly wealthier friends; the extreme is prostitution and drug dealing.
The extra cash can’t be put in a bank—the maximum amount of assets one can own and still remain TANF-eligible is just $1000 .. http://www.pacode.com/secure/data/055/chapter177/s177.31.html .. in Pennsylvania, including all bank accounts, cash and property that isn’t one’s home residence. So that extra cash often gets hidden in a bra, or underneath a mattress, or is immediately used for shoes, food or something else for the kids. Another problem is that if there is too much cash around it’s very likely it will be stolen or lost. So it’s common to purchase something that’s hard to steal or that can be resold out the front door in a jam.
Dr. Mariana Chilton is a co-principal investigator for Children’s HealthWatch .. http://www.childrenshealthwatch.org/ .. and founder of Witnesses to Hunger. .. http://www.centerforhungerfreecommunities.org/our-projects/witnesses-hunger .. Women in Witnesses to Hunger use photographs and stories to document their experiences in poverty and learn to advocate for change at the local, state and federal levels. These single mothers also form groups in their own neighborhoods to support and counsel one another as they navigate the system. There are forty-four participants in Philadelphia, and dozens more on the East Coast.
“People assume that women in TANF are stupid, lazy, inarticulate and passive—and that couldn’t be further from the truth,” says Chilton. “These ladies may not think of themselves as entrepreneurs, but they are, and they can make a huge difference in their own lives and communities if the environment were right. TANF is not setting up the right environment.”
Chilton proposes that TANF test a group micro-lending project that would build wealth through financial literacy training, nutrition education, access to banking services and microfinance in the form of small loans of less than $1200. These efforts would be undertaken by groups of ten to fifteen women who would meet weekly to encourage each other to save funds, repay loans and provide social support. Business ideas that would be supported include hair braiding, providing childcare, janitorial and housekeeping services, home decorating, catering, operating Internet cafés or small retail stores, tailoring and making specialty gifts. Measurable outcomes would include indicators of the families’ ability to lift themselves out of poverty, and improved health among mothers and their children.
Chilton has spoken with individuals at the Pennsylvania Department of Welfare and the US Agency for Children and Family Services and representatives have expressed openness to the project.
“We know through Witnesses to Hunger that there is power in the group—we’ve been keeping these various groups together for almost four years now,” she says. “When a group of three or more women really bonds together, the power in the room is enormous. Because there’s an enormous amount of resource sharing, energy, support and camaraderie, it helps them overcome their social isolation. They are very disempowered by the isolation. When they come together they actually see that they have a lot of power: they help each other, they provide advice, they pool their resources and money, they provide childcare, they do all different kinds of things.”
Chilton’s idea is partly influenced by the Society for the Elimination of Rural Poverty (SERP) .. http://www.serp.ap.gov.in/SHG/index.jsp .. in Andrha Pradesh, Hyderbad, India. It supports over 900,000 self-help groups providing employment to over 10 million rural poor women and implementing World Bank–assisted poverty alleviation projects. Some of the women have now started feeding centers, for example, where any mother who’s very poor can come and receive three meals a day, seven days a week.
On May 2–4 in Philadelphia, SERP representatives and participants from India will be joining Chilton and Witness to Hunger participants at the Beyond Hunger: Real People, Real Solutions .. http://www.centerforhungerfreecommunities.org/taking-action/beyond-hunger-real-people-real-solutions .. conference. (More information below in “Upcoming Events.”) A lot of times people go to anti-poverty conferences and say that they hear too much from guys like me, and not enough from the people actually living through these hardships. This definitely won’t be that kind of conference.
I’ll be there though, and I hope readers will consider coming too. It’s a great opportunity to learn a lot about the challenges faced by low-income people in America today, and how we can create a system that truly supports opportunity, self-sufficiency and community.
The 'New York Times' Misses the Mark on Inequality, Marriage Katha Pollitt on July 17, 2012 - 6:35 PM ET
Do we really need a front-page story in the Sunday New York Times to tell us that a woman with a college degree and a good solid marriage is better off than a college dropout raising three kids alone? In “Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’,” .. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by-i-do.html?pagewanted=all .. Jason DeParle profiled Jessica Schairer and Chris Faulkner, two white women from conventional church-going Midwestern middle-class families whose life trajectory looked much the same when they graduated high school and set out for college. Jessica, though, got pregnant by her freshman-year boyfriend and was persuaded by him to drop out and start a family. Now she’s raising their children in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by herself, on one income (just under $25,000 for a full time job as assistant director of a daycare center) and food stamps.
Meanwhile, Chris, her boss at the daycare center, did everything “by the book” and in the right order: college, marriage, kids. Now Chris has a combined household income of $95,000 a year, with plenty of money to spend on her sons’ sports and extracurricular activities, to say nothing of a loving, involved dad to share the parenting, while Jessica is exhausted, lonely, and can barely afford generic breakfast cereal, let alone Boy Scout Camp for her troubled son. Yes, yes, is the takeaway: inequality is increasing and good jobs are hard to find, but “what most separates” the two women “is not the impact of globalization on their wages but a 6-foot-8-inch man named Kevin.”
Well, if only we could clone Kevin—or maybe put great big Good Guy and Bad Guy signs on young men so that naïve college girls could tell which slacker boys are exploitive louts and which ones just need a nudge to become prime husband material. (Kevin went through a layabout stage but reformed because he wanted to marry Chris. “Marriage, in other words, can help make men marriageable.”) DeParle seems to think getting married transforms people, and maybe sometimes it does—but the lightbulb has to want to change. If marriage turned men into Kevins, there wouldn’t be so much divorce. Let’s say Jessica had gotten her boyfriend to marry her as they originally discussed—and she stayed with him for seven years and three kids, so she clearly tried to make it happen (“I wanted him to love me,” she says—what a world of sadness in those words!)—he would still have been a nogoodnik who rarely worked, lived off Jessica and his mother, and had little to do with the kids even when they all lived together. She would be long divorced by now. Her only other serious boyfriend, whom she dated for a year before letting him move in to her kids’ great delight, had to be removed after six months by the police. I don’t mean to be discouraging here, but maybe there was never going to be a Kevin for Jessica. Maybe there aren’t enough Kevins to go around, because of a whole range of developments over several decades, from the decline of good union jobs to our penchant for putting staggering numbers of men in prison.
DeParle mentions positively Charles Murray’s contention that single motherhood is a “values” issue, not an economic one. Murray means working-class and lower-middle-class white people have abandoned traditional family values (they’re becoming like—oh no!—black people) but you can just as well see Jessica as having too many of those values: she rejected abortion, she stuck by her man, she tried too hard to make a family. If we really want women like Jessica to avoid early childbearing and single motherhood, we have to stop promoting outmoded ideas about sex and gender: abstinence-only sex ed, shame that leads to inconsistent use of birth control, stigmatizing abortion, woman’s worth depending on keeping a man, “fixing” the relationship as woman’s responsibility, motherhood as women’s primary purpose in life. “I’m in this position because of decisions I made,” Jessica says. That’s a very American value right there: if you screw up in your early 20s, you—and your children—are on your own for life.
What would we do if we wanted to help Jessica and her kids, the millions like them, and the millions at risk of becoming them? I was struck by how completely she was thrown back on her own resources: she went to William Penn University, which costs $20,000 a year and has a freshman retention rate of only 55 percent—maybe she and her boyfriend fell through cracks that shouldn’t have been there. She gets no child support, not even a token amount—which is really outrageous, because even if her kids’ father makes very little, I’ll bet he has beer and cigarettes and girlfriends. She has church, but seemingly no help from her parents, and no helpful network of friends.
Her son has Asperger’s—where are the programs for him? Kids’ extracurriculars and camps cost too much for her, although we know they help learning and development—why aren’t they free? If she leaves her too-expensive neighborhood, her kids will be in a worse school—why? Believe it or not, most Western industrialized countries do a far better job than we do of giving kids a decent childhood and of sustaining their mother too. It does not have to be that if you can’t afford to live in the right neighborhood, your children get a bad education. That is a social and political decision that we have made.
And then there is Jessica’s job. Although she earned a degree from community college and is a highly regarded employee, she is still on an hourly wage of only $12.35. She punches in and out, and she gets no paid days off—even when she was recovering from an operation for cervical cancer. When she took a day off to chaperon a school field day, she lost a day’s pay. Message to Anne-Marie Slaughter: this is how we treat “family balance” in the regular world of work, and this is how we treat skilled, experienced management-level employees in the childcare field. Taking care of children is women’s work, after all, and women are supposed to have Kevins, not family-size paychecks. Why does it seem like a reasonable policy suggestion to tell Jessica she needs a husband, and pie in the sky to say she needs a union? Or a national day care system like the one in France, where teachers are well-paid, with benefits?
Jessica Schairer is doing the best she can. In fact, she is pretty heroic. It’s the rest of us that are falling short.
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