Bob Lord Posted by Bob Lord I have another syndicated op-ed piece up at OtherWords, A Trumped Up War On Welfare. We're currently seeing the top 1% and their mercenaries attacking mythical welfare recipients, who at most represent the bottom (i.e., neediest) 1% of the population, and may not even exist at all. Why attack this tiny sliver of the population? … Read more
Posted by Bob Lord
The Thuckmeister is wearing out his welcome here, at least as far as I'm concerned.
Among other things, he's engaged in what seems to me is rank intellectual dishonesty.
But since Thucky's dishonesty is sort of a case study in conservative intellectual dishonesty, let's explore.
Some time back, when ole Thucky first started railing about the evils of our social safety net, he made statements very clearly designed to conjure up images in the reader's mind of lazy welfare recipients sitting on their couches drinking beer and watching their flat screen TVs. And if the lazy person the reader imagined sitting there in front of the flat screen was black, well, all the better.
But when I began posting about the conservative war on the poor, Thucky morphed into a "compassionate" conservative, overcome with emotion over the damage welfare does to its recipients whom he cares so much about. On my last post, he commented about the harm that welfare does to children in their pre-school years. He'd even counted the number of words they were not hearing before entering school.
If you took his recent comments at face value, you'd think the Thuckmeister's desire to shred the safety net is driven by his concern for poor children.
Actually, he's just a corporate shill and the concern he purports to have for poor children reeks of intellectual dishonesty.
Posted by Bob Lord
Undergirding the 21st Century attack on welfare recipients is the notion, rarely challenged, that the denial of safety net benefits to those who possibly could work is crucial. The recent Cato Institute "study" bemoans its finding that the package of safety net benefits available to some single mothers of two young children has a value greater than the compensation from a minimum wage job. Translation: A mother who is unable to work and has the responsibility of supporting two children should receive no more in beneifits than the compensation of a 19 year-old kid who lives with his parents and spends the lion's share of his minimum wage pay indulging himself. Why? Because we just can't take the chance that people will lose the incentive to work if their kids aren't starving.
Laura Clawson at Daily Kos recently reported on the implementation of this principle in conservative Kansas:
Kansas could be kicking 20,000 people off of food stamps starting in October. Able-bodied adults without dependent children will only get three months of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits every three years before they face a requirement that they work 20 hours a week or participate in a job training program for those hours—regardless of whether a job or job training is available.
The only problem with conservative philosophy on this front is that it completely clashes with the advance of civilization.
Posted by Bob Lord On Saturday, in Conservative Think Tanks: Taxpayer Subsidized Mendacity?, I made the following observation regarding the Cato Institute "study" on welfare benefits and its author, Michael Tanner: Tanner knows well that when his study is reported in the conservative press, it will be to promote the view that we have too … Read more
Posted by Bob Lord
This is the third in a series of posts on the recently released Cato Institute Study, The Work Versus Welfare Trade-off: 2013. My apologies if I'm overdoing it here, but I think the Cato Instituted study goes to the heart of what conservative political strategy is all about: Rank intellectual dishonesty used to stoke anger and cause the masses to turn on themselves. In the emerging version of that strategy, conservatives are demonizing the poor as a means of distracting Americans from our ever-worsening inequality.
In the Cato study, the author, Michael Tanner, depicts Hawaii as the freeloaders' paradise. In Hawaii, Tanner claims, a "prototype" family receives $49,175 in welfare benefits annually, an amount that equates to a pre-tax income of $60,590. In previous posts here and here, I've discussed the rank intellectual dishonesty in Tanner's analysis.
The Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice has a report on The State of Poverty in Hawaii. Here are some of the data that report uses to describe how life is for those happy freeloaders in Hawaii: