The GOP Plan for the Poor: More!

Eduardo Porter of the NY Times, reports on his home state of Arizona, where I happen to be right now.

Arizona, where I was born, in July became the first state to cut poor families’ access to welfare assistance to a maximum of 12 months over a lifetime. That’s a fifth of the time allowed under federal law, and means that 5,000 more people will lose their benefits by next June.

This is only the latest tightening of the screws in Arizona. Last year, about 29,000 poor families received benefits under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, 16,000 fewer than in 2005. In 2009, in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s, benefits were cut by 20 percent.

And of course it’s not just an Arizona problem:

… if Paul Ryan, the Republican lawmaker from Wisconsin who is expected to become speaker of the House, has his way, poor people in many other states can expect similar treatment in the years ahead.

Two forces are driving this very unchristian behavior towards “the least of us”: a deep and misplaced moral punishment ethos, joined with a states rights bias that pretends what “big” government can’t do, “state” government can.  Under this fig leaf the long-ago federal aid to the poor has been replaced by block grants to the states, which then distribute funds intended for the poor anywhere they want.

Even thoughtful Republican policy wonks, and this does not include any of the current candidates for GOP presidential nomination, think what was done, was done badly.

… states were given both incentives and tools to redeploy the money to other priorities. Notably, they could get around the requirement to meet job participation benchmarks simply by reducing the caseloads of beneficiaries — almost a direct instruction to bump people off.

“States did not uphold their end of the bargain,” said Ron Haskins, an expert on welfare who worked for more than a decade for House Republicans. “So why do something like this again?”

It’s well worth a read of Porter’s article to understand just how mean spirited and deceptive this has been, with promises of more such in the wind.

For an earlier article on the myth of welfare’s corrupting influence see here.

For a public apology and detailed analysis of the current policies of block grants see Peter Germanis paper, here.

Corporate Welfare

Editorial in the NY Times today

… as labor standards have eroded, allowing profitable corporations to pay chronically low wages, taxpayers are not only supporting the working poor, as intended, but also providing a huge subsidy for employers by picking up the difference between what workers earn and what they need to meet basic living costs. The low-wage business model has essentially turned public aid into a form of corporate welfare.

I’m sure all sorts of investigations are going to pop-up to find out why this is happening….

Short of cracking down on such welfare frauds, California has an idea worth pursuing…

In 2016, California will start publishing the names of employers that have more than 100 employees on Medicaid and how much these companies cost the state in public aid.

Excellent!

GOP — Kicking the Poor, Again

WASHINGTON — A proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10, an underpinning of President Obama’s economic agenda and an issue that Democrats hope to leverage against Republicans in the midterm elections, failed in the Senate on Wednesday.

The vote was 54 to 42, with 60 votes needed to advance the measure.

All but one Republican voted to sustain a filibuster against the measure, saying that the increase would damage the fragile economy and force businesses to cut hundreds of thousands of jobs.

NYT

Race, Ryan and Lazy-Day Hammocks

Commenting on Paul Ryan’s “remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working,” Paul Krugman points out that it wasn’t simply Ryan being inarticulate, as he later claimed, but that since the GOP can’t face the facts about poverty in America they respond to the only dog-whistle they understand: race — “the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.”

NY Times: Krugman

And for more on Congressman Ryan, who likes to hearken back to his famine-Irish forebears, have a look at Timothy Eagan’s justified take-down of the Ryan rhetoric about “culture of dependency”  and “a safety net that becomes a lazy-day hammock.”  It is the same stuff the British said about the famine-Irish, exactly.

The Irish historian John Kelly, who wrote a book on the great famine, was the first to pick up on these echoes of the past during the 2012 presidential campaign. “Ryan’s high-profile economic philosophy,” he wrote then, “is the very same one that hurt, not helped, his forebears during the famine — and hurt them badly.”

Said Ryan:

“We have this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” In other words, these people are bred poor and lazy.

Where have I heard that before? asks Eagan.

Ah, yes — 19th-century England. The Irish national character, Trevelyan confided to a fellow aristocrat, was “defective.” The hungry millions were “a selfish, perverse, and turbulent” people, said the man in charge of relieving their plight.

And the hammock?

“We entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, scarcely visible from the smoke and rags that covered them, were three children huddled together, lying there because they were too weak to rise, pale and ghastly … perfectly emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, and evidently in the last stage of actual starvation.”

The Irish Famine, 1845-1849, (1900). Artist: Unknown

The Irish Famine, 1845-1849, (1900). Artist: Unknown

Corporations And Their Responsibility

Today’s S F Chronicle featured a front page magazine piece about SalesForce.com founder, Marc Benioff and his push to enlist other Bay Area corporations to follow his in being good citizens:

Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff is challenging fellow tech leaders to raise millions to fund a new antipoverty program – and recast the industry as a local hero.

“We don’t want to be the industry that looks like ‘The Wolf of Wall Street,’ ” he told The Chronicle. “We want to be more benevolent.”

On Friday – the software company’s 15th birthday – Salesforce and the nonprofit Tipping Point will announce the formation of SF Gives, an initiative to raise $10 million over the next 60 days for Bay Area antipoverty programs.

Persuading 20 companies to contribute $500,000 apiece is just the start. Benioff, one of the city’s leading philanthropists, said he hopes to eventually expand the program to $100 million.  SF Gate

There is, by the way, a music event at Justin Herman Plaza, near the Ferry Building, all afternoon to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Sales Force and to raise money and food for that goal.

Now such corporate largesse would seem to be a welcome thing.  Who could complain about $10 million to help the impoverished?  The problem is two fold as I see it.  One, each corporation is necessarily guided by its Board of Directors along the value lines they set up.  Therefore, the decisions as to Who is supported, under What criteria for How long and When the help begins and ends are all privatized.  As we have seen recently, several corporations are suing the government for mandating medical care payments for services they don’t like.  It follows that a corporation or consortium of corporations will, predictably, have opinions about who the Deserving Poor are and distribute their support accordingly.

Secondly, the corporate anti-poverty push is so far, and likely to remain so, a local affair.  The Bay Area is home to Sales Force and many other mega billion dollar companies; Gallup, New Mexico is not.  The result of such local action will follow in the tracks of the public school system in which wealthy districts hold million dollar fund raisers every year; their districts far outstrip their poor brethren in the breadth of school offerings, size of classes, excellence of facilities, availability and quality of extra-curricular activities.  The notion of equal education and opportunity is lost but denied, since all are still in ‘public schools.’

Thirdly, how much is $10 million anyway?  According to a Forbes article, the US spends $550 billion yearly to alleviate poverty.  My calculator won’t show in decimal format how small a percentage that $10 million is.

Fourthly, why is such giving necessary in the first place?  Why are there so many poor?  Why, for example, is San Francisco the city in the nation where the disparity between its rich and its poor has grown the fastest?

What are the structural economic reasons for this?  Have salaries for Sales Force janitors, electricians and grounds keepers kept pace with those of the Benioffs and top managers?  Have the associated companies taken advantage of city and county tax breaks, thereby diminishing taxes available for infrastructure jobs?  Perhaps the smart guys in these corporations could help us all figure this out.  What are the algorithms of production, distribution and consumption most likely to get us to a stable, growth economy, where all who wish to work can, and those who are unable to work are provided for?  Where are the super-computer models that could help us move forward?

Finally, such corporate largesse if it does not now, will surely, be weighed against their corporate tax obligations.  Perhaps such gifts are already tax deductible, depriving the governments (state and national) from making decisions and allocations of tax moneys — based on input from affected communities and debates which, in theory at least,   are public.  Corporate Board decisions are not public.  Who are their constituents?  If the donations are not now deductible you can be sure that the argument will be advanced, strongly, that they should be, or should be more deductible if such corporate giving shows a decent track record in the next years.

And how have corporations done with their responsibilities to the national community through fair and equal taxation?  The corporate record can barely even be called spotty. According to a new report from Citizens for Tax Justice:

“A comprehensive, five-year study of 288 profitable Fortune 500 companies finds that twenty-six paid no federal corporate income tax over the five-year period; 111 paid no federal corporate income tax in at least one of the last five years, and one-third paid a U.S. tax rate less than 10 percent over the same period,” says a recent study by Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based group.

Among the companies that paid not a single penny over five years, despite making huge profits, are household names such as Boeing, General Electric, Priceline.com, and Verizon.

[Just scanning the report will set your hair on fire…]

Corporate Tax Dodgers

Further, the hue and cry from the GOP to roll back corporate taxes and compensate for lost revenue by stitching up loop-holes in the law is about to go silent completely, after a report by one of its own shows how many toes would have to be stepped on to come close to maintaining revenues while rolling back top tax rates.

… the Tax Reform Act of 2014 proposed last week by the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Representative Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican …  seems unlikely to go anywhere, in no small part because the House Republican leadership has gone out of its way to distance itself from the proposal, praising Mr. Camp for his diligence and calling it worthy of consideration but not getting close to an endorsement.

In the talk about tax reform, there has been a general agreement that top rates should be reduced and loopholes closed, something Mr. Ryan has loudly endorsed. But there has been a great reluctance to get specific. This proposal does get specific, and in doing so it makes clear that much more needs to be done to reduce tax preferences and loopholes if we want both to finance the government and to lower tax rates.

To make the limited progress he does, Mr. Camp has to attack many tax preferences. Some are easy (did you know that for some reason the National Football League is tax-exempt?), but many are not. Americans who work overseas lose a tax break. The tax credit for buying electric cars goes away. So does the credit for adopting a child. A lot of tax provisions to provide aid for higher education costs are consolidated.

And so it goes.

It seems to me Benioff and friends would do all of us a big favor to put significant dollars into a tax reform campaign, into national discussion, payment for expert opinion, studies of other comparable countries, into its drafting and into lobbying to pass it — taxes which are recognized as corporate responsibilities.  After the payment of that obligated to the common good, and payment to workers of sufficient wages, if there is a strong benevolent ethos or particularly profitable years, additional gifting, corporately determined, would be a very nice thing, indeed.

Megalomania: MegaDelusional

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins is under fire for comparing criticism of the rich to Nazi persecution of Jews – but that hyperbolic analogy wasn’t his only inaccurate claim.

Income Changes

He thinks it’s not just unfair, but what, plutocraticidal(?), to attack those whose success is trickled down to the benefit of so many others. As Garofoli points out — ain’t much tricklin’ goin’ on.

GOP: Enemy of the Poor

From Krugman:

a party committed to small government and low taxes on the rich is, more or less necessarily, a party committed to hurting, not helping, the poor.

Will this ever change? Well, Republicans weren’t always like this. In fact, all of our major antipoverty programs — Medicaid, food stamps, the earned-income tax credit — used to have bipartisan support. And maybe someday moderation will return to the G.O.P.

For now, however, Republicans are in a deep sense enemies of America’s poor. And that will remain true no matter how hard the likes of Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio try to convince us otherwise.

http://nyti.ms/1af0TuF

Picking on the Poor

Bob Herbert in the NY Times

The poor are easy to pick on. They are the great boogeymen and women, dragging us down, costing us money, gobbling up resources. That seems to be the conservative sentiment.

We have gone from a war on poverty in this country to a war on the poor, in which poor people are routinely demonized and scapegoated and attacked, and conservatives have led the charge.

Seconded by Paul Krugman

More than a million unemployed Americans are about to get the cruelest of Christmas “gifts.” They’re about to have their unemployment benefits cut off. You see, Republicans in Congress insist that if you haven’t found a job after months of searching, it must be because you aren’t trying hard enough. So you need an extra incentive in the form of sheer desperation.

The Pope Jawbones the Power Elite

Pope Francis said in the first peace message of his pontificate that huge salaries and bonuses are symptoms of an economy based on greed and inequality and called again for nations to narrow the wealth gap.

In his message for the Roman Catholic Church’s World Day of Peace, marked around the world on January 1, he also called for sharing of wealth and for nations to shrink the gap between rich and poor, more of whom are getting only “crumbs”.

“The grave financial and economic crises of the present time … have pushed man to seek satisfaction, happiness and security in consumption and earnings out of all proportion to the principles of a sound economy,” he said.

“The succession of economic crises should lead to a timely rethinking of our models of economic development and to a change in lifestyles,” he said.

*

Last month, in a document seen as a manifesto of his papacy, he attacked unfettered capitalism as “a new tyranny“.

Since his election in March as the first non-European pope in 1,300 years, the Argentinian has several times condemned the “idolatry of money” and said it was a depressing sign of the times that a homeless person dying of exposure on the street was no longer news but a slight fall in the stock market is.

You Go, Pope!

Not Too Far From Angkor Wat

Scavengers in Siem Reap garbage dump

Scavengers in Siem Reap garbage dump

Not far from Cambodia’s  Angkor Wat temples, drawing millions of tourists a year, an enormous garbage dump serves as home and harvest ground for many.

See Omar Havana’s photo essay in The Diplomat.