J. Scott Applewhite / AP
This is pretty much what you’d expect. Mostly, it’s a outer packaging change, with prettier, more careful language. All of it can be summed up with “if you work, you won’t be poor!”
The report calls for tightening work requirements for welfare, food stamps, and housing assistance programs. “Our plan starts with work, not welfare: If you are capable, we will expect you to work or prepare for work,” a two-page summary says. Republicans are also pushing to send more authority to the states and change programs so that there success—and funding—is based on how many people they help lift out of poverty. The plan would tackle what the report calls “the welfare cliff,” in which recipients are discouraged from taking new or higher paying jobs because the salary would not compensate for the reduction of benefits they would see as a result. Other recommendations include more school choice in education, cutting back financial regulations under the Dodd-Frank law, and making it easier for small businesses to band together to offer 401K retirement plans. “This is how you fight poverty. This is how you create opportunity. This is how you help people move onward and upward,” Ryan said. “We wanted to start with poverty because we think this sums up our case. We want to build a confident American where no one is stuck, where no one settles, and where everyone can rise.” By and large, these are proposals that Republicans have made before, and in some cases tried to pass into law. The anti-poverty agenda also downplays or jettisons earlier Ryan proposals that drew more bipartisan support, including an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit. As Democrats were quick to point out, what’s new about the GOP platform is mostly the packaging, re-branded under the heading, “A Better Way,” and complete with a website and hash tag.
“Frankly, it’s a new spin on a bad deal,” said Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the House minority whip. Democrats also challenged the central premise underlying the Republican agenda—that federal welfare programs were failing in their mission to reduce poverty. “It is a distortion, and he tries to fool people with it,” said Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, who appeared with Hoyer at a panel discussion held by the left-leaning Center for American Progress.
For Democrats, the threat of Ryan’s agenda lies in its sales pitch, which has discarded the 1980s talk of “welfare queens” for the more universal language of upward mobility and self-sufficiency. One conservative congressman quoted Robert F. Kennedy while he touted the GOP plan. And who would argue with more results-oriented policies, targeting federal dollars toward the most successful ideas, reducing red tape, and “tailoring benefits to people’s needs,” as the report promises? Yet to liberals, the rhetoric obscures a far harsher reality: Republicans are proposing to align anti-poverty programs with their vision of a smaller, leaner federal government, which means steep budget cuts that they fear go well beyond trimming the fat. “Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty proposals sound great, but they’re fundamentally fraudulent covers for draconian budget cuts that will hike poverty,” tweeted Joel Berg, who runs the New York-based non-profit Hunger Free America.
That is a feature, not a bug, for the republicans.
“The plan would tackle what the report calls ‘the welfare cliff,’ in which recipients are discouraged from taking new or higher paying jobs because the salary would not compensate for the reduction of benefits they would see as a result.”
Ah, so they are going to make sure the salaries of those new and higher paying jobs actually bring people above the poverty line so they don’t need additional support! Wait, no, they just want to reduce the support for people who are already below the poverty line.
They’re very close to crushing unions. Once they can get those pesky minimum wage laws scrapped, there will be $0.50/hr jobs for everyone and poverty will be eliminated! Hooray!
Making it a bit easier for the banksters to crash the economy again is anti-poverty? The dishonesty stinks all the way to this side of the Atlantic.
The GOP has long straddled a divide that comes from being both pro-employment and pro-business. The fact is that business doesn’t see employment of workers, of any sort, as a positive thing. Employees are overhead so they seek to eliminate as many positions as possible as quickly as possible. Preferably before the employee becomes vested for a retirement, or runs up substantial health insurance bills.
When Romney ran they plastered over the gap with the “job creator” meme. Some people fell for it but many people sensed the inherent contradiction.
Keep this contradiction in mind when thinking about issues. A good example comes in the form of the debate about automation and robotics. One theory holds that we need to push robotics an automation to remain competitive. The other is that we need to delay such advances to maximize employment. Both arguments are nonsense. Advances in robotics are being pushed by industry to replace workers and they will replace workers just as soon as it is cost effective to do so and this is driven by profits, not any great desire to ‘beat the Chinese’. The advances are happening just as fast as they can be made and adoption of automation and robotics is not being delayed by any sentimentality.
As always, it is profit that decides. If a business can replace a worker with a machine and save a dollar the worker is gone.
An observation from the trenches: More and more people are beginning to catch on that if you get a paycheck; you are labor. This came as something of a surprise in the 90s when middle managers, who had long thought of themselves as management, were off-shored, marginalized, made into sub-contractors, and subject to the very same abuse as the blue-collar laborers they sneered at.
This trend has advanced up the ladder to the point now where Medical doctors, MDs, have started to figure out that they too are labor. Highly trained and specialized labor, but still labor. As labor they can and do have their jobs micromanaged, work conditions, and benefits renegotiated to their detriment, and hours dictated to them.
Even lawyers are looking to have a readjustment. NY state has recently allowed foreign lawyers to practice in the state. The good money is that Indian lawyers are going to work harder for less money than their bloated and complacent US counterparts. In ten years I expect a drop in pay and standing for US lawyers. And it can’t come too soon.
dammit
where is my “Feed the Homeless to the Hungry” button?
There’s echoes of slavery there…