Blaming The Poor Is Denying The Truth

(The image to the left is Pablo Picasso's "Poor People on the Seashore".)

The Republicans have been telling us a lie for quite a while now -- that poor people are responsible for our economic troubles. They would have us believe that the poor are just too lazy to work, and are living high off the hog on taxpayer money. That is far from the truth.

The sad fact is that the United States is the stingiest developed country in aid to the poor. We give so little help to the poor that it's a miracle that any of them are able to dig themselves out of poverty. It seems like we hate the poor, and don't believe they deserve our help (in spite of the fact that many claim this is a christian country).

Fellow blogger Marc McDonald, who writes the excellent blog BeggarsCanBeChoosers.com, wrote a very good post on this issue a couple of weeks ago. He says:

In America, we hate the poor. We really, really hate the poor. We are indoctrinated from birth to hate the poor. Jesus may have said, "Blessed are you who are poor." But America has no time for that Jesus. Our motto is "Screw the poor."

As a result, America has never been big on social welfare programs for the poor. Even during the peak years of U.S. social program spending (during LBJ's "Great Society" years), America had a skimpy social safety net, compared to other industrialized nations.

Compared to generous European social safety nets, America these days more closely resembles the likes of Mexico than a modern First World industrialized nation. Jobless benefits, for example, are far more meager and stingy in the U.S. than they are in Europe. In fact, for one reason or another, millions of Americans don't even ever qualify for jobless benefits. (I know: I was one of them. Years ago, I applied for jobless benefits and was turned down).

The other pillar of the U.S. social safety net, food stamps, is also very meager. I recall recently playing around with the food stamp eligibility program on a Texas state government Web site. I was curious as to exactly how low one's income had to be in order to qualify. I kept plugging in lower and lower income numbers and kept getting a response page that said, "You earn too much to qualify for food stamps." Eventually, I concluded the Web site must be broken. It was only later that I discovered, much to my amazement, that the Web site was in fact working just fine and the Third World-like wages I'd plugged into the search form were indeed considered too high to qualify for aid.

In short, in America these days, if you're poor, you are screwed. The fact is, many low-income and poor people never even qualify for any type of aid. And the shocking numbers of homeless in the U.S. demonstrates that our social safety net is grotesquely inadequate to meet the needs of the needy. The fact that one in five children lives in poverty is a good indicator of that.

In fact, what meager social safety net programs that are around only exist because corporate America wants them to exist (a good indicator of just how corrupt our government is these days).

Take food stamps for example. This program simply wouldn't exist were it not for the likes of Walmart. Since Walmart (a vastly profitable mega-billion-dollar corporation) can't be bothered to pay their workers a living wage, we the taxpayer in effect subsidize their wages via food stamps, (as well as other programs like Medicaid).

Give corporate America credit: they do know how to exploit a situation to boost their profits.

Despite all this, today's Republican Party is convinced that the reason America is going broke is that we supposedly fund all these lavish, generous social safety net programs. Indeed, the likes of Rush Limbaugh constantly ramble on about "trillions of dollars" that are supposedly spent on welfare. The typical Limbaugh listener these days is convinced that America is going broke because of "excessive welfare spending" and "lavish foreign aid."

It's all a lie, of course.

That's only part of his post. I urge you to go over to his site and read the whole thing.