"Will they notice?" Astonishingly the answer is "No" for they will blame it on those they fear and hate and will continue to vote against their own self interests. Republicans have proven that for decades and now we have Trump!
58
It all boils down to what kind of society we want to live in, and what kind of country we believe America should stand for. All patriotic rhetoric about flag and country is important and good , but as human beings we all have seem to have a different view as to what it means.
My America's priorities are really basic and simple. Health coverage and care for all, education made affordable in academic achievement as well as practical and vocational; all are needed. Enough police, firemen, medical doctors/nurses/teachers, and those in federal jobs and agencies to do their jobs well and to serve the people.
All communities must be safe because trust their local law enforcement with children feeling they can always go to a policeman with a problem no matter who they are or what their hue has to be achieved.
When America does well, Americans do well. (Obama said that) and it is true. When people have well paying jobs, when they are productive and are at peace with the education/health/safety of their families and the elderly and disabled, they can patronize the businesses that stay in business only because there are paying customers.
We, as a nation, can already bomb this planet to smithereens. We don't need the huge defense budget and Pentagon funding that is over the top. Why don't we realize we can get along with most of what is already there and finally concentrate on making the the great nation it can be. A nation is only as great as its people.
47
The war against the poor is of a piece with the obsession about immigration: The well-off among us have become aware that the country (like the world) is getting pretty crowded, and that resources are not infinite.
Expect to see this get even worse as the fracked oil wells deplete themselves, as the topsoil washes away and goes dead, as the oceans no longer provide food, as housing gets ever scarcer, and as our atmospheric garbage dump can no longer absorb our carbon emissions without making our planet hostile to everything alive.
I have concerns about overpopulation, both local and global, myself. I'm not as confident as some seem to be about my own capability to resist the lure of the howling mob. But, for now at least, I recognize evil when I see it and can promise this: to never vote Republican for any federal office again.
42
Remember, that Trump illegally used his charitable foundation to engage in self-dealing, amongst other improprieties, and that it was accordingly shut down by New York's Attorney General. Need anyone say more? Not a solitary ounce of empathy in his being.
41
The GOP is waging a war on the existence of the bourgeoisie. The war on the poor is mainly an attempt reduce overall economic mobility so the size of the middle class will shrink. A middle class, well educated populace won't tolerate a Trumpist kleptocracy. A poor, uninformed populace engaged in identity politics and struggling just to get to the next paycheck won't have time to worry about "national issues" until it's too late.
34
I agree with the thoughts expressed in the article.
What troubles me the most about the situation is that "Christians" are supportive of this regime ( word used intentionally). These attitudes excluding the sex, lies and probable videotapes, were nothing that I learned in my education as a Christian.
Caring for the poor, the less lucky amongst our fellow man is not only compassionate, but part of what make us human and separates us from lower forms of animals. Make no mistake - amongst those condoning these policies, any of them by luck (or the grace of their God) could be in the same situations and needing assistance with an outstretched hand offering assistance and not a slap in the face.
31
To answer the question, No, they won't notice.
18
I don't believe that Republicans want to be cruel. They simply won't do the math. They reward their rich donors, and just ignore the consequences for the rest of society.
4
This war on the poor, and the increasing percentage of our population that qualifies as poor, is not going to “make America great again”. It is going to weaken us; maybe beyond repair. A single generation of impoverished, poorly educated children will be sufficient to destroy us as a nation, and it is well underway. So much for the hypocritical, self described “patriots”. We are being destroyed from within.
25
There's plenty of opportunity in this country starting from grade 1. Nobody is forced to be poor. Don't reward people for goofing off.
4
No surprise here . Sometimes I wonder if the attack on poor people is a demonic way of instituting a military draft without any legislation . Many poor people fill the military ranks and as the united states becomes even more militaristic more bodies will be needed .
19
Entitlements to the wealthy and corporations are not "welfare" while monies given for the welfare of ordinary citizens are ?!
The poor are not causing the ballooning deficit: Congress's tax cuts to themselves and donors are. Look at the millions being wasted by a corrupt cabinet and Trump's golfing habits. How many families could have health care instead of Pruitt's telephone booth alone?
Capitalism has been reduced to the absolute minimum and Trump, his cabinet, the entire GOP Congress and the GOP party itself has turned this around: "We are rich, therefore we are good and moral. You poor people (and the middle class itself) are not good otherwise you would be rich."
For a country that proclaims itself Christian, our leaders have long since given up reading Jesus's words.
25
I see nothing wrong with vetting food stamp recipients to see if they can work. The same with welfare recipients. However the work has to pay more than welfare checks.
10
We cannot help the poor if the American values are everyone is in this only for themselves and their family. Without a sense of community we are lost.
14
The white, uneducated poor will continue to vote for the Republicans because Fox State news tells them to.
Their lives get worse and worse, they get angrier and angrier and more devoted to Fox who channels their anger towards policies and politicians who would actually improve their lot. A virtuous cycle for Republicans.
18
"Will they notice?" That's the real question. And if they're the lower middle class or poor white people will they vote Democratic? If they're minorities, will they register to vote and go to the polls?
7
Um, They may know it, but may just do not care. Simple as that.
3
Thanks Mr. Krugman! Your piece compelled me to re-subscribe to the NYT's. I wasn't disappointed in the NYTs, always appreciated its diversity of opinions. But your piece said, lend support to the Truth because there is an info war of grave consequences being waged against the poor and ignorant by the rich and arrogant. As someone once mentioned there is no shame in ignorance save willfulness!
10
Will they notice? Uh, no.
2
Trump is a greedy evil godless man. He has surrounded himself with other greedy evil godless men. I'm no super Christian or biblical scholar but even I know God wanted us to care for the poor. "But Mark, America is generous to the poor. Look at other countries." Agreed. I'd rather be poor here than anywhere else in the world. But the trend is negative, and Trump and his administration and the whole GOP are demonizing the poor in an unprecedented fashion.
13
Carson is a former Brain Surgeon who needs a Heart.
19
Who else is hurt besides the poor when EBT (food stamps) are cut?
Would you believe the farmer, companies like Walmart, and the small business owner of the local grocery store.
Who else besides the poor beneficiary is hurt when housing subsidies are cut?
Would you believe the owners of expensive buildings, when the homelessness doubles and those who are homeless squat in front of those expensive buildings. Let's not forget the counties and municipalities that will have to pay to keep the homeless from bothering all the rest of the citizens of their area.
Who else besides the poor is hurt is cut Medicaid?
Would you believe that we all are, when there aren't enough doctors because teaching hospitals use Medicaid money to train new doctors.
Those who think there are benefits to cutting aid to the poor are short sighted because one doesn't realize that there are benefits to us all with helping the poor.
46
Once upon a time (the first centuries of the first millennium), Christians believed the poor, because their abject misery and total absence of possessions, were closer to God. This meant they were holier than the rest of us. It meant that caring for the poor made those of us who are not poor closer to God. Their internal debates were over the best way to serve the poor--i.e., the best way to serve God--and they argued over whether it was better and more about God's will to give alms, to endow monasteries or to give to churches.
Now cut to Republicans, most of whom profess themselves to be Christians. Instead of thinking about God, they think about the ideas that have dribbled down from Adam Smith and Calvin. To them, the poor are a result of the invisible hand of the market coupled with Almighgty God deciding telling them the poor deserve their fate (for being lazy or whatnot).
In sum, the war on the poor derives from a Republican moral turpitude the early Christians would have found grotesque.
37
"Whatever you do unto the least of these my brethren, you also do unto me" - Jesus Christ, Matthew 25.
Oops.
64
Even more relevant:
"He will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.'"
- Matthew 25:45
16
In answer to your final question about whether poor tRump voters who are hurt by tRump's policies will notice, my guess is they will not. Or if they do, they'll blame it on the Democrats in Congress. And they'll continue to show up to Donnie "Boy" tRump's rallies and cheer for him.
32
About first class travel, I think in general people in the federal government travel way too much. One of the problems is not just the expense of the travel, but it almost always takes two days of work away. I was just on a cruise with several people who were American citizens but lived in Europe and Australia, they told me the one thing they absolutely hate about going back to the US is the US airlines, which they say are the worlds worsts. I traveled a lot with the military and was always amazed at just how much time it takes, it is hard for me to understand why these people want to travel and don't try to minimize it to the smallest amount possible, I know they need to visit workers at other locations and sometimes give addresses, but I feel for anyone who has to do a full time job and is still expected to travel a lot.
6
And now there's that good Catholic boy who fires the Whitehouse chaplain for daring to suggest that there should be fairness across the board in the new tax cuts. As one who was born and raised Catholic I am totally unfamiliar with these rich Catholics like Ryan and Justice Roberts who talk and act more like republicans than the parishioners in my working class neighborhood. We were taught by the Priest and Sisters to care for the poor. But then there are plenty of church door swingers who are Christian in name only. They will be called to account someday.
49
Tommy, I guess it changes once you got what you need, especially for those like the present and last speakers of the house. Bohner's family was rescued by the New Deal. What better excuse to trash the safety net?! Government sent our most visible of Ayn Rand's disciples to college when his folks couldn't. A perfect reason to pull up the emergency ladder! I got mine jack! Quit complaining and go sew some straps on your boots and start lifting. And, with the golden comb over in charge, the trains won't run on time either.
7
Yes, they will be held to account. In the mean time what you and they learned in Catholic school. That is forcing their personal beliefs on the rest of the country. Let all these politicians--Catholic, Protestant, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, etc.--park their religions at the door. And why does a secular government need a chaplain?
7
The explanation is simple. Every dollar that goes to promote "the general welfare" is a dollar that can be diverted to billionaires, with the expectation that part of that dollar will return to Republicans. It's called feeding at the public trough. The public be damned. Since most Republicans are sociopaths, they don't care if Americans are plunged into poverty of 19th century proportions as a result.
And "Republican ideology" or "conservatism" is just a cover story.
44
Simple but true. Smiley face Reagan did the same thing - comforted the comfortable and raked the poor. So did Bush II. It's just greedy and sociopathology.
3
Part of the problem with this discussion is the failure of many cementers on BOTH sides to understand how segmented the "Lumpen Poor" are; to a comfortable white collar professional with decent benefits and an employer match for their 401(k), anyone below them is "poor"; But this is a segmented labor force, including illegals working in the meat packing plants in Iowa, contract laborers in the Amazon Distribution centers, fast food workers, and on and on.
The American working class has been loosing ground since the misrule of Reagan, when "Homeless" first began to appear on our streets in numbers. Jobs are far harder to access than they were "then"; there are very few jobs in few centers or Amazon and Walmart Distribution centers in urban cores where the Urban Poor (Favorite targets of Right Wing dog whistle politics) can access them. The south side of Chicago was littered with empty warehouse and factory space in 1980's when I chauffeured an executive and a commercial realtor around on a look see...
The laid off coal miners, or young people who thought they could just follow their parents into the mines and factories (and REALLY have no business attending college, an eighteen year old who can't write a short answer to "Who was Hitler"?) (REAL experience as a substitute teacher). There certainly will be no new federal funds for REAL job training with a Republican congress.
28
Our priorities are misplaced. We really are a wealthy nation but our money is used for over bloated military might that can already blow up this planet.
Someday we might find the courage to concentrate on our people - education, health coverage for all, use our funds to make communities safer by inclusion and emphasis on community participation, employment with equal pay, and a sense that as a nation we strive for research, science, and the quest to make life better for all.
17
Look, the symbol of this administration is "Pigs at the Trough." It should be engraved on national monuments in Washington, emblazoned as a legend on flags unfurled all across the country featuring Trump at the helm of a small boat crossing the Delaware along with his crew of little pigs.
But at present the only thing that keeps this boat of little piggies afloat is the stupidity of the Democrats who keep insisting that 1) Trump won the election illegally and 2) that all his supporters are either mindless dupes or white supremacists.
To make what is obvious about Trump more obvious to his supporters, the Democrats are going to have to put down the liberal ducky, forget Mueller, Russia and the rest of it and start making the connection daily between an economy that rewards the rich obscenely while destroying the middle class and making wage slaves of the working class and the poor, stuck in below-living-wage service jobs most Times writers would simply refuse to accept.
This will also mean a concerted attack on Wall Street, the rentiers, bankers and oligarchs, even when some of them are, you know, funding the Steny Hoyer's, Joe Biden's, and yes, Gavin Newsoms, Cory Bookers, Kamala Harris' and Hillary Clintons of the world.
It's Tom Ferguson of the Roosevelt Institute's Golden rule of politics, "who has the gold, rules."
Otherwise, when Trump shouts "witchhunt" there's just enough truth there, to make all his other lies seem . . plausible, if not actually, "true."
13
Dystopia made real
Given the scenario, what is the end goal?
I dunno what it looks like in the middle - but on the coasts there are miles and miles, block after block of tent cities that look to be permanent. Sidewalks, freeway under passes and vacant lots packed with those who own only what they can carry. Many tent city residents have jobs that pay little with no benefits.
If the goal is more numerous and more massive tent cities then this is a great strategy.
Of course this makes it even easier to look down one's nose at the lower classes, struggling on the sidewalks, drug addled to ease the pain of living, diseased and dying due to being out priced of the medical system.
But is this a country we want to live in?
A country to be proud of?
A place to grow a family or a business?
What's happened to this place?
35
Trump and his minions are just the worst of a long list of politicians who put the well being of the wealthy ahead of the needs of the poor. What he is doing will make a lot more poor.
As with most problems, the needs of the poor will be fully addressed when they show up on the White House doorstep with pitchforks and torches and demand change.
12
...it cannot come too soon!
3
It notably sadistic that the corporate elite in charge of this administration and its cabinet departments are engaged in an all-out assault on social programs & assistance, given the poorest Americans are adversely affected, have no voice, depend on aid for their survival----- and will be worse off and made poorer.
Aren't they the forgotten people, Mr. Trump?
Why don't you stop watching TV and read these articles and comments instead? You will destroy peoples' lives by your cruel policies. Ivanka, stop being an enabler.
10
The irony is many trump supporters will need help with housing, either they themselves or their aged parents. With help drying up after 6 yrs they should be ready for ma and pa moving in with them
11
Perhaps the time has come to democratically spread the concept, process, tools, and focus of "means-tests" for receiving something from a local to a national system to include a range of people who have not been considered up until now. For example, a policymaker clinical trial(PMCT), pilot project.With random levels of policymakers to ensure generalizability of the derived "facts." What and Why? In order for a person to be given the opportunity to be an active policy maker-selected or elected- s/he would have to demonstrate, beyond any reasonable doubt, their range of means to actually plan, carry out, assess,and learn from the assessment -making adequate changes when necessary-the well beingness of each policy, as well as limited temporary or more permanent harms. This would root cost/
effectiveness as a measurable means; minimizing its toxic "mantrafication." It might also result, in an unpredictable number of cases, infectious states of personal accountability for what is said and done which is harmful. As well as not voiced and carried out! Which is much needed. For and by many. Seen as well as hidden "THEMs" In our divided culture, country and diverse population! Consider-a "means test" for the known, as well as knowable ill-meaning in our midst whom each of US enable. Whether we mean to do so or not!
3
An additional looking-at-Trump's behavior:WHO will pass and who will fail/be fired...a TV show which becomes a daily-24 hour performance.
"They (Republicans) just want to be cruel." Dr. Krugman hit the nail on the head! Paul Ryan just fired the Catholic Chaplin because of a prayer regarding the tax cuts.
"May all members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle," he prayed. "May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans."
Paul Ryan, the good Catholic boy from Wisconsin.
26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rebellions_in_the_United_States
We see teachers and high school kids, Black Lives Matter-fed up citizens. How long will Americans put up with the deep corruption of our political system, in some states it seems reoccurring, and in Congress and the presidency we see prostitution to billionaires, directing events with their wealth.
It's easy to let it slide, it's easy to let the absurd Electoral College supersede the people's choice for president.
Will we continue to take the easy way and just talk hot air? We have the numbers to hold all of these dark forces to account, if we decide to use the fact that we outnumber them. They want us divided.
During the American Revolution, many citizens were on the side of England, and some left the country for England after the war. All of us don't have to awake, just ENOUGH!
15
Great column...but there seems to be something more than a mere lack of empathy for the poor. Over and over, I encounter "conservatives" who seem to express something more akin to outright hatred for the poor. They want to simultaneously blame the poor for being poor while going out of their way to advocate for ways to inflict even more pain. No doubt part of it is racism based on the mistaken notion that poor equals black. But somehow, the same folks claim to be devoutly Christian and fiercely patriotic.
I don't get it.
33
Unfortunately, it is not just Trump and the Republicans. It's about class warfare. Hatred of the poor. Like in so many other countries where there is great income inequality and lack of compassion, rational approaches to solve the problems of poverty, or belief in the moral obligation to do so.
8
As a volunteer for our local Loaves and Fishes, it was always interesting to hear people who came in for free food to rail against "those other people" who were lazy slackers. A good number of them were Republicans and probably voted for forty-five. Now that he, and his Republican enablers, are going after poor people like them, it will be interesting to see whether they still sing the same song.
14
There is cruelty for the enjoyment of cruelty, and cruelty born of indifference. The GOP version is cruelty under orders, as the GOP is a collection of venal lackeys in thrall to a few billionaires. The GOP Congress doesn’t ask what they can do for their Country, they ask what do the Mercers, the Koch bros, Adelson, etc ask of them?
As for the bonkers billionaires? What do they want? Seems like they want to run some narrow minded, so-called “Christian”, Theocracy that will straighten out all these slackers who want a free lunch. Make ‘em see the virtues of “devil take the hindmost”. Except on Sunday that is.
20
Why? Mr. Krugman has answered his own question "... They just want to be cruel...."
People are naturally mean. We learn this in high school and that is where a great many people's development ends
19
Recent research shows Trump supporters are fearful of the loss of status, and Republicans are more fearful than Dems in general.
Rather than condemning them as deplorable, Dems need to return to their roots advancing the dignity and worth of the working class.
The positive side of this fear is the very human need for reassurance and concern, which could unite us, while we condemn as deplorable the exploitation of these fears as racism, nationalism, xenophobia, and militarism.
Russia seems to be aiding tyrants throughout the world to exploit the dark side of this fear, as Putin did himself to overturn Russia's brief democratic era. Our security establishment dropped the ball when it failed to fully support democracy in Russia after "winning" the Cold War. Our political leadership cannot continue this failure.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mind-in-the-machine/201612/fear-...
https://www.earth.com/news/losing-status-votes-trump/
10
Trump and the GOP doesn't want to spend money on anybody else except for themselves. No money for seniors or the disabled. And certainly no money for children or youth who might need a loan for an education. Because an education might lead to a job or career opportunity. This country is becoming what immigrants from around globe tried to escape - corruption. I hope Trump and the GOP studied some history, because a revolution may soon be boiling. There is only so much bread and circuses people will take before they wake up.
16
I can't believe that you used "Trump" and "studied some history" in the same sentence! Trump doesn't read and doesn't study anything. He is way, way too smart for that (in his own little universe).
6
We have the circus sure enough, but not much in the way of "bread."
3
Trump and many Republicans do not know history. When people lose hope they get angry. The poor don't go away and disappear. Tenant farmers revolted in the South. There were riots to form Unions so factory workers and miners could have decent working hours and safer working conditions. Unemployed World War I veterans built Hooverville towns by camping out by the thousands in Washington DC (until Hoover had the Army attack them.) There have been revolts of poor people going back to the French Revolution and back in time beyond that. Is it better to help the poor or fight the poor? Will we go back to the days when people steal bread, like Jean Val Jean, to feed their families?
22
If “the reality is that there are very few Americans getting food stamps or Medicaid who could and should be working but aren’t,” then few would be affected by new work requirements. Further, it seems strange to argue that the object is to cut benefits when the result of meeting work requirements is to retain benefits.
1
It means a lot of pressure on people to run around and to document the alleged job search, and more workers assigned to monitoring a useless exercise. It is wasting resources for no gain, The underlying purpose is to drive people away - - not to encourage work force participation.
28
If someone makes a mistake on their paperwork, they will lose their food stamps and/or Medicaid. Even though they can't work.
The goal is to get people off food stamps and Medicaid. Whether they need it or not is irrelevant.
6
Does this apply to the babies, school children and infirm? Most of the recipients fall into these categories. You seem to be thinking of unemployment insurance which is different.
1
Krugman's own arguments belie his final claim that the role of the welfare state is to evidence "empathy" for the poor. If this were the motivation, then why would there be any need to make cost-saving arguments ? "some of the programs under attack actually do what tax cuts don’t: eventually pay back a significant part of their upfront costs by promoting better economic performance."
History also contradicts his argument. Most of the programs he discusses (e.g. SNAP) began with the Great Society programs of the 1960's. At the time, our poverty rate was about 14%. In the subsequent 50 years, we've spent $15 tn on such means-tested programs ... yet, the poverty rate remains at 14%. If such programs really were as LBJ described them ("a hand up, not a hand out"), wouldn't the poor or their children have long since earned their way out of poverty ?
Krugman is fooling no one. He and other liberals favor these programs because of a benevolent cynicism toward the poor. They believe we live in a caste system and there is nothing the poor can do to improve their circumstance.
But we know this is not true ! That's why I used quotes around Krugman's central rationale: "empathy". If you give someone a fish, you feed them for a day. If you teach them to fish, you feed them for a lifetime. We know what it takes to rise out of poverty - education and/or marriage. But liberals would rather shake their finger at the rich than ask the poor to make better choices.
11
First of all, isn't saving people from starving a worthy goal in itself?
Secondly, you point out the importance of education. Yet, it is conservatives who are starving our education system of the funds that it needs to educate children and teens.
31
There is a third way to raise out of poverty. After his father died from alcoholism and left the family on Social Security Disability, Paul Ryan married money instead of working for a living.
3
The lack of poverty reduction can be attributed to the change in employment in the US. Manufacturing jobs and affordable college (remember when you could pull two summer jobs to pay for college?) have been replaced with low wage service jobs (some with non compete contracts!) and a student loan industry. Most people on SNAP and Medicaid do work. They work a patchwork of part time jobs if they can co-ordinate the bus routes. It is a fragile existence that is one missed bus away from losing what little they have away.
14
Paul Ryan, God Bless his Catholic Piety,
has just fired the House Chaplin. . .
Apparently he prayed for the TAX reform package to be fair and balanced for Americans of all income levels. And was told off for getting into politics.. .
But didn't Trump just let their churches promote political candidates in their sermons, without loss of TAX free status by Executive order?
23
It is easy to ascribe one or two motives to people's behavior. But I think that dr. Krugman is missing two additional important reasons that many conservatives are against the government giving benefits to those who are poor:
1. The Comforting Myth of Total Control
We all like to believe that we are in control of all important decisions and consequences in our lives. For some, the idea that many people become poor or challenged in ways that they have no control over, such as choosing the wrong parents or having learning disabilities which are not recognized or corrected, is frightening or anxiety-provoking to them, even if they are not aware of it.
2. The Cowboy Myth
A variant of number one is that anybody willing to work hard & be "good" can achieve anything. Our lives are filled with stories about people who overcame diversity to achieve greatness, or at least a mention in the newspaper. If one blind person with cancer can become a billionaire, surely so can the rest of us. Right? Right..please?
19
Evangelicals support Trump even though Jesus said that how we treat the least of these is how we treat him. The Republicans pretend they are the Christian party even though Jesus said to take care of the poor, the sick, the widow, the orphan, and prisoners. Instead, the Republicans want to do the opposite of everything that Christianity is supposed to stand for.
35
It's pretty simple, Paul. The GOP's neverending attack on the poor is a result of the fact that many (not all) Republicans believe the poor deserve to be & it is their own fault. So why should the rich "suffer" for the failures of the "weak"". Nothing more complex than that.
27
Yes, you are exactly right. Poverty is being viewed in terms of morality ... the poor must have done something wrong or they wouldn't be poor.
It is this same philosophy that underlies the conservative opposition to birth control and abortion: women, especially single women, shouldn't be protected against the consequences of their "sinful" actions. Their opposition to abortion isn't too save lives, but to punish women. If they were truly "pro-life", they wouldn't be cutting food stamps, Medicaid, education and other services that the young need to grow into productive adults.
13
In fact, the Republican cruelty will hurt a lot of Trump supporters who are themselves poor and vulnerable (and always white). But, you know what? Maybe they deserve it. Trump's personality and record of bigotry, racism, lying and cheating were all obvious during the 2016 election, but his voters wittingly chose to ignore them in order to put their own racism and bigotry at the forefront of power. So now it's payback time. You bet they'll notice.
8
The people I know who support trumpty are white and evangelical. They do so because of the Supreme Court appointments and specifically to repeal Roe v. Wade. That's it. That's all they care about. He can do whatever else he wants as long as he gets those justices in to repeal Roe v. Wade. So tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, repealing EPA protections, racism, sex scandals, ties to Russian oligarchs, money laundering, et. al. it's all good--he's our guy and he's making America great again. And if by some fluke he gets ousted, well we have our actual 1st choice Pence, who could never get elected, on the bench ready to step in. What a wonderful world. Not.
17
Interesting that the congress , presidency and court are controlled by the anti abortion republicans and I haven’t heard about any votes to rescind abortion rights . These people know that if Roe v Wade is knocked down they’d never get elected again and have to get real jobs .
1
This isn’t complicated. Destroy the safety net and you get cheap labor without any protections. They want an American serfdom. To be truly rich you need disposable peasants to brutalize at your pleasure.
Welcome to the 21st century.
23
Trump should see what these mostly white societal unfortunates are really doing with their lives, as described in Bruder’s well-documented book Nomadland. It is a saga of contemporary American middle class destitution in which millions of people in this country, having lost their houses, jobs and sometimes families, have taken to the road in RVs, working backbreaking part time jobs with no benefits. History will likely not be kind in reporting that an affluent society like ours was unwilling to take care of its own.
18
In my last job poor people would call me threatening suicide because they could not pay their bills, because they were on the cusp of losing their home, because they were suffering from profound shame, yes, profound shame at having to receive any assistance. For example, “I’ve worked hard all my life. I never expected a hand out in all my born days. Now I’m sick. I feel punished and forgotten, like garbage. People blame me. I don’t think I can go on.”
Trump, his family (with their clothes costing thousands, just as an example), his cohorts, Republicans in general including the Republican Congressional leaders, ... have never had to count dimes, have never been hungry, have never made any room in their lives for anyone other them themselves. I think Jesus had a few things to say about these types.
Next time you divert your gaze from a homeless person remember Trump’s behavior and open your wallet. You judge? “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Thank you Paul Krugman!
30
This is about race, plain and simple. Yes, many of these cuts will affect poor white people, but they are only collateral damage in the war against black and brown people.
5
This absolutely is *not* about "race, plain and simple."
Race, religion and ethnicity, for the oligarchs who own and operate or government and economy, are mostly a valuable tool for pitting different segments of the poor , middle and working classes against each other, in order to make conquest by the owner-elites easier.
It is certainly true that black and brown Americans, for instance, carry an additional burden because of their "races," but never forget that the Bosses care mostly about staying on top and making challenges from any of the "lower orders" as difficult as possible.
3
the amazing thing is we have ample examples in our government to prove the benefit of helping the poor: Paul Ryan's family was on public assistance in his young age, and turned out to be "speaker of the House"; Ben Carson, a brain surgeon, then Secretary of Housing; Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice.... these are tax-paying individuals, so the subsidy money were well-spent. how come after they got their "welfare" benefit , they want to deny others in similar situations of their past ?
9
Maybe because it would diminish the self-narrative about their own success being due exclusively to their hard work and all around wonderfulness, as opposed to having a lot of angels who helped push them along.
3
A thought that has never crossed Trump's mind and never will: "There but for the grace of God go I."
8
The defining feature of the vast majority of Republican voters—other than that they are white—is a belief that economic success or failure is earned and therefore deserved and that any attempt to redistribute wealth from the economically successful to the less successful interferes with the divine order, demotivating the more successful and increasing indolence among the less successful. Rich and middle class Republicans have an "I got mine, now get off my lawn" view of the world. Poor Republicans assume they've done all the right things in life and therefore deserve better, but have stayed poor because the "elites" have rigged the system while the "liberals" keep taking money from the hard-working to give to the lazy.
Add in the fact that a large majority of Republicans generally think white people are the deserving people and brown people the undeserving and you have the entire vision of Republicanism in a nutshell. Accordingly, the two main projects of our Republican government are to (1) free the rich from regulations and taxes that might hinder their ability to accumulate wealth and (2) dismantle any social programs that might take money from the rich and transfer it to the poor, thereby rewarding the poor for their indolence and stripping them of all incentive to improve themselves. Will this two-pronged policy hurt poor Trump voters? Of course. But as long as they see it as restoring the divine order, they'll gladly sacrifice their present and await the rapture.
15
SNAP and Medicaid benefit the public health of the whole country, not just the direct recipients of government aid. Preventing people from being malnourished and providing them health care stops illnesses bred in poverty from spreading to the rest of the population.
12
It is just despicable to proposed a bill like this, increasing the cost for the poorest among us after passing a massive tax cut for the wealthy.
It is not ok for the members of the Trump administration to fly first class and buy expensive office furniture at the tax payers expense while making it more difficult for people who are already struggling to make ends meet and put food on the table.
How much did the trip to Fort Knox to see the eclipse cost?
This is just not right. We got to vote these people out of office. The republican party has to be held accountable.
14
It seems fairly obvious that what is motivating the GOP war on the poor is their belief, steeped deeply in social darwinistic principles, that anyone who is poorly is morally unfit and deserving of any misery that comes their way.
13
Dr. Krugman observes, "But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
Quite possibly not. For some reason, a lot of low income whites, particularly males, identify with Mr. Trump. They feel (I won't say reason) that they will be better off if the rich are better off.
I know of someone, a retired white male, whose only income in retirement is Social Security that's well under than $1000 per month. And his only health care is from a Medicare Advantage plan. That's it.
Yet he's one of the staunchest of Mr. Trump's supporters. The other day, when the stock market rose, he cheered, even though he has no stake whatsoever in equities or bonds. He admires Scott Pruitt and Ben Carson, both chronicled here in this column. Somehow, the thinks these people are the swamp drainers, rather than the people adding to the level of stagnant water.
This same person rails against the Democrats. He's still crying, "Crooked Hilary." Yet the federal programs that sustain him came from legislation supported by Democrats, and in varying degrees, opposed by conservatives.
There are hundreds of thousands of people who share the outlook of the person above. And they would vote again for Mr. Trump.
16
There is no war on the poor. President Obama added more people to the welfare rolls then any president before him. President Trump wants to reverse this unjust and unfair situation which should never have happened in the first place. Mr. Obama wanted to make the US a welfare state probably to get votes for the Democrat party. It backfired on him and one of the reasons Mr. Trump was elected to office.
No decent human being objects to a handicapped or very sick person from receiving government assistance but when a perfectly healthy person goes on the dole people protest. They do not want their hard earned dollars going to an able-bodied person who refuses to work.
For those who are upset with these cuts to welfare and Medicaid, I have a suggestion for you. Petition to have your tax dollars go to these people for these government programs. The rest of us do not want to pay any more taxes and feel we are paying enough. Thank goodness the Republican Party passed a tax plan that has finally been equitable for a majority of Americans.
3
Let’s look at your first two sentences where you state that President Obama’s added more people to the government dole than any prior president. What happened when he took office? The country was in an economic free-fall. Jobs vanished along with 401(k)’s and homes. Of course those numbers went up. You lost all credibility after that sentence. I don’t need to go any further.
The next move is to show the pockets are inside out when the next budget comes along and that gives the Republicans the “reason” to take away your social security, Medicare and anything else they can along the way. It is about the long game.
5
What nonsense
If all the statistics mentioned here were true we would be seeing the poor doing much better today, with more of them rising out of poverty, than any time in the past. As Krugman has shown Many times this is just not the case
The American taxpayer remains wonderfully willing to spend on programs that provide people a hand up—anything to help get you back on your feet. But way too many of these programs have become hand outs, leading nowhere, reducing incentives to move at all. And hand outs that do not move folks up just create calls for more hand outs. Time to stop
We have spent trillions on programs that have not accomplished the objectives set. Any honest person would ask “what is going on?”
Wasting taxpayer money is cruel too. It is appropriate for taxpayers to demand an accounting
Yes there are charity cases in the US. There are people that must be cared for. As much as possible we should let churches and charities provide that. There is less entitlement and less moral hazard in this.
We will in fact do better soending money via tax cuts to provide any responsible person a decent job. As Krugman has long suggested we should create a massive debt funded infrastructure investment to create low skilled jobs
But we should cut handiuts that allow folks to move to those jobs or freeload. Cruel? Not in this economy
3
THe war on “the poor” began with the war on public education that continues to be waged by all Republican administrations in States, counties and cities across America. Public education is failing badly in its limited ability to teach critical thinking and judgement let alone basic skills. There is a war by the wealthy to dumb down the American population in order to better manipulate and control them using media they have monopolized in order to control with their messages of fear, to terrorize the ill educated into believing their lies.
9
"it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
Sure but maybe they're not part of the "me generation" (remember that?) who vote solely in their self-interest.
This is for sure, nothing makes a white-collar liberal angrier than a blue-collar person not voting the way the former thinks the latter should.
1
Thank you Mr. Krugman for taking the time to write. I know you could be making a lot more money doing other things. I appreciate it.
The white Trump voters hurt by this will suffer, but will be made to feel their suffering is a moral failure on their part. They will continue to vote for Trump as long as their better off neighbors do, as a way of trying to be like everybody else.
2
Why are led by people with such obvious broken empathy? I suspect this its the result of the natural winnowing of political aspirants during cycles of capital dominance. When capital is dominant over labor, the pool of available positions of power shrinks due to increasing capture. The fighting among political aspirants for limited positions increases and only the most aggressive win.
Historically this process takes about 50 years until there is too much impoverishment or power consolidation that leaders themselves push for real change. We are at the end of such a cycle right now now. Its not as bad as other authoritarian states, but our sycophant non empathetic leaders are hitting our stronger rule of law. The real question is will our rule of law hold and the cycle be reversed soon or will they succeed in abolishing our rule of law and go all the way.
That leaders wont process empathy at this stage of social cycles is the key.
4
This story provides more confirmation, if any was needed, that conservatism in America constitutes the elevation of meanness to a governing political philosophy.
6
I actually think its more about selfishness than meanness, despite more or less agreeing with Dr. K. But I suppose selfishness begets meanness, so....
4
Agreed.
These people are addicted to greed the same way some are addicted to drugs.
We reall should have a way to protect the government from these selfish, self-serving , aggressive, bully types who don’t really care about the country.
They aren’t going to police themselves.
Great column and comments. As one who worked as a legal aid lawyer for over 20 years mainly representing tenants being evicted from their homes, it still shocked me as to the resiliency of my clients in forging ahead under untold hardships and obstacles. I can't recall any clients that I deemed had the ability to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" and didn't. The remaining 90% (just a guess on the number), usually faced an unfathomable set of circumstances which were close to impossible to overcome without assistance either government or private. To further kick them when they are down will not help them overcome their life's predicaments but is just plain mean and cruel. It's like a sports team pouring it on when the score is a total blowout already. For the life of me, I to this day can't understand why more haven't blown their brains out. It is a tribute to man's resiliency that they persevere and don't vent their frustrations on society. I can't imagine an avid Trump supporter trading one day in their life with a day in the life of one of those "undeserving" poor. A single parent with one child gets around $200 a month in cash benefits for a maximum of two years in Arizona. Only 1 in 4 poor families are able to obtain subsidized housing due to lack of funding. So if you are one of 3 of 4 families how do you provide a home for you and your child, let alone pay for any other necessities of living which are not available for free on $200 a month. Amazing.
9
Yeh. Empathy is the key to understanding. Empathy is a real biological mechanism, key for survival it turns out. But, like every trait, the processing of empathy is not the same in everyone and can be damaged as well. If you lack it, you don't feel the pain of others, but you still see the pain of others. What these guys do then is justify why it is OK not to be processing empathy. For example, it's the fault of the poor or Ayn Rand economics. These are wrong of course as research and history clearly shows. But, when you lack empathetic processing, its not possible to be convinced because you will never feel these truths.
6
I'm sure this is unsettling to those of you who lean left on principle. To me, it is literally terrifying.
Ben Carson's proposed rent hikes for the poorest HUD beneficiaries only exempts the elderly and disabled for the first six years. Why is no one zeroing in on this specific part of the issue? If you are elderly and/or tpermanently disabled in this country, you aren't given some "morally above reproach" poverty survival kit. You are left to cobble together an existence using the programs that are just collectively there for "the poor."
Food stamps. Section 8 vouchers. Medicaid. And if you're lucky, a check for $760.00 a month, so you can pay your portion of the rent, and all your utilities - and hopefully purchase toilet paper and the like, and maybe even save just enough for a pair of shoes when your current pair wears all the way through.
That's literally my life. I have a serious chronic illness. I worked harder than you can even imagine to get into a good college in spite of it. (My parents had eighth grade educations - it was a challenge.) My only living relative is my mother; when I was a college sophomore, she was diagnosed with ALS. What would you have done? I love her - I had to come home and take care of her. So this is my life now. And I genuinely don't know if I'll be able to keep us off the street at this rate.
Please, care enough to stop this from happening. Call a senator. Write an article. Do something. Help us.
17
The problem with the Krugman's progressive worldview is in the percentage of poor he can count. Our social programs would be much smaller, and quite a bit less expensive if the truly poor could be identified.
How do we know that liberals miscount to poor--always overestimating how many there are? Simple...let's look at the welfare reform package that New Gingrich shoved down Bill Clinton's throat. It succeeded in cutting the number of welfare recipients by nearly half. And we know beyond all doubt...if all those who were shoved off the couch by this reform has actually suffered any real harm, the main stream media would have been laying in wait--to chronicle the stories of those poor folks living in their cars--or if they couldn't afford such luxury--cardboard boxes.
And therein lies the argument between progressives, and conservatives. Progressives believe the vast majority--upwards of 80 percent of citizens need to be on one form of public assistance or another--and conservatives believe it's probably below 1%.
A recent experiment with welfare reform in Maine makes the case. After 16,000 able-bodied adults were required to work to get their benefits, only 1,500 still remain on the program today. Folks...that's over a 90% drop.
Given what we know from experience, the greater question is: why do liberals continue to wage war on the poor--but trapping so many of them in poverty with easy-to-get welfare benefits?
5
Have you not seen the tent cities? Have you not seen the working poor sharing apartments with others, which increased dramatically after Newt's disaster which harmed untold amounts of people? Nonsense. Leave Vermont and come around here to see the poor. They're here. they're in Chicago. They're in Dallas. They're in Honolulu, they're in LA, they're in Miami. I've seen them everywhere I've gone.
5
Where has ANY liberal every made ANY argument that 80% of Americans need to be on public assistance? For that matter, where has any progressive in ANY DEVELOPED NATION ever made the argument that 80% of any citizenry of ANY COUNTRY need to be on public assistance?
Where could such a COMPLETELY unsubstantiated and outrageous statistic come from?
If SS and Medicare were "public assistance" then perhaps a COMPLETELY outrageous claim like yours would almost make sense. If a graduated income tax, provided by the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, allowing a graduated income tax, was somehow a form of public assistance, then a claim like yours would almost make sense. If veterans' benefits were somehow a form of public assistance, a claim like yours would almost make sense. But none of these institutions can reasonably by defined as public assistance. Sorry.
And therein lies a difference between progressives and many conservatives today. Conservatives make crazy and unsubstantiated claims about progressive conspiracy to put everyone on public assistance, and progressives do not.
9
>>> "And therein lies the argument between progressives, and conservatives. Progressives believe the vast majority--upwards of 80 percent of citizens need to be on one form of public assistance or another--and conservatives believe it's probably below 1%."
I've never met a progressive who believes that 80% of citizens should be receiving public assistance beyond that provided to all in civilized society. Sadly, I *have* met any number of people calling themselves "conservative" who believe that fewer than 1% need special assistance -- a belief that is entirely unsupported by fact or history.
Indeed, such a belief is so very much at odds with reality that it is probably best classified as "religious" in nature, arising from faith in supposed revealed truth.
9
Thank you Paul Krugman! There is indeed an obvious cruelty to this entire administration. It's unlikely any of the current cabinet officers ever stepped into a low income area and really noticed what surrounds many American citizens in our country today, (surprise, even Trump's home city) living in poverty. They, like most Americans want work that can support them/ their families, hope for access to good health care, quality education for their children and harbor the expectation that government works for them as well as the wealthiest among us. Perhaps high ranking officials in Washington should step out of their offices, their "secure office phone booths", first class airline seats or limousines and find out firsthand what their cruel policies are delivering.
3
Make America great again: Kick out this corrupt administration and see how great we can make the nation with expanded social security, national single-payer healthcare that will encompass the work of Medicare and Medicaid, an education system that gives all children the necessary tools for success, an infrastructure concept that increases safety and efficiency, and the rules and funding necessary to keep banks honest, our air and water clean, our food safe, and hackers out of our cyber networks. The Trump mob is destructive to everything "great" about this country.
20
While i share Krugman's thoughts i know of 3 people who could very well be working, but have chosen not to work. For now, i m supporting one who just can't seem to get out of the door and look for a job. Yes, he's in his 30's, and healthy, and he does have a record. I know he will never be able to get a good job but can't he find work as a dish washer, janitor, flipping burgers, something, anything, to put a bit of food on the table? He says he has applied for food stamps.
I want to have empathy for the poor, but sometimes it is hard to come up with the required amount.
6
If assistance does indeed provide a disincentive to work, why are you supporting this individual?
1
There are so many such anti-people (not just poor, but middle class included) policies imposed by various administrations belonging to both Republican and Democratic party that we started accepting those policies as acceptable. One great example would be PMI in mortgage loans by almost every Bank, when the borrower could not pay 20% down payment. Most buyers of any type of dwelling would fall under this category. The banks charge the same money (10 % of the property value, not just loan value) twice. The borrowers pay the designated interest on the same money for which they pay PMI, which is much higher than normal interest on that same money. The logic of ‘more security’ does not make any sense, as the Bank issues the loan based on property value which they themselves evaluate.
Then most banks like Wells Fargo, Citi, BMO Harris etc make their own rules when the borrower ask to cancel the PMI when the loan to value (LTV) ratio reaches 80% (i.e. 20% of the property value, principal, is paid off), as initially indicated by the Banks loan office while the customer was shopping for the loan. Banks can be more whimsical to decrease the LTV to cancel PMI for shorter term & ARM loans. That means the customer has to pay many more months/years of that double payment. And we all, including almost all government oversight bodies took that for granted for so long. PMI is a big issue for many people who can not buy house and/or pay mortgage regularly.
3
The white, rural, racist, Trump supporters in my state will be more than happy to see urban, nonwhite, poor lose benefits. The only thing that Trump isn't allowed to cut is their own personal welfare in rural Iowa - - agricultural subsidies.
17
If the increasingly obscenely wealthy class does not want to contribute to society out of community interest or compassion, perhaps they could think about doing it out of self-interest. Otherwise, as billionaire Nick Hanauer has said, mobs with pitchforks will be coming after them. This is not a result that anyone with common sense should want, because revolutions are bloody and indiscriminate, but this is what we are going to get if current trends continue.
9
Marketing alert: It's a great time to open a pitchfork store!
6
I don't believe the primary goal is to "hurt the poor". Republicans are not stupid. They know the tax cut will not improve the standard of living for the base. They won't be climbing to the next rung of the socio-economic ladder. But if they can watch others get pushed further down the ladder, they will have something else to look at and cheer. Instead of blaming the Republicans who have nothing to offer for them. So even when you are losing you are winning.
2
Sadly, the contempt shown for the poor is part of a general contempt of the rich for the poor. If you are not rich you are a loser.
Worse, many people who end up in the safety net were pushed there by the the cruel people who deem them lazy: those refusing to raise wages, shipping jobs overseas, taking away pensions and medical benefits, charging interest rates 10-20% higher than bank interest on credit cards--all in the name of "increasing shareholder value" and enriching CEOs.
In short, it pays to be cruel.
16
Clearly the Trump/Republican viewpoint is that the best rise to the top, while the rest of us either rightfully suffer in the dirty sink water or go down the drain. Social Darwinism purely and simply. It is a sick and disgusting philosophy. Applying evolution to economics is simply wrong.
5
Please forgive a second comment, but I just read a story in the WP about Paul Ryan's firing the House chaplain who had prayed that “there are not winners and losers", but rather “benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.” The author suggests an answer to the question of why Republicans are so cruel to poor people. They're not being cruel, they're trying to keep from stripping the individual intuitive and work ethic from these people. Sort of like the British who let a million Irish starve to death, rather than make them weak. Maybe that's the thinking. OK, I got that typed without gagging.
17
Conservatives and Republicans believe that all of their success with wealth is because of their virtue. Poor people are poor because they are lazy. Moochers and takers. Their language speaks louder. They care less about government size.
Why cruel, they would ask. Why is telling lazy people to work harder cruel?
7
I doubt most of us who read this paper are even going to notice that these programs are being cut, it's nice to tell your opinion to make yourself feel better, but once you press send, more than likely, you won't think about it again
1
I think you're on to something. The roar of the internet is just background noise.
In answer to your question Dr. K....Trump voters are willing to punish themselves as long as they perceive that non-whites are being punished more.
10
Such a Righteous group the Republicans are, their distain for the disadvantaged is only surpassed by tripping over themselves to find new and improved advancements for Corporate Welfare.
Ironies abound with the Righteous, outrage over the fate of a Fetus while ire towards the 31,000,000 million children living in poverty.
The Republicans are predators and scavengers. Their hunt devoted towards the destruction of the middle class and poor, all members of their own species, leave them no better than cannibals. No shrunken heads are displayed only the numbers that represent the citizens they are squeezing into a slow, painful decline.
They are led by an admitted sexual predator. He devoted his professional life to scavenge through loopholes for anything he touched from loans to the swath of bankruptcies destroying businesses he engaged, their employees, students at the University he founded, while he remained unscathed personally and professionally.
He built and opened, as a testament to his grandness, Casinos in Atlantic City that are left vacant, decaying eye sores. As wiley and hideous as the mythical Jersey Devil who lurks in the nearby Pine Barrens he will be remain villified by those he left bankrupt and jobless.
9
And what a clever fellow he has been! He chose Mike Pence, quisling extraordinaire, for his vice president, virtually guaranteeing his own hold own power until we finally reject him at the polls.
5
Since I work as a doc in “free” clinics here in rural Georgia by the Alabama line I hear what our poorest citizens say. The patients are all white and every one is on disability or WANTS to get on disability.
None of these folks could work in a sheltered workshop. They lack any cognitive ability, most didn’t get past the third grade. They simply are unable to understand the world around them so they reference the only book read to them on Sunday and Wednesday nights- the Bible... mostly “Revelations.”
I had a family conference as none of the kids went to a public school—“We home school them as “they are being taught that the Bible is wrong.” There is zero oversight to see what these children ARE being taught.” They mainly just watch TV all day, mainly old TV shows.
Parents unable to keep the lowest jobs such as gutting chickens in an assembly line. “I didn’t like wearing those big ole gloves.”
They ALL called Hillary “the Devil” and NOT metaphorically!
I asked them “Where does the government get the money for your disability, food stamps Medicaid etc?”
They print the money
Trump is so rich we get our money from him.
I am serious!
“The earth is 5,000 yrs old and NASA just makes stuff up!”
I have 6 more months w Americorps.
These are the people who need our help! And Ben Carson tripled rent and “able bodied” people must work to get this “welfare.”
They can’t!!
28
Good observation and if American business had no choice they would have to hire and train them.
As much as I appreciate Mr. Krugman’s analyses, I disagree with his take away in this column.
Saying that our current disaster in Washington is based specifically on Trump and Co.’s cruelty removes the continuity with previous Republican administrations. To be fair to those on the other side of the aisle, I take them at their word that they sincerely believe that government has no role in helping its citizens beyond ensuring a strong military (which fits with the border security obsession) and policing areas of morality that I consider private matters (e.g. use of drugs, birth control/right to choose, etc.). Tooth and claw, winners and losers, makers and takers - very straightforward world view.
I completely disagree with them, but I need not paint them as pure evil to call out the disastrous outcomes of their positions on society as a whole. Unfortunately current conservative’s “circle of concern” is narrowly defined, and they’ve sincerely convinced themselves that any redistribution of resources is not only unfair but a breach of their view of the natural order.
Very different philosophies at play, very hard to reconcile, and it’s going to plague our politics for decades.
8
A year ago during the Christmas season I was on Fifth Avenue about a block from Trump Tower, which was surrounded by a protective ring of law officers. A woman and infant wrapped in blankets against the cold day were lying on the sidewalk--beggars. Some have suggested the scene was a scam by the pair to extract more money from passersby. (That was one really really smart and clever infant with a mother obviously well equipped to provide a great life for her child.)
I was deeply upset by the scene (probably like thousands of other passersby) but did nothing (also probably like thousands of other passersby). I could have called 911, or 311, but decided to" mind my own business."
As much as I despise Trump and his politics and lack of humanity, i cannot blame him alone for our society's increasing callousness and hostility to the poor. I don't know if the trend started with President Clinton's welfare cuts, or Bush I's cuts, or earlier--unless checked and reversed we are in for some severe social unrest in the future.
2
It's not a new phenomenon, but the increasing wealth of the top 10% has something to do with the current situation. For Trump and most Republicans, money is all that matters--and if you don't have it, you don't matter. That sentiment has been well known throughout history, but it's front and center now, in the TV news and on magazine covers and newspapers' front pages, because the clueless and heartless and frivolous wealthy are running (and ruining) the country.
4
Dear Anne in Maine -
The woman on the sidewalk with the baby ... it IS a scam. There was an organized group of them doing this until the news followed them home and got footage of the women clothes shopping and living normal lives.
You see them once. Live here. You'll see the same person in the same place on the sidewalk for years on end. I have passed the same "homeless" woman for eight years in a row standing on the same corner. Same guy downtown, same corner, four years, I left for two, went back for four more - he was still there, ten years in a row.
In Maine, you learn not to feed the bears because they come to expect handouts and that people are an easy place to get food. It's no different with people. There are some who cannot work - truly cannot work. They deserve help. But there are a great many who can work, but choose not to. For them - give nothing. Only by refusing to give can you teach them (or force them) to go fend for themselves.
1
"Will they notice?"
No, they won't. The willingness of many people to vote against their own self interest has been demonstrated repeatedly in election after election. Give them their myths, their miracles, and their dreams ...
7
I consider myself very much a centrist, but the way Republicans tend to view and treat the poor just sickens me. I know quite a few poor people, some rather well, and most all of them work thankless jobs that just don't pay enough.
Should these people have stayed in school longer so that they could get higher paying jobs? For the most part, yes. Should they have waited to be in stable marriages before having any kids? Far too often, yes. But neither of these things changes the fact that today they are working hard and trying to do right by their families. Don't they deserve a helping hand?
Liberals too often downplay or make excuses for bad choices commonly made by poor Americans. It's true. But conservatives seem downright heartless when it comes to the poor. Whatever happened to "But for the grace of God there go I"?
8
I, for one, I'm happy to see these giveaways get gutted, they've been growing for too long and it's time for people, especially with a less than 4% unemployment rate, to get back on the horse and make a living themselves.
Aside from that, these giveaways and entitlement programs do nothing for someone self-esteem or sense of self worth. What kind of a man wants to crawl to another man for his family's food, I'll never understand it
4
Most of those on food stamps are children. But let's be honest. The only reason conservatives haven't eliminated it altogether is that large grocery manufacturers and farmers are making a bundle off of it, so they leave it mostly intact and use it to rile their base of mean, nasty, and ignorant voters.
Yeah, so that minimum wage job with not benefits and on-call hours is going to give you plenty of self-esteem as you starve or freeze to death.
2
There are people in the armed forces who are paid so little that they need food stamps to get by. That might be a good place to begin understanding it.
5
"But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
Sadly I fear the answer is no. Much has been written about the paradox of poor whites voting against their economic interests (What's the matter with Kansas?) but as recent research has shown, what drives the vote is white's fear of being replaced in the social hierarchy by minorities. The South will always be the South until it is swamped by demographic reality, but that won't come soon.
5
More evidence of this war on the poor emerged this morning as Paul Ryan fired the House chaplain for daring to say in a prayer "guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans."
There is apparently no room in Paul Ryan's supposed devote Catholicism for compassion for the poor.
12
The chaplain was grossly out of line. I find it repugnant that liberals who constantly (and correctly) call for separation of church and state are supportive of a clergy member who spouts their liberal ideology.
1
The liberal Democrats are the party of free "stuff" at the expense of others. They love to have others pay for things that they themselves work hard to obtain. This is why the Republicans are winning elections in many states. Americans are tired to have to support able-bodied persons who refuse or will not support themselves. President Trump wants to end the free give away program that has been draining our citizens for too long now.
3
I might have some sympathy for your perspective, except you are picking a mighty peculiar example of this alleged ending of free stuff for others. You do realize that Trump has PLAYED the system relentlessly for decades, I assume. He got unique tax breaks for building profit-making building that others did not. If you pay taxes in New York, you subsidized this person who claims to be self-made (we also know about the millions his father gave him to become self-made, right?). President Trump wants his wealthy friends to prosper; others down the food chain might benefit. It's the latest incarnation of trickle down economics.
3
When it comes to "free stuff," conservatives lead the charge. In conservative West Virginia, for example, a state that Trump won by 42 points, 44% of the population is on Medicaid. There are many conservative farmers and ranchers who are heavily subsidized. Former Tennessee Tea Party congressman Steven Fincher, for example, collected millions of dollars in farm subsidies, yet quoted scripture in justifying his vote to cut food stamps: "The one who will not work shall not eat." Republicans also hand out tax cuts to be paid for by future generations, deregulate corporate polluters so they can stick taxpayers with the cleanup bill, etc.
The liberals are the party of "free stuff" nonsense is designed to appeal to the Republicans' base of low-information voters.
4
The Republican Party is all about greed.
They want the money.
They will take whatever their base is as long their base supports them.
And they have no allegiance to their base, they couldn’t care less about them.
But they will pander to them for their votes.
But in the end, it’s “show me the money”.
And this has been working for them.
The 1% is winning, and the country is losing.
7
I have made the argument for years that religion makes people less moral. The Republican party is proof that this is true. They are dominated by people who claim to be religious, and their policies on health care, helping the poor, military spending, child care, contraception, education, environmental protection, and tax policy are all immoral. Don't get me wrong not all religious people are immoral, just the vast majority.
8
This is about money, and money alone. If all you care about in life is money, go ahead and support Trump and his minions. But if you care about anything else - anything at all - be it health care, equality, or a decent chance at a decent life for all Americans, please join me and let's work hard towards reversing this downward spiral by electing Democrats in November.
115
Ah, and now we have another "Father Knows Best" by Paul Krugman who professes to know more than any of us about poverty. (Especially the cruel Republican cause). Here is my Trump Conservative take on it. Lyndon B. Johnson declared a "War On Poverty" years ago. Why, oh why then, is there still so much poverty? Answer: We have been importing it!! Yes, the importation of poverty through illegal immigration is the single biggest cause of the increase, & lack of progress, in fighting poverty in the USA! Those who enter the US illegally in mass every year are adding poverty to our schools, our welfare system, our health, and our criminal justice system, as it is well know that poverty is a big contributor to crime. Yes! Trump is fighting poverty and it is seen in his fight against illegal immigration. Perhaps, if we can stop the importation of poverty via illegal immigration, we can finally give more attention to those who are US citizens who are in need. Until then, poverty will never be really solved, no matter how much money you throw at it.
3
Food stamps are widely praised and supported by the farm lobby, as it increases business for them.
4
As long as the problems of the poor don't ever negatively impact the lives of the rich, it doesn't really matter how bad their situation becomes.
1
Beyond making a comment here or there, who has the time to worry about other people's financial stability?
Charity starts at home.
4
It is not just a war on the poor. It is a war on Democracy.
The poor are the most easily felled in that war. But the war will not stop until either we successfully unite and overpower them, or we are all become slaves to our new masters.
I know it sounds like I've been reading too much fantasy. But it's as plain as day. That's what they want. Complete and total power over all.
The question becomes, how do we unite ourselves? How do we bring together BLM and Trump America, Evangelicals and Atheists? And get them all to VOTE. Because that's what we have to do. November is fast approaching.
5
The Republican party has the secret to stay in power in perpetuity. Make life more difficult for working people struggling to stay afloat in brutal jobs, foment resentment of social programs for confiscating their hard-earned money to give away for free to the lazy, undeserving poor, win elections at every level. A foolproof formula that works every time.
3
It is my hope that the GOP will be crushed so badly in the November elections that it will cease to be a major party. It somewhat troubles me that the desperation the cuts of the war on the poor may engender could lead to civil unrest that would turn into a hot shooting war against the poor, as martial law and the military might be brought in to quell unrest among hungry needy people. it looks like trouble ahead especially in some large cities that haven't exploded since the 1960s. But this time, with the cuts that are being proposed, it wouldn't be a bad thing to bring street justice to the politicians who so richly deserve it.
13
Being poor is never an excuse to rob and pillage.
1
Perhaps if the message was made more strongly to the voting public that these programs
are not -giveaways-
they are -valuable investments-
They offer a return on tax money spent.
6
Education and civil service systems are the best ways up for poor people. Both are under fire by self-serving Republicans. True conservatives would see these programs as an investment in the social structure, not a cost in the operating budget.
7
Conservatives attack education because they fear people will be educated by it. A broadly and well-educated citizen knows very well that the term, conservatism, has come to mean the the elimination of public schooling, e pre-school child care that allows broke families to go to work, adequate health care, safer food and cleaner environments. All government programs that do not involve what we call Defense, and policing, are targets of these so-called conservatives, and the decline of quality education is necessary to the bleak and dangerous world the so-called conservatives are, perhaps blindly, creating.
14
Just reading about the pain inflicted by this administration on anyone who isn't in their 'elite' class makes me physically ill--not to mention mad. Is there nothing we can do to stop this inhumane treatment before it gets so bad that it will take years to fix?
7
There's nothing legal that appears possible to be done quickly enough to stop the damage, it appears.
1
Feel free to donate to charity until it hurts but keep the governments hands out of my pockets.
"But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
Good question.
Some will notice, such as our public school teachers.
But some won't notice, like the out-of-work West Virginia coal miners who despite all evidence to the contrary still think Trump will bring their coal-mining jobs back -- or at least make America great again.
10
Cutting taxes is not an act of war on the poor. The goal of tax cuts is to make the economy better. Even the poor are better off in a wealthy nation. However, we will always have people who will require SNAP and medicaid. I don't know why the GOP insists upon attacking these very good programs. Poverty and a certain amount of dependence will always exist in any population for various and sundry reasons so why attack programs designed for that?
9
Cutting taxes in red states (such as yours) has gone way too far. Witness the upheaval with teachers’ strikes in many states where education has been stripped to the bone. Like it or not, having a good educational system, and safe and functional infrastructure, for instance, costs money. Taxpayers have to pony up. Of course we all have a right to expect that our taxes are wisely spent. Which is why “hiring” a guy who specializes in bankruptcy when he overspends, and has had his hand in the till since Day One, made no sense at all.
16
Hi Benedict,
if you are referring to the corporate tax cuts, all they did was improve what for most of the industry were already record earnings. Please explain to me how increasing the profit margin of a company from good to better makes the economy grow? Assuming they don't just return increased profits to investors or buy back their own stock, how do higher profits create a market opportunity to be exploited that didn't previously exist? What is the mechanism that creates jobs?
9
Why? Possibly to start a shooting war on the poor. Make them desperate and angry enough to bring out some guns, and then kill them. Reduce the number of poor and minority people---Trump would love that.
Lurking behind these policies of the current government is the belief that human beings are economic machines and no more.
So the government's role is reduced to directing the "machines," not to enabling a healthy and happy society.
Time to rethink the roles of government?
11
No, time to rethink the giveaways to the poor
2
Why? So they can proclaim in speeches that they started to rip the leeches off the American taxpayers. It reinforces the idea that it is the poor who are dragging us down, and their democrat enablers. It is pure blame and projection, the only tools available to inflame the dispossessed.
The real problem is that serious people only address the policy, and rhetoric is left to partisans. We need a serious battle over rhetoric driving policy. But who could do that? Mr. Krugman doesn’t grok rhetoric, and the national comedians can’t be serious. Who then?
7
Reagan trickle down policies were designed to do exactly the opposite: establish a system to mop up whatever wealth existed down below and bring it up to the corporate wealthy. This is now in full operation and works as predicted. Bills pile up, social programs disappear, any basic safety net removed. The billionaires are sucking up the blood of millions and return nothing. Hard to believe that many poor and lower middle class people voted republican and supported trump, as they can't eat their guns and bullets or whatever else they expected was going to be delivered to them.
18
Look at Sean Hannity, the welfare queen, to see what Trump and his miscreant, hypocritical cabinet heads have as their agenda. They criticize and exploit the poor to enrich themselves. There is no compassion, just greed. They use the mantle of saying the poor are lazy, uneducated, criminals. and abusers of the welfare system. Yet as we can see it is just the opposite. Trump, Hannity, Mnuchin, DeVoss, Pruitt and the other garbage men are the ones that are manipulating the system for their own personal wealth. The poor be damned. Trump and Hanitty are slumlords. Mnuchin foreclosed on thousands of California homeowners. Pruitt is destroying the safeguards of saving the environment. They are the robber barons of today. They have now been exposed for what they are, the wretched of the earth.
31
Mnuchin made a fortune running a foreclosure mill. Often they foreclosed on homes without any documentation even on some where the mortgage was already paid off. These people are truly crooks.
Just about every Manhattanite knows how crooked trump is, but somehow no one listened to them.
When he started the "crooked Hillary" garbage, I knew he was deflecting, and I began to suspect he was even more of a criminal than I originally thought-- looks like that is indeed the case.
5
Many Americans believe in "reducing the size of government", by which they do not mean reducing spending on the military, on prisons, on policing, or on corporate subsidies. What you find out they mean, if you question them for only a minute or two, is "taking money away from the needy".
The flip side of the demonstrably false argument that "anyone can make it in America if you work hard enough" is that if you are poor "it's your own damn fault because you are lazy and undeserving. Giving you more benefits will only encourage your laziness, and as a taxpayer I'm not paying for that."
The GOP and Trump don't live and breathe this argument simply because they are cruel. This argument is a foundational justification for income inequality, for the belief that the wealthy are deserving and the poor are not.
26
Under Trump, a plutocracy is criminalizing poverty. Essentially saying if you won't work, you won't eat.
Meanwhile, as corporations stockpile cash, Trump's cabinet members spend large sums on themselves. And Trump vacations most weekends, using millions of tax payer dollars.
Insidiously, slashing government expenditures to the poor opens up more ways for Paul Ryan and the administration to give more tax cuts to the richest in America.
As for corporations already granted massive tax breaks, a full two thirds surveyed said it didn't change their plans for hiring. It was a lie a Republicans tax plan would trickle down to the poor in job creation. By actions + policy this administration punishes and shames the poor.
16
For my family in Kansas, this is not a debate about compassion. It is a fight for justice. The best among us, the wealthy, deserve to soar free. The unworthy, the poor, deserve disease and death. Redistributing wealth is immoral. As Christians, they see a tiny handful of undeserving poor who should be helped, but it’s just a few, and they all live in rural America. To the poor they “speak the truth in love”: you deserve your plight.
4
I'm in Kansas and am not where I can hear those arguments expressed, but I see the results weekly and even daily in difficulties facing poor people. Food stamps cut off because a person had a couple of weeks worth of overtime pay. Welfare department's bread and butter is to take kids away from their parents for the most trivial reasons, like legitimate discipline. Highways going unrepaired. Countless taxpayers failing to realize that in voting for rightwingers, they voted for the potholes wrecking their suspensions and voted for skyrocketing costs of public universities and govt-regulated electricity rates. This state is despicable.
2
“Will they notice?” A good question. Maybe not.
4
The war on the poor is necessary to keep them in line, so they will do the dirty, dangerous, low-paid jobs and keep the profits flowing to the 1%.
It also motivates the rest of us to stay at our grindstones, so we don't fall into that situation.
Viva lazzai-faire capitalism!
12
Food, housing, healthcare, and education are basic human rights.
We ought to be willing to pay for this.
Most poor people in the United States are white people who live in red states. The day will surely come when they wake to the Trump GOP con game.
8
Nah, they like their life. Hunt, fish, eat organic, don't give your life savings to the doctor for an 18 month extension. Pay your dues by serving in the military. Sell enough produce and do the odd jobs to make taxes. Limit the number of dependents to those you can support. You'll have to look elsewhere..this group isn't interested in becoming mass low quality food producers, spending their time building homes or feeding onlookers, but they are willing to fund the schools if their own kids aren't in study hall and the tax isn't so much that they lose their homes. Perhaps vo-tech needs to be expanded in the cities.
In the meantime, Vonnegut's Galapagos is a good read while we ponder how to integrate those who want the benefits of the first world without contributing to its success, and what to do with those impeding the thriving of humanity as they fill their vaults.
"it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
Not as long as it hurts minorities more. For Trump voters, it is also about inflicting pain. Let's us not deceive ourselves for an instant that there is anything but irrational hatred at the heart of racism and bigotry, nor anything but racism and bigotry at the heart of Trumpism.
14
How can someone with so much, know what it's like to have so little?
Krugman: “… a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel no empathy for the poor…[that] reflects racial animus…[it] will disproportionately hurt minority groups, [and] a lot of low-income whites — in fact, … a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?”
The bottom line, they don’t care because they do not see the linkages between them and those they blindly hate.
The righteous GOP and those that put trump in office wrap the robes of God around themselves tightly, purposefully disdain those with less, and do not believe that “We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous.”
8
What do expensing first class travel fare and a dining set, massive government waste at maralago, and huge tax breaks for wealthy gop donors have in common ? Add trump’s university, hiding his taxes, evading taxes and self-impersonation. Criminality, fraud, and abuse. Trump and the gop are together the most corrupt in living US history. Trump and the people around him- pruitt, price and carson are a mafia. Trumps collusion with putin is another story. Shady, sleazy house republicans just colluded with trump and putin by concluding their ‘investigation’. Together they can now rob, torture and kill anybody they want, with impunity
9
You referred to the right: "What about the idea that anit-poverty programs create a 'poverty trap' reducing incentive for people to work their was to a better life?" Their argument is ridiculous. Why don't they prove their point? Rush Limbaugh, Shaun Hannity, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and a few others should forgoe their millionaire lifestyle and live on food stamps and in public housing for a month or two. If it's such a good life that there is a reduced incentive to have a better life, they can donate their millions to charity and enjoy life on the public dime. Not a likely outcome.
10
The issue that bothers me the most is the mean spirit with which they make the cuts. Take for example the program the Justice Dept. had for getting legal aid to immigrants trying to get asylum in the US. By the Justice Dept's own review, the program saved millions of dollars every year in Justice Dept's costs. But since the program targeted the 2 main focal points in the Trump Republican Party, Immigrants and the Poor, it has to go. But they are okay with a $43,000 cone of silence for that muttonhead Pruitt. God, please make it end soon.
7
I think Trump's core base supports him because he's
"in your face" about everything. His behavior and Tweets encourage the attitude that is so prevalent today in all of society: "Don't tell ME what to do." (This attitude makes teaching high school and middle school very difficult.)
For the right, especially the working class, this attitude is the perfect foil to the educated left. The near-genius ploy of creating a world of 'alternative facts' and the always useful "Fake News" taunt - supported by Fox News, Breitbart,etc. - gives any uninformed person the feeling that they can join the national debates and win.
The Evangelicals who support Trump seem to like the "in your face" approach as well. They have armed themselves
with retorts like: "We weren't trying to elect St. Francis of Assisi," or "President Trump's character issues are between him and his family." What they are really trying to whitewash is the ugly fact that their prosperity "gospel" is all they care about ( that and a nod to pro-Life), so bring on the tax cuts and make the poor pay. There is more than a little white supremacy and anti-women ideology among the Evangelicals "love" for Trump.
The rich are truly put off by Trump's coarseness, his vulgarity and ignorance. His lack of education is such that it makes them wonder how he got into or out of college. But they put up with Trump because his "in your faceness" got them the tax cuts, the deregulations, the boot on the neck of the poor.
13
The Republican Party misread their Dickens. Or more likely, didn't read it at all. Cast Trump in the role of Fagin, exploiting the poor orphans and you have their version of Utopia.
3
Trump's war on poverty should shame us all, yet the Democratic party's challenge is hard to hear in today's news cycle. Having made his money the old-fashioned way, by inheriting it, he will never know the terrible choices the poor make every day. Instead, he and his sycophants keep finding new ways to inflict pain on the poor. It is truly shameful, and no good can come from it for any of us.
4
There is a widespread delusion on the right that those who graduate from high school, take any job they can find, and have no illegitimate children will not be poor.
Few of them will be destitute. Nevertheless, many will spend their lives as one of the working poor.
Computer technology and automation are eliminating the better paying jobs that most people can learn how to perform. The "better trade deals" Trump talks about will not change this.
4
Trump and the GOP are at war with every American who isn't rich or a rich corporation. The Democrats rely too heavily on the rich as well but at least they try, on occasion, to help the rest of us. Trump and the GOP make no pretense of caring. Even their words show their complete lack of understanding and concern and interest in the lives of average Americans, working Americans, and yes, poor people, most of whom do work.
The Greedy Praetors Party would feel right at home in the latter day Roman Empire. Corruption was their downfall. It will be the downfall of the GOP as well because when enough people get angry and start to rebel the corruption fails. Trump and the GOP are loyal to power but not each other and not to us. They would sell out their best friends to stay in power and that will undo them in the end. I hope I live to see it.
5
Most poor people are not poor because they're lazy, they're poor because they have no money and very limited opportunities to change that situation. The idea that freedom and self-determination are ours for the taking is absurd. Those educated hard-working teachers going on strike are blowing a huge hole through the economic and social fallacies the GOP has been peddling for decades.
The depths of poverty in mostly White areas in Middle and southern America is sometimes more horrific than anything I witnessed growing up in the south Bronx. My father died when I was a baby. We needed food stamps and Medicaid while I was growing up. And my mother worked. Now I pay taxes, both income and business, in addition to high health insurance, and student loans needed for the education to make this all possible .I contribute positively to society including helping out our less fortunate friends and family. And we are barely whats considered middle class for NY. I think New York has gotten a good a return on investment from me. Let's stop muddying the issue with morality and compassion. From a cold-blooded financial perspective, the war on the poor does more harm than good.
19
The way to fight a war on poverty is to offer people what they need: jobs that pay enough, affordable housing, good education, retraining, enough food so they don't go hungry, quality child care. All the things that Scandinavia and other civilized countries offer their citizens but we don't because we don't believe in charity or welfare. We prefer to let people starve, become homeless, die or be in pain from lack of access to decent timely medical care, remain jobless, etc.
If other countries can do well by their citizens America can too. We have to want to and we have to elect politicians who want to as well. The current crop don't have enough people in their midst who truly care about others. They care about their image and their power which is not the same as caring about others.
5
Republicans and their sympathisers must be reminded of the Aesop's parable of the goose that laid golden eggs (http://read.gov/aesop/091.html.)
1
Certainly the economy is measured in a way that talks in gross amounts of capital. The concentration of wealth into a small amount of people who benefit from the productivity gains and the economic growth in the economy hides the fact that luxury talks and fair distribution of wealth walks. The fear and resentment of white people in the middle class made a classic opening for a charlatan extraordinaire like Trump and a vicious demagogue like Bannon to put Trump in the presidency.
5
Conservatives complain that the liberal programs don't work.
But the conservatives don't say how they will fix poverty.
They just say get rid of the liberal programs.
We are the richest industrial country on the planet GDP / captia.
Why don't the other industrial first world countries have the poverty we have?
5
"Why don't the other industrial first world countries have the poverty we have?"
Because they don't have a phony-Christian money-changing GOP running their countries.
10
"Why don't the other industrial first world countries have the poverty we have?"
The U.S. poverty rate for a family of four is an income of $24,563. This family poverty level income in the U.S. would be the 24th highest average nominal income or 28th highest adjusted income in the world, both measures are ahead of Greece and Portugal.
Even the individual poverty income level of $12,228 in the U.S. would be earning more money than the average GDP per capita of someone in Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and China.
And we already offer 1-2 years of unemployment benefits, food and SNAP programs, free public school, means tested secondary education assistance, health care subsidies, and housing assistance to people at this poverty income level.
Luxembourg is the richest country by average wages. Using nominal wages, the U.S. has the sixth highest average income in the world, the five countries ahead of us have either the tightest immigration policies in the world or no land borders with less affluent countries (Iceland, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg). Qatar, Bermuda, and Macau were not included in these figures.
Average income by country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage
GDP:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita
Poverty in U.S.:
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2017/demo/p60-259.html
Conservatives make sure the safety net programs don't work and then blame them when they don't.
2
Thanks for writing this, Mr. Krugman. We, in the general sense, are not talking about this very subject enough. It does seem very calculated in the way this administration is targeting low-income people. The reasons why are too tragic and heartless to fathom.
10
Lyndon Johnson gave us the war on poverty. We got Medicare and welfare.
Ronald Reagan gave us the war on drugs.
Nobody including the Tea Party voters want to give up Medicare.
But welfare and prison have not cured those problems. In both cases we spent money, gave people a check and built prisons.
And in the case of the war on drugs, we killed Pablo Escobar in 1993 and we have more drugs than ever.
But in both cases, we didn't do the hard work to help people change.
It's hard work and costs money.
On the other hand, most of these problems correlate to poverty.
Why don't the other first world countries have the poverty we do?
And we are the richest industrial country on the planet GDP / capita.
2
The overriding goal of the Republican Party is, as Prof. Krugman said in his recent summary of Paul Ryan's career, "to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted." I understand the first part since that has always been Republicans' prime directive, but why the need to make life more difficult for poor people? As this points out, most of the mean spirited actions Republicans are taking against the poor will not save money and are likely to reduce economic outcomes. My state, Arkansas, is enforcing the Medicaid work requirement, and just announced that all recipients will have to have access the system on line to document their efforts. Wonder how that will work out for poor, old, sick people? I also wonder if the cost of enforcing the requirements might exceed the savings from denying poor people medical care. (We also have proposals to raise the sales tax on food, but cut the top income tax rate.) We did just put up a new monument to the Ten Commandments on the State Capitol grounds--some guy destroyed the first one--so we're a vocally Christian state. I have no answer to the central question here. I just remain amazed at the mean spirited nastiness that passes for "conservationism" and "Christianity" in my state and country.
15
I assume Arkansas is now providing free wifi and computers for internet access that the poor can't afford but will have to provide to prove they are poor. Southern "Christianity" is a blight on society, as is Ayn Rand's (you know, the atheist the Catholics like Paul Ryan all worship) hateful libertarianism, which drives the GOP to new depths daily. With half of Americans in the thrall of fake news, lies, and conservative propaganda, I see no way out.
3
During the '60's I believe, poor women receiving Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) began organizing to push back against abuses they experienced at the hands of the government. They were successful in achieving remedies and in gaining support for change. And they voted. This is what needs to happen now to stem the damage Republicans are doing in scapegoating and depriving the poor (most of them working). The rest of us have to decide what kind of society we want to be and vote accordingly in November.
5
Paul, how could you forgot Betsy deVos???????
2
If you kick people while there down they get used to being kicked and they less likely to get up and fight back; but you have to keep kicking.
To the rich republicans indulging in cruelty is simply a perk - an entitlement, for what passes these days for conservative, county club Christians, who golf as people starve or die for lack of medical care.
The Republican/Fascists are damaging this nation beyond repair. Unless the voters really wake up and act in great numbers in the next 2 elections, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that by 2030 either half of our people will be working in labor camps or debtors prisons, or the billionaire donor class who who have bought our government for themselves to do with as they please, will be hung from lampposts within a day of their arrests by armed militias, gangs and the tree of anarchy will be in full bloom.
Our house is on fire now but we can put out the flames on election day and determining if there is enough left of our country to make repairs in 2020 by purging the fascist cancer which has infected all 3 branches of government.
Our Sup. Ct., is signalling that it can no longer be trusted with the Constitution and it will approve a travel ban based on religion the 1st amend be damned, thanks to a stolen seat with flouted the Constitution. It will be necessary to have an 11 Justice court so that the Court is not tainted for years to come. After all Trumps war on the poor is against the Constitution as well.
3
And the so-called "Christians" support these policies. Very "Christ-like" of them. What a scam.
9
Perhaps you never heard of Calvinism, the so-called Christian doctrine that states those who are worthy shall be rewarded on earth with riches and acclaim. Those who are unworthy shall be consigned to misery. The Pilgrims among others subscribed to this heresy and its influence has never ceased to be felt among even non-believers in the USA.
3
Please, don't leave out DeVos in your list of collection of petty grifters and miscreants.
6
You left Betsy DeVos off your list.
4
President Trump and his minions in state departments, congress and state governments are operating a bald faced rape of the nation's coffers; skimming the cream, and most effectively I might add
3
Did you ever wonder why poor Mexicans scramble over our border in order to work and earn money while many of our poor Americans eschew those same jobs and destroy their futures by becoming government dependent?
5
This is worse than the liberals' war on the rich.
2
Maybe the poor are too stupid to realize they have been conned.
2
Well there is an argument that can be made with poor Trump supporters that their problem is the US really is the meritocracy they think it isn't.
I'm not sure I really believe that . . . but heck, it is a possibility.
Trumps effect on people like me isn’t so visible .His vicious
Behavior ,coming everyday ,is like a tide of filth unending
And spreading sickness everywhere.He “leads” this country and
Congressional members are afraid to stand up to him,they know he’s sick and so do we.
He blunders on now including a War monger in his stable of
Horror.You are correct ,he does what harm s others because he
Wants to and because he can.Are there no men or women to stop him?Our Republic is in terrible danger,and democracy is
Being thrown into Trumps sewer.
2
The last time the entrenched Wealthy, Powerful forces of the "Establishment" locked arms to protect its priveledge was when the outsiders voted en masse to elect FDR. Oh how the NE Establishment howled at the betrayal!! They used the Court System to block the FDR agenda, they slandered him in the papers, they fought tooth and nail to prevent FDR from accomplishing anything. Fortunately for FDR, it was truly hard times and the overwhelming support from the outliers allowed FDR to carry out a lot of programs that would be unthinkable today.
Today, a lot of those very same programs are the PROBLEM......preventing the USA from moving forward....an inertia resisting change. the New Deal is now....admittedly.....OLD............along comes Donald J Trump....DJT (hahah).......and oh how the Establishment howls!! They put aside political colors and unite in a fight to prevent anything new from happening(and then call themselves "progressives")
1
Nothing new here. Same old redistribution of wealth upwards to the already overly rich. The promise of the New Deal still hasn't been fulfilled. That is not because it's tenet are old, it is because the GOP has fought it for most of a century. That is on the back of Reagan and every self-serving conservative Republican elected official since, including your boy Trump. Trump has no new ideas, just the same anecdotal haze that has driven all conservative "thinking", including yours, for decades. Don't EVER conflate my progressivism with Trump's antediluvian idiocy.
3
Why you ask! It is a political calculation.
We are now being trained by this administration to see the poor as a threat to our white privileges. The poorer the non-white minorities are the more time they spend in prison, the unlikelier they are allowed to vote or are interested to vote and the more we white folks can blame anybody else but us for stagnation in our incomes and well being and the more the 1 percenters can lap off spoils of the economy for themselves.
5
I’ve agonized since Trump took over. I’ve tried to pinpoint the cause of the agony. And alas, I woke up to the Trump reality of leadership. Trump’s reign is based on hate - probably stemming in part for Barack Obama, which many have guessed, but really hate of fellow man, and woman, I might add.
If you hate, you don’t want better for those you hate. You want the worst for them. So you take away their basic fundamentals of life, shelter, warmth, and safety for example. Where better to do that in housing of the hated? Hatred for the poor can be magnified - let the poor be cold, leave them to the elements to be unprotected from those that harm physically, murder, rob. Keep them out of reach of medical care, prevent a healthier life.
Make it hard for them to get an education or the means to study.
So you hire someone like Ben Carson, a brain surgeon, one of the best paid healthcare specialties in America - and top it off with having him be black. Can’t you just hear Trump saying something like “We’ll give those projects one of their own, and have him throw them out.” Make sure he has very little empathy or sympathy for the poor because after all, this black man, in Trump’s eyes was important, at least enough to separate brains on an operating room table - but yet have disdain with prejudice, proclaiming all the poor have to do is the obvious - work.
Never mind poor do work. Hate needs to reign. Send in Ben Carson to do the evil work. Make their life hell. Happy Donald.
7
If you cannot dump on the poor, who can you dump on? After all, the poor cannto afford lawyers.
1
Why don't the other industrial countries have the poverty that we have?
Why do they have better schools for the working class?
Why to they have universal healthcare but only spend half per person that we do?
5
Well, one reason is that taxes tend to be higher—and the money raised is spent on social programs rather than the military.
The longer I live outside the US, the more I realize that America's problems are mostly cultural. There's something in American culture that makes Americans choose universal gun ownership over universal health care.
8
@617to416 Ontario via Massachusetts
Well said.
Now if we could just get more people to understand this.
2
The poor who happily voted for Trump would rather make do without health care or adequate housing than have a black man or a women as president.
They should be thrilled with their lives.
1
You are assuming the poor vote. A vast majority do not vote. The public defender office I worked in tried for three years to register our clients to vote. We discontinued the program for lack of interest. Not all convicted of a crime are disenfranchised, but most do not vote.
You also assume poor people have the wherewithal to understand their plight and act to resolve their problems, of which poverty is but one.
2
We get the government we deserve. The poor either don’t vote or fall for Republican propaganda. Either way they get shafted. We all need to vote like our lives and our country depends on it!
2
The war on the poor and working class in this nation has been happening in slow motion since Reagan.
5
Feudal lords seem to think their vassals will be more subservient if they are kept in desperate conditions. That is what he saw in history and the tales of kings and barons who subjected their people to cruelty and inhuman treatment.
t rump is by his very nature a cruel individual; I am sure his first thought in the morning is "Who can I hurt today? What person or group can I inflict some pain on?"
republicans come from the tradition of Puritan and Calvinist thought who seem to believe that God wants us to be miserable unless we are lucky enough to be rich.
t rump's support comes from the parts of the Nation under the thumb of republican austerity policies meant to inflict as much suffering on their voters as possible without those voters waking up and noticing the people they vote for are not looking out for their best interests.
Of course, those same voters somehow thought their best interests included keeping other voters from marrying the person they loved or getting an abortion.
Will they notice? I doubt it. We just have to wait for them to die hoping that our democracy will outlast them.
4
I've lost faith that the political process can fix this with a crisis. The crisis will come.
None of us has a magic wand. But if you have the right to vote, then exercise it. And make sure everyone you know does too.
Enough people in Alabama recently did that and prevented one more degradation to this country.
2
Trump is simply not bright enough to think this through. It is the GOP war on the poor. Trump reminds me of the fool in the King of Hearts.
6
It must be hard to list all the Trump miscreants in one column, but surely Scott Pruitt deserves special mention for his indifference to the survival of life on earth.
7
"President Trump and his administration lack empathy for the poor." So true.
However, I am not too concerned about the taxpayer expenses for more comfortable lifestyle of cabinet secretaries. Their jobs are as, if not more important than any CEO in the private sector. By tradition they can't be paid much higher, though they should be.
We have an impression that elected officials, in turn cabinet members should be paid no more than what average American is. I disagree, because that mentality brings either independently wealthy, or crooks for such positions. That's what has been happening to the perils of our democracy.
You know there was no pension for Presidents until they saw Prez Truman was struggling to make ends meet after he left W.H. He had to live with his mother-in-law. Vice president Joe Biden, was planning to sell his house to help out his son Boe. Joe Biden's asset after being a US Senator for nearly 40 yrs. & VP for 8 yrs. is about $500K.
Bill Clinton was an ascetic, but HRC, not so much. Now both are a little greedy, which was ONE main reason for HRC's defeat. They were broke when they left W.H. I believe, if they had donated half of their income to their own foundation, HRC would be president now.
2
"Bill Clinton was an ascetic, but HRC, not so much. Now both are a little greedy, which was ONE main reason for HRC's defeat. They were broke when they left W.H. I believe, if they had donated half of their income to their own foundation, HRC would be president now."
Yet, with all her positive contributions to various charities, causes, and humans, enough voters pulled the lever for a lying piece of garbage who never did or gave anything to anyone outside of himself. So I doubt that this idea would have come true. After all, she got paid to give lectures to wall street companies! She used email! What could be more damning than that? No one ever went broke underestimating the ignorance of the American conservative voter.
2
The thing of it is wcdevins, that the Clintons, who had been very kind to the downtrodden could no longer "impress" the public they were still conscientious. You have to "give up" something tangible to impress people, which they failed to do.
I don't quite like to write this. But I have been an ardent admirer of Bill Clinton, still am. When he started the Foundation, I thought of donating all my social security check to it. They dissuaded me. I still donated $1,000 a month for 3 or 4 years. I then saw they were minting money. I thought I could cut down my donation. After a few more years I stopped. Then they would send notices at year end that Bill Clinton would match every donation. I obliged. For several yrs., even that too disappeared. Last yr. I got another notification to that effect. I didn't have much but I still sent $1K.
HRC's charitable contribution was just 10% of about $17 million income, which is what Carlie Fiorina donated from her multimillion income. Whereas, Mitt Romney gave 28% or so of his $14 million income. He didn't have to do that as his tax-rate would otherwise be less than 20%, by law. He still received a lot of criticisms. (Ted Cruz gave all of 0.2% of his $2 million income!)
These things do matter and reflect one's conscience.
Fwiw, it is a non sequitor to say, as Krugman repeatedly does, that most people on Medicaid and food stamps actually work, in response to the attempt to impose work requirements. Krugman may be exposing a false assumption of many anti-liberals, but his argument doesn't touch those cases where the poor in question are in fact unemployed.
Instead of dodging the issue, lets just be straight: Denying healthcare to a person just because that person is unemployed is seriously mean-spirited. If it were the case that employment was plentiful, employers were respectful of their employees and aimed for their employees' uplift as well as their own (instead of paying them as little as possible), and work was meaningful - and despite all that, a person refused to work - then it would be reasonable to deny healthcare to the unemployed.
But when people are not employed because there are few jobs, few employers who will hire them, few employers who will respect them - when, basically, they are assumed to be guilty of all manner of problems, as the default, and constantly have to prove they are innocent - when that's the case, a poor person is more likely to give up on being "responsible" than to aim for it, leading to a wonderful self-fulfilling prophecy.
If welfare programs provided the poor with a livable income, that would be a disincentive to work. But no one wants to live on the paltry amount available to the non-working poor. Even if it comes with Medicaid and food stamps.
3
Estimated tab for corporate welfare $100 Billion.
Tax Increment Financing for Billionaire stadium owners not included.
Tax deductions for guys like Donald, who wrote off $ other people lost against his future earnings for 18 yrs, about one billion : $1,000,000,000. Doesn't include the other write offs.
9
"But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites..."
I would offer that the number of low-income whites being hurt, exceeds the number minorities. And, no, many will not notice. Others will but don't care. Such is the power of emotional pursuasion.
3
To care.......rationally................there has to be some path to remission. Suicide bombers do not intentionally blow themselves apart in the wilderness.
Under the present iteration of the GOP, this nation has gone from the Constitution and its Amendments, the Gettysburg Address, Emma Lazarus's "The New Colossus" (on the base of the Statue of Liberty) to something as cynical as "Arbeit Macht Freie" (work makes you free--the words over the gate to Auschwitz).
We can't say we haven't been warned. We can thank the cater-waiter at the Romney fundraiser in 2012 for recording his infamous "47%" speech, implying that some 150 million fellow Americans are somehow "life unworthy of life" and should vanish at little or no cost.
Little or no cost fiscally, when the budget was rewritten to create a $1.3 trillion deficit to "justify" these moves; enormous cost to this nation and its future.
8
It strikes me as a perverse display of cognitive dissonance. Deep down these folks know their economic success isn't due to their special moral character, so they demonize the poor to help them think better of themselves. Paul Ryan a prime example. His family benefited from the social safety net. Then he demonizes others needing it.
8
Ted Kennedy once said, "Reagan loved the poor, he created so many of them." I think that can be said of just about every Republican today.
10
The political scientists have studied this phenomenon. A great deal of animus towards the poor in our society, that is the supposedly able-bodied poor who are able to work. Public attitudes are deeply racist. Regardless of the facts, when many people--surely most Republicans--hear about aid programs for the poor, they think of chiseling welfare minorities. This did not start with this administration. Remember Reagan's "welfare queen?"
6
Tripling someone's rent sounds draconian until we click the hyperlink and learn: "But the new rules would hit the poorest residents hardest, with minimum monthly rents in public housing developments and for recipients of Section 8 vouchers rising to $150 a month from $50."
Now imagine you're a formerly middle class blue collar worker who lost a job to globalization and also lost a home to the Great Recession. In that person's shoes, $150 a month for housing sounds like just another government giveaway that never seems to land on his or her doorstep when they could have used some help.
2
Maybe when "a formerly middle class blue collar worker who lost a job to globalization and also lost a home to the Great Recession" realizes the GOP was responsible for both globalization AND the Great Recession he might be convinced to vote Democratic for a change.
3
wcdevins: Ever hear of NAFTA and the repeal of Glass-Steagall? Working people were convinced to vote Democratic in 1992 and this is what they got in return.
"In sum, Bill Clinton’s presidency accomplished almost nothing to improve conditions for working people and the poor on a sustained basis. Gestures to the poor and working class were slight and back-handed, while wages for the majority remained below their level of a generation prior. Wealth at the top exploded with the Wall Street bubble. But the stratospheric rise in stock prices and the debt-financed consumption and investment booms produced a mortgaged legacy. The financial unraveling began even as Clinton was basking in praise for his economic stewardship." Robert Pollin in The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/article/note-to-hillary-clintonomics-was-a-dis...
Anyone who thinks people receiving food stamps or other forms of public assistance are lulled into lives of hammock-swinging complacency, as Paul Ryan likes to put it, should spend time with people like those who come to my church's food pantry, or the low-income homeowners in Appalachia we do construction work for. Nearly all of them receive some form of public assistance. But to assert that it makes their lives tolerable enough that they have no incentive to improve their lot is ridiculous. It's about survival. Many of them already work full-time, just for meager pay. Those who don't typically have serious disabilities. In most cases their biggest impediment is lack of education, the cost of which is simply an insurmountable barrier. But of course people like Paul Ryan and Donald Trump never go near food pantries or poor areas of Kentucky and West Virginia, so they're free to indulge their conservative socio-psychological "theories" about human motivation while never getting their hands dirty with the actual humans they're calling unmotivated.
13
And yet those poor disenfranchised white workers continually vote for their killers, the GOP, hastening their own demise. How do you reconcile that? How many more of them have to die before they realize that voting for a flag pin isn't in their best interest? How many more of us have to suffer for their brain-dead acquiescence?
2
I think there is more to this than just animus towards the poor, more than just intentional cruelty. Creation (or nurturing) of a "kick-down, suck-up" attitude in society is beneficial to the wealthy because it reinforces a social order in which those of lower income are subservient to those above them in wealth and income and, as compensation, those in the middle (or really at any level) can feel superior to those beneath them. The social pecking order reflects an economic pecking order and identifications of both class and race are inherent in the structure. I also think this is related to the mindset of many Trump supporters who feel anxiety that they are losing ground economically and are therefore dropping in a social order, losing out to those below them whom they believe to be inherently inferior.
This is not at all a new phenomenon in American history and it is not unprecedented that it is being exploited for political gain. World War II in a way created an anomaly in American society in which the recognized collective effort necessary to win the war created forces for societal equalization. The pessimistic way to view things is that the past 30-40 years have represented an unwinding of the post-war anomaly and a return to a societal structure that has prevailed through much of American history. Let's not forget that at the time the Constitution was adopted voters were property owners and most people of African descent were enslaved.
10
Food stamps were supposed to be a short term solution to assist people in their time of need. For some people it has become a way of life and they expect the government to take care of them while they sit around and do nothing. It has created a dependence on others rather then to make them independent human beings. It has negatively affected their self esteem and self worth. They have become complacent and too comfortable in this lifestyle.
There is nothing wrong for able-bodied persons to be working if they are getting assistance from the government. Why should they be receiving freebies on the taxpayers dollars? They need to contribute to the cost of the food stamps and earn a living. They could find employment that could be done from home if necessary such as taking care of children or working at a center for the elderly. There is certainly a lot of need out there and their services would be greatly appreciated.
No one will ever begrudge someone who is too ill or handicapped if they are unable to work. Medicaid was intended for the truly desperate and needy but has become abused over the years. The Obama administration added greatly to the welfare rolls and President Trump is undoing the damage that President Obama created. Someone had to fix this injustice and President Trump had the courage to tackle the problem. This is one of the reasons he was elected.
2
A full time job is also supposed to pay enough to live on. Many don't. Walmart (the largest private employer in the US) encourages its low-level employees to apply for Medicaid. They are paying poverty wages so their employees are still in need of public assistance.
Who are the freeloaders here? Those who work long hours for very low pay? Or the corporations that pay them so little?
8
Why don't all the other industrial countries have the poverty we have?
Maybe they invest in education for the working class?
5
Perhaps Republicans would be more amenable towards Medicaid and food stamps if a requirement to vote Republican were to be attached to recipients of those programs.
2
"But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
This is what liberals never seem to get about low-income Republican voters. It's not about how well you are doing. It's all about how well you are doing compared to the people you want to look down upon. It is the essence of dignity for much of the country that no matter how far I fall, no matter how impoverished I am, no matter how uneducated/addicted/underemployed/in debt/hopeless I am, at least I am not a minority. The hatred of welfare stems from exactly that dynamic: the fear that bringing others up the ladder will take away that last thread of self-conception and dignity maintained by this smug racial hierarchy.
A white family scrapping by in rural Arkansas won't really notice if their bi-weekly paycheck goes up from $700 to $725, but they sure as heck will notice if the Puerto Rican family down the street can afford to lease a new car. It matters not a whit whether it's because they no longer have to set aside 35% of their income for their kid's liver condition or because their special education is now covered by the state or because a job retraining program has helped them.
5
No, Liberals realize all of this. We just cannot understand the stupidity of consistently voting against your own self-interest because your bigotry is stronger than your self-preservation instinct. It is a recipe for your own demise. Enjoy it while you can, white backlash voters.
3
The Trump Republican war on the poor will affect lower income whites too, but perhaps not fast enough to affect the next couple election cycles where Trump's poor misguided white constituency also feel the pain. By then, the damage will have been done and it may take a generation to undo.
The media propagandists on the right have succeeded in brainwashing lower income whites into thinking rich white guys in the Republican Party have their backs. The greedy toxic wealthy do have their backs perversely, as targets for their cost cutting knives while they further enrich themselves.
What's worse, the wealthy white right propaganda is stoking ethnic animosity and tearing this country apart, they are responsible for perpetuating plantation and ghetto style racist policies and perpetrating civil and human rights crimes against minorities besides being stingy and self serving. Welfare queens, Willie Horton blah blah blah has led to Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Parkland and Nashville etc. ad nauseum.
It's worse than the left leaning media reports, look at the vicious media attacks on the Parkland kids and the ongoing weekly shootings of unarmed American citizens by incompetent or mean spirited authorities. The bipolar media is part of the problem, we need a stronger objective foreign media presence to report how it really is on the ground in the USA to the rest of the world. When they start calling out billionaire American domestic policy, that may help our working classes.
5
The privileged, and those that get out of poverty like to entertain the thought that it is because "they" are "hardworking" and the others are lazy, the reason of their better standard of living. They like to ignore the fact that it is made in the frame of a society; so the clowns think that they are great, because they get the applause of the crowds... the society.
4
Ah, the politics of spite. Most Republicans I know would rather see 99 people go hungry than see a single "unworthy" —such as THEY define that concept— person get a free meal. It's a whole mindset.
Of course, all of it goes down the drain as soon as it's one of THEM who needs assistance. See the recent NYT video doc about Republican teachers who admit to voting again and again for irresponsible, tax-cutting politicians, yet are suddenly ok with unions and collective action when *they're* the ones who are hurting.
The stench of spite and hypocrisy is the eau de cologne of the GOP.
10
Even the wretched cloud of the GOP’s war on the poor, brought astonishingly to light under Trump, has a silver lining; as these comments prove, the level of acknowledgement of this evil has exploded into the nation’s conscious as not seen since the 1960s. Maybe we finally have a chance to change this cruelty because of this awareness? Maybe those who have said “they’re all the same” will finally realize that is not true, and you MUST vote for those who actually care about this country and all its citizens. All of our problems are solvable as long as we mobilize the non-cruel to care.
3
Trump? What about Bill Clinton's role in the assault on social services? That was Clinton's claim to fame, after all - the careening rightward trajectory of the Democratic Party as a sop to Reaganism. Trump is indeed a wolf in expensively tailored Merino wool suits but it's a diversion to ascribe to individuals the crimes of an entire system.
The unspeakable "C" word today in not cancer. It's class. The twin parties of the American ruling class, the Democrats and Republicans, respond when anybody raises the obvious matter of obscene class oppression by howling about unseemly "class warfare" while waging it globally on a daily basis.
Well, it's a fact. Trump's war on the poor is not just Trump's war on the poor. It's the war of an entire predatory system designed to defend the class privileges of a tiny minority (of the uber wealthy) against the majority that generate that wealth (through their uncompensated labor) in the first place.
Buckets of crocodile tears for the most oppressed in this instance only serve to dilute and obscure the fact that this is a class problem that any amount of charity will never overcome.
My question is how is it that a Nobel prize winning economist of the 21st Century stumbles when it comes to fundamental concepts pioneered by a poor, largely self-taught German philosopher who died in 1883? I am referring, of course, to the genius who worked by himself in the Reading Room of the British Museum and discovered the laws of Capital - Karl Marx.
2
Very eagerly anticipating the debut “Paul Krugman Fund for the Needy” as an organization. I fully expect to see the honorable donor, Paul Krugman, has given his entire net worth (and all he could borrow!) to his charity.
No? He’s not going to?
Then perhaps he could stop lecturing those of us who believe we pay enough in taxes as it is and are sick and tired of being blamed for human suffering when the government blows its allowance from the people on proverbial guns and candy.
1
To assume our current White House cares about anything other than increasing its own wealth and status is false. They are not cruel nor 'cruel to be kind,' they are indifferent--we are fodder for their bank accounts.
"Will they notice?" Wrong question because of their collective cognitive dissonance. Do those who voted for Trump care about their own and our impoverisment? No, too many are bent-double over the bibles welcoming a sinner to remove sins, waiting for Trump to drain the swamp he fills with his own reptilian creatures, and believing in numerous conspiracies that Trump and only Trump can uncover.
5
So is it equally cruel and racist if anyone says we shouldn't double these programs?
Let's say the programs' benefits were doubled from their current length, and then a black woman Republican Senator suggested we should cut them in half back to where they were before. Based on Paul's reasoning and the comments here she can only be considered a cruel racist, right?
1
The fallacy that financial and food aid disincentivizes the poor from working misses a bigger part of the picture.
The poor by their caste within society more than likely are victims of these circumstances. The circumstances impact the ability of the poor to obtain most of the following necessities; two-parent household, safe neighborhoods, good education, healthcare, food and finally they have never seen or learned about a work ethic.
We as a Nation have chosen to spend most of our tax dollars on defense, more than the next five Nations combined and the "luxury" of ongoing wars. We also have chosen, through our Leaders to reward the very wealthy and large Corporations. We have also chosen to make elections to serve in Government very expensive and life-long jobs for our Representatives.
Until we have the will to change the dynamics of these issues there will be little to no monies available to improve the lives of our poor.
4
Food Stamps also help farmers and grocers sell more food and reduce waste. The fact is that poor people are often largely sell sufficient. It's billionaires who are the needy ones, always in need of federal assistance.
Right! The Food Stamp Program was and is not a welfare for the poor program. It is run by the Department of Agriculture to prop up the Agricultural industry. When it was created, one could use Food Stamps only to buy American produced food.
The purpose of these, and all, Republican policies is to destroy or hinder economic and social competition. If you ask, "How does this destroy competition?" and everything the Republicans do makes sense. Food stamps, education, energy, environment, guns, racialized politics, tax cuts, banking policies, the budget deficit, etc., are all designed to hinder economic competition for the benefit of the existing wealthy. The list goes on but when ever the Republicans propose or promote any policy, you only have ask one question to understand it.
3
Mr. Krugman ends his commentary with a question to which the answer is no.
Besides, it's hard to notice that you're being hurt by the policies of person who you enable by presuming everything he says is true and loyalty to his statements is paramount, even trumping facts and certainly contrary perspectives, a loyalty which is reinforced by a closed information system (including evangelical churches, like-minded social media contacts, Fox News, NRA publications, conservative talk radio, and more).
When you're a participant in a de facto cult of personality culture, how much pain does it take before the Great Leader's image seems to look tarnished? A lot. In the meantime, during the hurt, it feels so darn good to lash out at the elites, gay Americans, Muslims, and immigrants, that it is its own distraction.
It's a grim self-reinforcing cycle.
3
Another reason for crushing the poor is that they are less likely to vote, a trend that conservatives contribute to with voter registration laws that make it tougher for them to vote.
2
When it comes to understanding the psychology of those who currently wield the cudgels of power, "cruel" and "greedy" are the merely the handles. Certainly, for the billionaire class, there is nothing further to be gained, in any meaningful sense, from the additional wealth that is the be-all and end-all of that power.
The rewards, it would seem, are psychological. The need to fill a sense of extraordinary specialness, of being among the uniquely exalted, is never-ending; and the flip side of this ubermenschkeit is an abiding contempt for everyone else. For the ubers, the fear that they might be shown to be ordinary mediocrities is the ultimate driver; hence the importance of widening the difference between "us" and "them."
In the American past, these tendencies were tempered by a more pervasive ethic that led successful people to identify with a sense of duty and an obligation for public service. However, ever since Ronald Reagan promoted greed and proclaimed government to be the problem, that ethic became as despicable as the people who relied on it.
4
The poor are in a vice. When their subsidized housing rent is tripled they can no longer pay for food, but when their food stamps are cut they can not pay for rent. Add to this a cut in Medicaid and the message becomes just die.
Perhaps some of the poor may find a minimum wage job or try to go back to school, but then their safety net support is cut further because they reach low eligibility limits or they can not work because they are in school thus forcing them back to the programs that were squeezing them in the first place.
This society needs to decide if it really wants to help our citizens out of poverty or whether they just want them to die, live in a box or disappear through the cracks of indifference.
13
Being poor and needing the paltry benefits available makes for very hard work. People who think the recipients somehow just lie around and wait for checks ought to go and meet some of them and accompany them as they apply. They wait on long, long lines, endure invasive questioning, often have to appeal, and then have to go and try to make it on paltry amounts of money. And they often do have jobs, but they can only make a limited amount of money or they will lose their benefits. And that limited amount keeps them poor. It's a big jump to make enough to not need the food stamps.
16
The strategy of conservatives is cut taxes to starve the treasury until things are so dire that the only recourse will be to cut entitlement programs and the federal safety net. Of course, the continuing war, that has won us almost nothing and but missing family and a moral equivalency with Russia, is in itself a way of starving the treasury and transferring wealth to the wealthy where it belongs. WIth these strategies conservatives plan to do away with the remnants of the New Deal and the Geat society programs. If you think this sounds too much like a cabal of conspirators than the republican party, you haven't read enough conservative literature or you missed Mitt Romney's overheard remarks about the importance of the producers versus the fifty percent of the society who are just takers, or didn't notice that Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, requires that all employees of his office read a selection of Ayn Rand books.
17
That's an apt summary. I'll add only that the strategy is at least as Reagan's presidency but has been virulently ideological since as the early 1990s' "Republican revolution." It's stunning that's its so bald-faced and longstanding yet so unsuccessfully countered or contested. Maybe that says something about the American character, that the New Deal and Great Society were essentially at odds with what Americans think the republic should be. Maybe it says something about the ineffectiveness of the Democratic Party's political communication, candidates, or both. I don't know. But there's little evidence right now, in my opinion, that would give Republicans cause to doubt their dream will come true for an anti-New Deal new reality.
Ugh. Sorry for all the typos. Try this: That's an apt summary. I'll add only that the strategy is at least as old as Reagan's presidency but has been virulently ideological since at least the early 1990s' "Republican revolution." It's stunning that it's so bald-faced and longstanding yet so unsuccessfully countered or contested. Maybe that says something about the American character, that the New Deal and Great Society were essentially at odds with what Americans think the republic should be. Maybe it says something about the ineffectiveness of the Democratic Party's political communication, candidates, or both. I don't know. But there's little evidence right now, in my opinion, that would give Republicans cause to doubt that their dream will come true for an anti-New Deal new reality.
I believe, in all sincerity, that the underlying reason for this is that the rich believe that they will get richer.
11
Certainly, it's open warfare on the poor. What is being missed, because it's taking place rather quietly, is open warfare on the civil service. Every element of civil service, from pay levels, to evaluations, to hiring and firing, to pensions, benefits and responsibilities is targetted for reduction and elimination. Mulvaney is point for the effort, but the end ambition is to turn the Federal Civil Service into a form of at-will employment. The whole purpose behind the civil service is to ensure that corruption and the buying and selling of federal employment does not occur. Take that away and you have removed the nation's civilian protectors, just as you would destroy the nation's military protectors. Destroy the civil service and the current war on the poor will succeed because there will be no one institutionally available to prevent it.
22
Civil service should be filled to the maximum extent possible with conscripts bringing huge cuts savings. Those taxpayers who produce the results in the economy should be able to enjoys the fruits of their labor rather than have to support an artificial middle class of bureaucrats. If every eighteen year old male in public school were drafted and paid only a stipend, our military could be fully staffed and the excess could be placed in state and local agencies, providing taxpayers with much deserved relief.
2
Would we also conscript the millions of contractors that currently support the federal government?
Since you're proposing that the average person's rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness be taken away, why not force everyone, including the rich, to attend public schools - including universities?
In addition, why not prevent the transfer of estates to heirs. Those measures would level the playing field and allow the formerly rich to compete on an equal basis with everyone else.
Those measures would also improve their character, e.g. raise their empathy quotient, and raise lots of revenue to improve the infrastructure for and the intellectual capital of ALL Americans.
1
"From where I Sit: Great idea! But how much money will it cost to educate and train the unemployed poor to be able to do those mid-level jobs? Once they have the jobs, don't they become the "artificial middle class of bureaucrats" that you hate? Oh, of course not since they will be "Conscripted", in other words forced to do the jobs for subsistence wages. Medical care is so expensive that I'm sure you would welcome a conscripted person with no medical training to be your doctor in order to save money.
i think that democrats, if they were not so feckless, would have made the point that these aid programs actually are working as intended. what we wind up talking about is the small percentage of people, that remain on these programs for extended periods of time. most people that use these systems are on and off of them quickly not relaxing into a hammock.
10
How do you convince people not to vote against their best interests. Right now so many white people are convinced that lazy people of color are living off of their hard earned tax money that they keep voting for Republicans who in turn target the very safety net that they themselves rely on. LBJ created a great society and Reagan destroyed it with his welfare queen driving a Cadillac on the tax payers dime. We have 40 years of deprogramming to do and Republicans have Fox news propaganda on their side.
49
Fabulous opinion, totally agree
11
Sadly, the Trump voters will notice if they have to do with less and, following Fox, will demand that the programs...food stamps or Medicaid..change to deny ANY benefit to black or brown people...so all benefits accrue to the "deserving" people...themselves.
It’s never been clearer in our time that certain psychological types persist throughout history no matter how many stakes are driven thru their hearts - today’s GOP are just those of us from the ancient Greeks to the guillotined French who can’t stomach the truth ‘There but for the Grace of God...’
9
My handicapped brother gets SSDI, Medicaid, Medicare, housing support and transportation assistance. It's a package worth $30-40K. He could lose most of it if he makes a dollar too much per year and the process for reapplying often takes years -- he was on a waiting list for housing for 10 years. So, that's a HUGE disincentive to work for that extra dollar and in fact, my family is very careful to make sure he doesn't earn that extra dollar.
That said, in the course of his 60 years, there have only been a few years when he's been at risk for making a few too many dollars. In the mean time, he has to recertify his disability several times per year because he gets support from multiple sources and none of them accept each other's assessment and none of them have a process that distinguishes people, like my brother, who have been disabled for over 50 years and have no realistic chance of recovery and people who need temporary assistance.
The government has certainly spent a hell of a lot more money monitoring and reassessing someone who clearly has a lifelong handicap than it might have gained if for one or two out of forty years my brother earned $500 or so over the annual limit.
35
True that the system can be quite redundant and inefficient, for all - stakeholders, recipients, taxpayers. I've never been able to figure out why that can't get fixed. The inefficiencies are so obvious (including the ones you stated) that it's really incredible no one has been able to figure out how to do this. To me, it seems like one good manager could clean up the process. Often poorly implemented, actually incompetent and redundant though they are, the safety net programs tend to pay for themselves and actually reduce poverty and improve the economy over time, as Mr. Krugman states.
2
My brother is autistic and gets nothing because he has too much of his own money. But he wouldn't be able to have the life he has if our parents had made money enough to pay for his training to be a piano tuner. He has lived with my parents his whole life. But we were lucky with him. He is high functioning, talks, and can manage his life and tics fairly well. That being said, there are still plenty of people out there who need assistance and don't get it because of how our country views welfare of any sort.
In other words, America is no country for a handicapped person, an elderly person who isn't rich, someone down on their luck, or someone who doesn't have a small fortune somewhere. It's a war on 99% of us by the 1%.
1
Thank you Dr. Krugman for this article. However, no one is using the e-word in talking about Trump, Ryan, the Republican party, and the 1%'s behavior toward the poor: evil. In the church that Ryan attends (Roman Catholic), and in any other Christian church that professes to believe the Bible, harming the poor is explicitly a go-to-hell sin. That this sin has become so popular that it is affecting the law of our land is worrisome in the extreme. Traditional Christianity would talk about such widespread serious sin as the devil's work. But of course such talk is no longer allowed, so sorry to bring it up!
29
Since you want to interject religion, if God makes Jeff Bezos the worlds richest man and another man homeless and destitute, who are we to challenge that?
1
The House of Representatives just fired their chaplain, a Catholic, for bringing up that very point.
4
Social causes of human origin, such as unjust tax structures, are at the root of what you describe--not God. Yes, it is true that Jesus said we would always have the poor with us, but the huge disparities and upward wealth transfers that characterize the USA today did not exist before Reagan and his his "reforms" of taxation, which have ever since relentlessly favored the rich at the expense of the poor.
Will people but by Trump notice? Not if Trump can live up to his motto - Keep America Stupid Always. DeVos is his insurance policy. Ain't this a great country?
11
The GOP is filled with craven hypocrites who would push their parents into poverty if it meant more for themselves.
23
Did poor Southern whites in the Jim Crow era ever notice that the oppression of blacks was holding them back as well?
15
With the jobless rate hitting a new low and the economy booming, leave it to Krugman to sharpen his knives in his latest attempt at character assassination. Isis running scared in the battlefield, peace on the Korean peninsula, yes, what a terrible President. Perhaps we should bring back the empty suit, lie about how you can keep your health plan, draw a few fake red lines.
3
Oh my gosh. That is close to the funniest thing I've read. You actually used the "L" word in a derogatory way towards another person, much less a former president. I don't think there has been a single day during this administration where trump hasn't lied. It's his defining trait. And are you talking about the same economy that was skyrocketing during the previous administration and hasn't stopped. Or the unemployment that that was dropping at a record pace during the last administration and hasn't slowed down. I think that says more about how well the previous administration did in developing economic policies. As far as isis? Wait, wasn't it trump who said we were going to pull out of the Middle East involvement. And as far as peace is Korea. There have actually been a number of great articles recently about how the influence of America has diminished so much while economic powers of smaller countries has grown that they are no longer seeking or needing American guidance in foreign policy since it doesn't always work in their best interest. It's very likely that this is the case of South Korea. When someone from a foreign country is promoting nuclear war on or near their country, they probably want develop their own foreign policy sidelining the us if possible. Yes, I kept my insurance. So did everyone in my family. So did all of our friends.
11
Robert: What you don't know is that "Jobless rates" only count those people actively looking for jobs, bot those who have given up because, despite their hard work and finding work haven't been able to find a job. The System purposely finds ways to undercount the unemployed.
The poor whites who only voted for trump because they foolishly believed he would make their lives better, have long since abandoned him. Those poor whites who voted for trump because they believed that harming people of color would make their lives better are hanging tough and cheering every mass murder of children, every crime committed by the administration, and every policy that will ultimately harm them because they think all of those things cause 'liberals' pain and cause people of color agony. They're so downtrodden they just want the rest of us to be as miserable as they.
13
The racism of malignant neglect.
10
In 2018 you can't have a workforce if you poison the air and water of children! That is what ended the French Empire. It's one of the most famous quotes in history. At some point around 1789, when being told that her French subjects had no bread, Marie-Antoinette (bride of France's King Louis XVI) supposedly sniffed, “Qu'ils mangent de la brioche”—“Let them eat cake.” We are at the end of the American Empire!
10
In answer to your last question....no.
3
Wake up. It has nothing to do with views on poverty. It is all about racism. Many conservatives use euphemisms to conceal their true motives. They believe that all welfare recipients are Blacks. They believe that Blacks are lazy and do not want work. They want to punish the poor by curtailing entitlement programs because they believe these programs principally help a race that they inwardly hate.
13
Sure, nothing but crumbs, along with lowest black and Hispanic unemployment in history. And in and on.
What this all sows is the difference between words and deeds. Demos just love poor people. But Repubs do things that actually help them.
If this is a war on the poor, the poor are winning.
Yahoo.
1
Low unemployment, but in minimum wage jobs with no benefits or short term stints in the gig economy. The only groups who have recovered from the crash are the banks and Wall Street. the average American is still struggling
12
Continued/...
They only net effect is the cultural disgust and hatred for such rape and plunder. We have seen the effect of these cultural awakenings many times over the last millenium. Out brains are designed so that over a period of time, the masses that survive each and every consequence will eventually evolve protective capabilities. Extinction lies waiting for the rapists and plunders. Like the silly fools that they are, they forget or are oblivious to notions of biological success. and do not comprehend despite their conception of such ethereal or philosophical proclivities, they are at the core of Darwinian fitness and survival. Therefore, eventually, the uber rich will eventually be discarded by society in favor of practices that nurture and sustain the greatest growth and benefit to all.
trump’s motto “ making America poor again “ !
6
The GOP - now renamed the Cruelty Party.
1
There is a difference between a war on the poor and a war on being poor. It is my opinion the Republicans are waging a war on being poor while the progressives want to keep the poor, poor so they can always be obligated to the government for there needs. That is evident on someone who comes out of the poor ranks and speaks against a system that offers nothing but endless poverty and the backlash from the left they recieve.
4
It's all about infinite competition right? If you cannot compete then you should be neglected and let nature take its course. Very glib assessment that no doubt that works for those not faced with the predicament of poverty. For those who are not so fortunate the war on poor vs being poor is very likely a distinction without a difference.
Your evidence of war on the poor confirms my observations but I am concerned that the larger question of whither we drift in our society such as longer-term trend in income inequality, increasing concentration of wealth, mal-distribution of income, a stresses on the social safety net, and moves to privatize natural monopolies like our surface transport system that were built by public investment into toll roads that burden commuters, households and businesses with higher cost of goods sold or delivered by trucks. Just think about the news this morning that Amazon Prime has increased its membership costs by 20%.
In my view the market economy and what I believe the good societal egalitarian trends that emerged from WWII are being eroded. There have been many economic plusses but there are also some negatives have contributed to our poor economic performance.
But the economy is very vulnerable to fossil fuel energy -- which is finite and needs to be replaced with a new source of energy for transport and generation of electricity. The President of France eloquently reminded us that the continuing dependence on fossil fuels is a global problem that our government must give priority or we will all be living on the margin. The conversion will be extremely difficult and will take time, innovation and investment for the US and world economy to maintain our current standard of living and our socio-economic safety net. This is a huge policy challenge, it will not solve itself.
8
I don't want to let the Trumpistas off the hook, but for the typical Trump supporter with an income around $70K, there isn't a whole lot left at the end of the month, and taxes take a serious bite. Anything that threatens to raise taxes threatens their ability to maintain their lifestyles. Anything that promises to lower them seems like a godsend.
And they're right that they're paying more than their fair share.
But what they don't understand is that it isn't the poor that are burdening them that way; it's the rich.
The rich don't pay payroll taxes except on a derisory part of their incomes. Property taxes, a major burden to the middle class, barely touch the rich. And meanwhile the rich get a preferential rate on realized capital gains and pay NOTHING on rolled-over capital gains, allowing them to compound their gains on the taxes they never had to pay.
The middle class pays too much and fears having to pay more because 50% of the income in this country, and 98% of the wealth, never gets taxed at all.
19
You can fool some of the people all of the time. Or ... maybe it's something else?
How does Trump still have supporters? Maybe because the myth of his support base being largely aggrieved working class white people is just that -- a myth. His base remains suburban republicans and the Mercers and their economic class.
4
Last question. Will the poor whites that voted for Trump notice? Probably not. There will be a cutout for white people to get "welfare" while people of color will be shut out. Folks, it is obvious that Trump and this administration does not like anyone that is not as lilly white as our president.
4
the general leaning of this progressive voter is toward dr k's litany of trump-era woes, (even though they are not unique in american politics), but, alas, a quick scan of the times, now and way-before trump, finds our poverty centers, our cities, under democratic control...the rising numbers of chicago murders, the the growing number of los angeles homeless, as examples, are evidence of disregard for the poor...so let's dis-elect trump, if we will, (we won't if our effort doesn't offer more than anti-trump tantrums) but let's first restore the party of the people, the voice of working men and women muted by the hi!!ary hijack, which included debbie doing-in bernie and the consignment of half the country's citizens to baskets of the wretched (deplorable) and condemned (irredeemable).
1
Paul says not just Trump but the GOP too act out of a joy in cruelty. They also act out of self-righteous belief in the unassailable nobility of themselves as “self-made men” which, not oddly, involves a belief in the sanctity of winner-take-all, at any cost to others.
But these traits, real as they may be, are secondary to the main trait: venality. Subjugating all principle to doing what a few extreme donors request of them in return for the exercise of a huge propaganda machine and lavish disinformation supporting their re-election.
Venal lackeys of bonkers billionaires, wealthy wackos.
The big question is: what is wrong with the Mercers, Adelson, Wilks bros etc? Why do they want to install a Theocracy of hideous “Christianity”. Are they nuts? Need we ask??
10
Grab as much as you can for yourself. When the wages of global climate change hit home, only the very wealthy will remain comfortable. Everyone else will be queueing to become a part of the security team guarding them and their children or the downstairs servants and groundskeepers maintaining their compounds in the great white north.
7
Why are people once again questioning this extreme cruelty which is a part of the Trump administration's agendas. One simply needs to read the philosophy of the Koch's, the Mercers, the two largest Trump supporters to see where Trump's agenda is originating.
While we waste time criticizing, these people behind the Trump are pushing through their vicious, hateful and totally egocentric Agendas, and they are apparently getting away with it.
From what I see, the damage done just in the first 1 1/2 year has been so extreme that I question if we'll be able to undo this mess. While our election laws allow unlimited funding by these extremist right wing groups, I doubt it.
We are in the middle of nothing less than a non violent coup d'état .
12
There is something wrong with people who seek ever greater wealth at the expense of the poor and less fortunate but we now have an administration and a congress that has turned this perverse behavior into policy. Of course it's bad for the poor but in the long run no one will escape the adverse effects.
6
In think there's a lot more to be examined on this one. Let's see... pick one example from the list of dysfunctional groups and activities listed below and discuss it in terms of behaviors demonstrated by the Trumpocracy:
A) Lord of the Flies - A random collection of unqualified individuals meets disaster when attempting to govern.
B) Fraternity Hazing - In-group cohesion is demonstrated and enhanced by exerting power and control over individuals in an out-group.
C) Gaslight - A villain attempts to destroy his victim by manipulative attempts at distorting reality.
D) Mean Girls - A group of individuals forms a clique and acts out aggressively towards other groups as it pursues power and control.
3
Republicans refuse to believe that government can sometimes be the solution, not the problem. They want to "drown government in a bathtub." Why? Smaller government means less in taxes for their rich donors who keep them in power.
3
There's gambling in Casablanca! My, who'd thought? The poor taking advantage of the system? No businesses would circumvent, bend, lie, or cheat the government, competitors or customers. Well, ok, Wells Fargo is an exception. And VW did lie about their emissions testing. And Purdue's drug safety protocol has led to an addiction catastrophe in our country. Shall I go on?
But these are giant corporations and your small business man is honest and scrupulous in their dealings. Really? How many are taking cash with no taxes going to the local municipality or Uncle Sam? How many homeowners pay the yard guys cash and avoid the sales taxes? Are those landscapers reporting that income?
There are many honest corporations, small businessmen and honest consumers but there are those who bend the rules, actually steal, but we are not going to radically change our system of capitalism or the social safety net because of warts and rashes. In the grand scheme the poor taking advantage of the system is a pimple in a landscape of acne. Clean it up but don't see it as a plague. The safety net may not be perfect but it is far superior than anything the Republicans offer.
The Republican war on the poor, is also a war on children, education, medical care, single parents, the disabled, legal rights and social security. Seen this way the Republican party defines itself as the party of greed and narcissism, of narrow mindedness and short sightedness, yet they have the audacity to ask for religious support and incredibly they sometimes get it.
More importantly they resort to a self righious rhetoric to sell their programs as being all we can afford. In effect the argument is not moral but rather entirely economic and reduces pain and suffering to something that is tolerable as long as it is not one's own.
Come the next recession , and this will come to pass as sure as day follows night, the rich will want government welfare to bail them out…and suddenly the act of helping will cease being a morally corrupt concept but rather a sign of enlightenment . At that point Republicans will find magicly all the money needed …even if it leads to huge deficits !
5
Sadly, many people vote against their self-interest. People who feel trapped, vulnerable, and hurting from our cruel oligarchy look for someone to blame for their woes, and hucksters like Trump point the finger at immigrants and refugees.
What baffles me is how the so-called "Christian" evangelicals in this country have wholeheartedly embraced the most un-Christian, unethical and cruelest person to ever be President. Trump's daily motto must be, "what would Jesus NOT do."
4
Let's not forget that roughly 50 years of social welfare programs have done little to "help" the poor. Evidence of this is painfully clear each and every day commuting via the subways in NYC. If you give a person a handout for too long, they tend to expect it to continue, and do nothing to remedy their situation. This is an indisputable fact, and there are more people in poverty in America now than ever before, despite wasting Trillions of taxpayer dollars on failed programs. What people need is to get an education, not endless welfare!
1
I relied on social services after my divorce. I was able to get Section 8 housing. Then I got a good paying job after being able to get hearing aids which helped me to become employable. I then lifted myself up to a better paying job, then an even better paying job. I was able to purchase a car with my own money, then a house. I am retired now. Without their help I was suicidal. I approve of them highly. Another woman who was in the program with me also went on to get a good job. Don't diminish everyone with your broad brush.
1
Let's hope Democrats are smart enough and united enough to point out who the real "welfare queens and kings" in America are- people like the Kochs, bankers, insurance companies, fossil fuel industries, the off-shore money hoarders.
Their contribution to society is voided by what they take from society and their goal is to give less and less..
7
"Will they notice?" No. Minor variations in their generally poor economic situations don't interest many of the poor nearly as much as being able to blame being poor on "others" and support a delusional self image. Trump knows those people and gives them what they really want. Offering a little more actual help isn't gonna pull them away from him.
Republicans like to say these policies on humiliating the poor is about fiscal prudence, it's not. In fact their punitive policies actually cost taxpayers more; and there numerous studies that show these policies are nothing but a waste of money. For Republicans, it is a fetish to humiliate the poor. However, unlike normal people fetishes, such as furries, feet, whips, bondage, etc.; Republican fetishes involve hurting non-consenting adults and children.
3
This administration is trying to cut costs by making it too expensive to be an aid recipient.
1
Sorry to say Prof., the poor white will not notice, because they are the first to believe that they are poor because of "other races" rather than the truth of their exploitation.
2
I recently started delivering Meals on Wheels, in response to Trump's "War on the Poor". There are so many fronts of attack on our way of life- education, environment, National Park System, healthcare, on and on. It is incredible to me that the radical christians support this administration's thinking , when a basic cornerstone of Christianity is to help the needy- to love your neighbor as yourself. This administration is exposed as the hypocritical money-grubbing grabbers they are.
3
"For example, the creation of the food stamp program didn’t just make the lives of recipients a bit easier. It also had major positive impacts on the long-term health of children from poor families, which made them more productive as adults — more likely to pay taxes, less likely to need further public assistance."
This statement is a perfect example of why our political system is failing us.
It says that some of the benefits of decisions made today may not be seen until 10+ years after those decisions are made.
However, our political system, as it works today, requires that the benefits be seen before the next election cycle. If not, as a politicain, why should it be of interest to me.
Bottom line: There is no strategic thinking in our political system.
1
One possible motivation in addition to the “Republicans need scapegoats” modus operandi: these programs act in conjunction with voter ID laws to make it even harder for the poor to vote. No stable housing means re-registering after every move - not a problem for folks financially secure enough to have stable housing.
3
It never ceases to amaze me how the very people whom Donald Trump appealed to as a candidate, namely the working-poor, fell for his charade without ever suspecting they would be the first he'd throw under the bus.
At least in this respect, he hasn't disappointed.
Most everyone else, even vaguely aware of what kind of a tabloid creature Mr. Trump was, already knew enough not to vote for him. And the fact that he was running under the banner of the G.O.P., a party that makes no pretense of having interest in anyone who isn't rich (or white), sealed his fate.
So in this sense, ever since his installement everything that has happened has been dujour; and the first signs of this came with Mr. Trump's choice of cabinet members -- each one being a perfect example of greed and graft in itself.
Then came that heinous G.O.P. tax bill, which made no effort to hide its real intent of giving to the rich, while taking from the poor. And all those campaign promises about creating new jobs that have fallen by the waist side, thanks in large part to corporations that now have no incentive to move their operations from abroad, and a threatened tariff war that could devestate those few viable American industries that are left.
All in all, this country is now under control of a kakistocracy which doesn't think beyond its own interests, and sees economic austerity as something that applies to others and not themselves.
If anyone is 'winning', it's not us.
11
We never get to see how an actual unalloyed lift up would work. As soon as we try to create a program that will help a poor person or family, or a disabled person live above a subsistence level so they can see more choices to pursue, someone in Congress must modify the program to protect against those who will scam the system. The program gets so drowned in red tape and means testing that it stigmatizes anyone who needs to take advantage of the program. We never get to see where a truly supportive and nonjudgmental system might get us.
In this way everyone gets to see the program, meant to be a humane offer of a hand up, as a burden, either a burden on the recipients' spirits or a burden on the pocketbooks of those who are not poor.
But societies do not provide such aid only to benefit the poor. There are reasons to avoid abject poverty that are not altruistic, that benefit society as a whole. Societies try not to bottom-out and they do this to prevent disorder and disease and an overload of sadness and grief. They do it because they understand that life is not always fair or just. Bad things do happen to good people. And sometimes people who seem bad might be turned around by kindness.
There is nothing kind about our poverty programs and we all pray that we will not lose everything and have to use food stamps or housing subsidies or even a handout. "Tough love" is out-of-style. It did not prove to be as effective as its proponents thought if would be.
34
The big donors to to the GOP want to grab as much of the pie as possible from everybody else, so they start with tax cuts, then go after the weakest, which are the poor, and then move on to rob the middle class. By this logic, once they finish grabbing from everybody else then they’ll grab from each other, like in medieval times.
26
Better title: Trump Leads the Republican War on the Poor. Trump’s being exploited by the Republican Party. It is a Republican trope that Trump took over the GOP and is responsible for the tax cut, the budget, the assaults on healthcare, defense spending. Sure the GOP uses him, but he’s barely coherent. Trump is not at war with the poor. He doesn’t know any poor people. He is at war with everyone who does not kiss his butt.
Oh! What about Steve Mnuchin’s $800,000 spent on military flights. Why has that escaped the attention of the media, democrats, and this column?
Gun control, gender equity, free college education for those qualified, Universal Healthcare, fully funded public education, equal pay, restoration of productivity and pay ratios to 1970 levels are necessary for Democrats to restore their integrity. That’s a lot like Bernie Sanders agenda, but Paul Krugman insists that Bernie cannot do arithmetic. Supposedly we can’t afford universal healthcare, or free college, or a living wage because Dr. Krugman won’t tell us? France does it.
16
France, and every other civilized European country, does it with much higher taxes. That is why Bernie's math doesn't add up, and that is why we can't have nice things, like universal health care, free college, or a living wage in America. He couldn't tell the truth about how it would all be paid for. This is not Krugman's fault - he is only the illuminating messenger.
One party, the GOP, has waged a 50-year war on "the government" in general and taxes specifically. This war has given rise to the lie that anytime taxes are not being cut they are in effect being raised. When the center has thus been moved to the far right there is no chance of reality taking hold. That is why Bernie could not tell anyone, his supporters included, that if you want nice things and equality in America, you were going to get a 15% tax increase. You simply cannot say that in GOP Amerika.
As for gun control, Sanders was in the pocket of the NRA and gun manufacturers, a little fact Bernie Bros often overlook. See, if you want nice things, like a safe country free from assault weapons, some constituents and donors are going to take a financial hit. It is a reality almost no politician can face up to. And Bernie is just another politician, not a saviour. Saviours like Trump are a Republican construct and a conservative necessity; best for progressives to leave them aside.
8
Under Trump the unemployment rate for blacks and Hispanics is at an all time low - That is better for the poor than all the government handouts offered by Krugman and the rest of the democrats - Get the government out of the way as much as possible and give folks a chance to work
4
Let's see those numbers. The only thing at a all-time low under Trump is honesty and integrity. Fake News reports about a glowing economy are just more lies.
1
Except that Trump didn't do absolutely anything to get those unemployment numbers where they are today.
Look at how they went down under Obama and you notice that for the moment, Trump didn't disturb this 8-year evolution yet.
Presidents also only start implementing their first budget during their second year, remember, so any serious effect on the economy can only start taking place by the end of their second year in office ... .
By the way, you also seem to ignore that Obama's 2009 Stimulus (turning Bush's -9% GDP into a decade-long steadily growing economy, as the CBO analyses at the time predicted) contains LOTS of tax cuts for the middle class, whereas Trump's tax reform bill actually INCREASES them ... ?
No, I suppose.
Time to start fact-checking ... ;-)
2
Figure for 1st quarter 2018 from BLS. Unemployment rate:
White - 3.9%
Black - 7.3%
Hispanic - 5.4%
2
Yes, those who voted for trump will notice and then blame Obama.
28
"Will they notice?" No.
3
(Lord Dacre), a British historian who died in 2003. Dacre summed up Leviathan curtly: “The axiom, fear; the method, logic; the conclusion, despotism.”
5
Paul Paul Paul - where were you during the 2016 primaries when you had an opportunity to back a true champion for poor Americans? Answer: You sided with the forces of greed and concentrated wealth.
Okay, we've all made big mistakes in the past and I could forgive you and take your column seriously again. But I can't until you 1) apologize for helping to elect Trump by torpedoing Bernie at Hillary Clinton's behest and 2) assure us that you've learned from your terrible mistake and will not repeat it.
9
You seem to have forgotten that it's Hillary who actually won the primaries?
If you disagree with the majority of Dem voters, imho it would be more useful to try to convince them through some solid arguments, rather than simply call it a "terrible mistake" and then imagine that that's enough to have a majority start adopting your ideas in the future, no ... ?
1
Sen Sanders never met a math problem he was interested in solving correctly. Mr Krugman appropriately called him out on this.
Likewise some seem to misremember history.....Sen Sanders failed to win the primary all by himself.
It is not possible to correct an error of too much of a swing to the right by going too far to the left. The only durable place for governing is the center. Sen Sanders could not grasp this and, it seems, neither (still) can his supporters.
1
Pigs at the trough. Not just money. McConnell and Ryan are getting what they want, beat up on anybody who would stop the grifting. There is little or no focus on these two seditionists and the execution of an authoritarian agenda totally focused on taking as much as possible out of the commons.
You call it pay to play, in other jurisdictions it’s called the spoils system: change of government means my people get all the jobs etc and your people are fired.
You should have it out with the right. Let the south wither.
12
I’m sure from the splendor of their lavish opulent megachurches the Southern Evangelicals of the GOP can find a Bible verse to justify all this. Theirs is a heartless religion after all, more concerned with what’s going in people’s bedrooms, bigotry and intolerance than actually following Jesus’ teachings.
As long as the cancer that is the Evangelicalism festers in this country will never treat the poorest among us with any dignity.
What angers me most is that I as an atheist am forced to subsidize this monstrous perversion of a religion.
24
The white "Christian" evangelicals' Bibles must conveniently omit Matthew 25:31 - 46, aka The Judgment of the Nations.
1
Ryan firing the poor House Chaplin merely confirms what we Democrats already knew: the man has no soul. I'm an atheist so what do I care but its proves his conscience is grating at him if he found the Chaplin's prayer to be too "liberal". What has this nation come to that we elect such heartless people into goverment? Americans (especially white Americans) love to cut off their own noses to spite theirs own faces. Rev. Barber is correct when he says this nation needs a moral awakening and not just on Mondays.
17
It seems as if amerikan ideology is so deep and pervasive that the only means of seeing through it is to obtain a PhD in Economics--then go on to gain a Nobel.
In less-academically descriptive terms, what Krugman us referring to is a one-sided class struggle. Fighting back by any means necessary is long overdue.
3
Mulvaney " Pay to Play ", epitomizes this administration. The question is how are you going to pay to play if you don't have food on the table. The convenience of using the sanctity of life when it comes to abortion but not food, hypocrisy at its best
13
Policies that negatively impact the poor may, or may not be the result of racial animus; it depends on what you want to believe and how you parse the data. I prefer to believe policies that negatively impact the poor, and the interests of all other citizens are the result of who finances elections. So long as the rich, the connected, and mega-corporations provide the cash, all of us will live with the policies they paid for. Every citizen should have some "skin in the game" that makes their vote, their interests count; figuring what that might be is more productive than emoting over why extremely wealthy people don't do more for the poor. Everything else is the rage of dreaming sheep.
3
Let's hope the Democrats actually come up with a campaign that hammers this message home effectively. Bill Clinton was not my favorite guy, but his "it's the economy, stupid" message was effective, even if his actual policies weren't always ideal for spreading prosperity and economic security widely enough. But lately I keep reading things like this, seen in another editorial in this very paper: "...fear of cultural displacement was a greater driver for Trump voters than economic anxiety..." There are a million reasons why people voted the way they did, and no doubt that was a motivator for some. And I get why people are afraid their own pet social cause will be pushed to the back burner. But a message of economic security is the best way to bring in the largest number of votes.
5
The perennial sadism of the Republican party is truly breathtaking. We're talking about a political party that has spent decades sabotaging every compassionate, stabilizing, and generous aspect of our government and society, and then laughing at those who are struggling while kicking them in the teeth.
This isn't just the Trump administration, although they are the most blatant examples we've ever seen. It's Ronald Reagan with his faux-optimism and hatred of our government, it's Newt Gingrich with his assault on democratic norms, it's Grover Norquist still smarting over daddy's two childhood ice cream licks, it's George W. Bush handing the treasury over to the 1% and destroying the housing market, it's the dozens of attempts to kill the ACA, it's Paul Ryan back-slapping his kegger buddies in college over his dreams of killing Medicare. It's all of them.
There is something seriously wrong- on a basic, human, empathetic level- with members of the Republican party.
27
Paul, it becomes quite obvious to all of us that Trump who wanted to clear the swamp in Washington, in fact became the swamp himself.
He's swimming in the large ditch or the swamp,as he calls it along with his Republican cohorts.
He forgot that he promised to clean up the swamp in Washington to his supporters in 2015-'16.
So what we've now are pools of dirty water, all over our capital which even a renowned doctor called Ben Carson, who is the health and human services secretary under the Trump administration, is showering everyday in the same stinky muck which everyone in the current administration is stuck into.
Money which is the only motivating factor in Trump's life, the only reason why he chose to run for presidency,is devouring each and every member of the current administration and the Republicans in congress.
Even a self described catholic Paul Ryan, who doesn't do anything important unless he gives thanks to Mother Mary, is on his way to become the first so called devoted catholic preacher whose main intention is to fleece the poor negating the main doctrine of Jesus.
Even the evangelists who still support Trump after putting him into power, are now engaged in giving their vocal and moral support to their president who has only one agenda :To hurt the poor.
His very form of anti-poor outbursts are being lionized by every Republicans, not realizing that these anti-poor legislation are going to hurt their core supporters : The rural poor White Republicans.
6
You are horrified that people are expected to work for their benefits? Would it surprise you to know that those of us not on assistance have to work for our housing, food, medical care? Their benefits should increase? So I should work harder, longer hours, so I can hand my money to someone else? Seriously? Before you go on that these people work but don’t get paid enough, well what sort of bad life choices did they make to put them in that position? Didn’t take school seriously? Had a million babies in their teenage years. Spend their time taking drugs? We are already being choked by taxes, particularly here in NYC. When these people are up at 4 am, taking a train for a 90 min commute, working ten hours, getting back on a train and doing that every day then we will talk. The war is not on the poor, it’s on the people who have to work harder and harder to keep up because the government wants to hand out their money like Halloween candy. How about a little empathy for us?
3
Wow, TD shows us a perfect example of the Republican mindset.That's quite a description of a huge swath of American citizens.
FOX tells these folks stories about the poor, and some divisive anger takes hold and TD begins to resent others. It's US versus THEM now, not 'United we Stand'.
I hope you do not become disabled and need more medical care than you can afford. But if you do, and you become poor, you'll do the 'right' thing and refuse medicaid because you don't want to take others' taxes dollars. Give me a break.
5
If we reduced taxes, we might have to dispense with that train you take to work. Maybe that would ease your misery a bit.
3
Here's empathy for you, from me, for free. It's yours. Please take it.
Now, let's focus your resentment where it belongs: on the wealthy, not the poor.
Your struggle and theirs is the same. Since 1979, the median wage is unchanged, while the economy grew by 128%. All economic gains in those 3 decades went to the top 20% of earners, most to the top 0.1%.
Since Reagan, the top income tax bracket has been reduced three times. The economy is skewing wages upward, and the tax system is exacerbating the effect. Your earnings would go further if theirs contributed more to the pie. Consider just the effect, hypothetically, of having your health insurance fully paid for, and tuition-free college. Fantasy? It used to be called the City University of New York, in the 1970s. And you guessed it: prior to the great wage suppression that began in 1979.
Antipoverty programs reduce crime and suffering. They don't hinder work; they enable it. They make citizens more productive and let them lead better lives. Those are simple facts, borne out in the data. Punishing the poor for their poverty is both cruel and shortsighted.
Studies show that the proposed work-requirements in various guises will not have the effect of inducing work. That's not their intent. Their intention is simply to drop people from the programs, to "save" money. If that means less productive citizens, more suffering and higher crime, well, who knew? At least we saved money!
Your enemy is the rich, not the poor.
1
Yes. The Republican war on the poor is more than ideology. It's ideology fueled by willful malevolence.
9
With the tax cuts, listen for calls to cut entitlements. Crazy Town: Cut income you have coming in with rising interest rates exploding the national debt. What is it? Over half of Congress are millionaires? How can people like that not understand basic economics?
4
I once was a recipient of "welfare" when my then husband left me with two small children. Welfare saved me. I was able to go to college, get a master's degree and enter the workforce. I sent my children to Ivy league schools and I have been a taxpayer for over 40 years. Welfare saves lives and futures.
43
"America hasn’t always, or even usually, been governed by the best and the brightest; over the years, presidents have employed plenty of knaves and fools."
Weren't the "best and the brightest" the arrogant Ivy Leaguers who kept us in Vietnam by lying to us, and basically destroyed ordinary Americans' trust in their government? Aren't these "ordinary" Americans the ones who now trust Trump?
Uncle Paul...a bit of a tin ear here, no?
2
The defining feature of the vast majority of Republican voters—other than that they are white—is a belief that economic success or failure is earned and therefore deserved and that any attempt to redistribute wealth from the economically successful to the less successful interferes with the divine order, demotivating the more successful and increasing indolence among the less successful. Rich and middle class Republicans have an "I got mine, now get off my lawn" view of the world. Poor Republicans assume they've done all the right things in life and therefore deserve better, but have stayed poor because the "elites" have rigged the system while the "liberals" are stealing money from the hard-working to give to the lazy.
Add in the fact that a large majority of Republicans generally think white people are the deserving people and brown people the undeserving and you have the entire vision of Republicanism in a nutshell. Accordingly, the two main projects of our Republican government are to (1) free the rich from regulations and taxes that might hinder their ability to accumulate wealth and (2) dismantle any social programs that might take money from the rich and transfer it to the poor, thereby rewarding the poor for their indolence and stripping them of motivation to improve themselves. Will this hurt poor Trump voters? Of course. But as long as they see it as restoring the divine order, they'll wait patiently for the rapture.
11
People seem to forget the true recipients of these "welfare" programs. While the resources might pass through the hands of our nation's poor, it ultimately ends up in the hands of Walmart, Merck, Monsanto, and the like.
16
Once again Krugman misses the point. Conservatives do not believe that these cuts are hurting the poor. We believe that, other than with respect to children and the truly disabled (not the phonies on disability playing golf of which I know many), being poor is to a large extent a moral failing. Why didn’t they stay in school? Work harder? Not buy that iPhone (food stamps now by iPhone!)? At the same time, people deserve to keep what they earn with redistribution viewed as theft. To cut welfare is therefore viewed as just and good. The point isn’t to hurt the poor. The poor have hurt themselves.
1
Apparently you think the "poor" consists of able-bodied slackers. If we look at SNAP ("food stamps") recipients, two-thirds are kids, twelve percent are elderly, and eighteen percent are "non-elderly disabled." Not a lot of prospective job-seekers there.
2
No, Mr Krugman nails the point exactly - and your comment reinforces it. Your list of "grievances" are nothing but a litany of Fox News propaganda talking points. "The poor have hurt themselves" - that is the current Christian point of view, is it? Conservatives will destroy the world for a buck.
2
No you hurt children and the truly disabled
1
It's not popular to say this, but this cruelty is rooted in Evangelical Christian dogma. The poor are sinners, thus they are poor. The poor are lazy, thus they are poor. The poor are crooked, so they are poor. The "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" purity of Christian thought is translated into public actions to correct all these flaws. The FACT that most welfare recipients are white is ignored. The good book is good for White, upper middle class Christians, not the rest of society.
11
In a world where facts don't matter, there is a certain quality akin to whistling in the wind to the good professor's critique. Trump and the tea party have set a new low bar for republican government. Given a tax policy that a) dramatically reduced the stated rate, but didn't touch the effective rate, Trump/teaparty have almost abolished taxes for the big guys. Face it. Free market guys live to starve the domestic beast and build weapons.
6
Coupled with the desire to rid the country of one of the only ways poor people get any healthcare, Planned Parenthood, it's been obvious for years that the Republicans, or the new Know Nothings, have figured out how to properly implement eugenics.
Rounding the poor and challenged up and putting them in camps would be bad "optics"; figure out a way to kill them off while the rest of us look the other way. Then, better yet, make it an argument about economics! That's the ticket. Just read these comments to see how very misdirected many people are.
5
We have to remind ourselves that most of those who voted for Tax Reform were voting to line their own pockets as well. Most of Congress nowadays is full of very wealthy members.
It is not only Congress that does not care about the poor. A ton of citizens feel the same way. And they are not the rich citizens.
They look down on anyone living in Public Housing.
Ben Carson himself grew up there and instead of being grateful that he had a roof over his head and heat and hot water, his goal is to increase rents on those who have no money and no where to go. Yet he got the working poor to pay for his $31,000 conference table.
He is such a hypocrite. As is the rest of the Republican Conference. Only Susan Collins has had the guts to speak up about this injustice.
Just when I think the Republicans cannot bet any meaner, they go and prove me wrong.
6
Trump ought to try working for even a few hours at a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, or an outreach center. He should to talk to some of those people he thinks are trying to get a free ride, are lazy, or cheat the system.
Unfortunately, he would never to that. After all, poor people carry germs. And his view of those less fortunate is from 26 floors up in Trump Tower and from inside a limo. You know, the little people look like bothersome ants.
6
Why - "The interesting question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are. The question, instead, is why". Forget evidence - the GOP is essentially fact-adverse, or as Professor Krugman cleverly points out, facts have a well-known liberal bias. Why is the natural evolution of St. Ronnie's famous claim that the Federal Government declared war on poverty and poverty won. The poor are undeserving moochers - plain and simple. God favors the successful.
5
Why no mention of Betsy DeVos? Her attack on publicly funded education will take away the greatest ladder out of poverty that the poor have. At the same time one of her main goals of vouchers for private schools will give the rich a high break on their gilded elevators.
11
The war on the poor is a kind of a defense mechanism.
The rich are under a lot of (deserved) pressure to justify why they have so much money and the rest of us don’t. That’s why there’s an elaborate mythology of wealth. The rich are rich because they work harder, because they are smarter, because they deserve rewards for the jobs they create, because you shouldn’t “punish success”, and so on. They’re really just good people who deserve what they have - or so they would have us believe.
They don’t want to talk about how much wealth is inherited. They don’t want to talk about how wealth creates opportunities the rest of us don’t have (It’s easier to turn $1 million into $2 million than it is to turn $1 into $2.) They don’t walk to talk about how money buys access. They don’t talk about a tax code bought and paid for to protect the wealthy and transfer wealth upwards. They don’t talk about how much depends on luck.
The war on the poor is about changing the subject. It’s about making the non- rich into scapegoats. It’s about transferring guilt to the victims.
And let’s make one thing very clear. The massive inequality in the US today means this is no longer just about the poor. This is about the .1% versus everyone else. It’s a war on the middle class as well. It’s a war on society in general.
Wealth is power. Unchecked power is tyranny. Q.E.D.
21
Perfectly explains the reality of the American economy and culture. I have never seen it explained better.
4
I see Krugman hasn’t changed. Once I noted in his piece his fervent defense of food stamp users, which has been proven repeatedly to be used by many millions of scammers, I put the article down. Where did he earn his PhD? A wood working / Shop school?
1
Fraud is present in the SNAP program, but its NOT a large part by any measure.
" If you are concerned, then consider the following. The total cost of the SNAP benefits disbursed in 2016 was $66.5 billion, down from $74.6 billion in 2012. Those are significant figures because America is a big country.
When compared with those total figures, the fraud identified in 2016 amounted to a mere 0.9% of the total. That was up from 0.5% in 2012."
4
Just because you've seen the same viral email about a food stamp scam forwarded a million times, don't assume it happened a million times. It's true however that one family has scammed the food stamp program for millions. It's the Waltons, who encourage their employees to use food stamps, and then accept the food stamps from those same employees in payment for groceries at Wal Mart. They put their hands in the taxpayers' pockets twice, first to subsidize their less-than-living-wages and again to pocket the proceeds.
2
As someone not up on statistics maybe you could enlighten me about the repeated proof.
2
Does Professor Krugman consider it "kind" and "caring" to allow people to remain on government assistance programs after the economy has improved and unemployment fallen?
At what point is it not "cruel" to ask people to work for their benefits? Is this not what everyone else is expected to do? Certainly Professor Krugman works for his living. Most Americans have to go out and work several jobs to pay for themselves. Why is this anathema to progressives?
It's unclear why certain Americans deserve a reprieve from the hardship entailed in personal responsibility while others are provided no such luxury. Professor Krugman's argument seems to be "because they're poor" and it's "cruel" to expect them to work. Well, then, life is certainly cruel for everyone else who has to work.
The professor's argument breaks down, and, alas, this is likely why he resorts to charges of "cruelty" and "they don't care". A lack of argument, if there ever was one.
4
The economy may be doing better for who, the 1%. If the economy is doing so well why haven`t any of my friends gotten raises unless you consider 1.50 a week a raise. Full employment hasn`t done much for income. Why has my 401 suddenly taken a loss, the true trump effect?
3
There has always been poor people and there always will be poor people. These are desperate people that need help. This will only increase over time in this environment. The system is broken and I am sure there is abuse that takes place. That is part of the symptom of desperate people. Some people will resort to any means to gain resources.
This does not mean that it is not good to help people out. Why is it that we do not hear something such as; “We know there are people that need help, and we want to help. We also know that our system is outdated and needs to be fixed. We will do that so that we can help people in a more efficient and humane manner.” This administration and its supporters do not say anything of the sort. The disdain for those that need help is palpable and the response is cruel. I don’t believe this is being hyperbolic. Robert Mercer a big Trump supporter is known to see those that are not rich a people that are less than human.
It is very disheartening to see the responses to this column.
8
A whole column about the war against the poor--and several hundred comments--and nobody has yet pointed out the elephant in the back of the room.
Can you spell C-A-L-V-I-N-I-S-M?
Calvinism, you may recall, is that religious offshoot of austere Protestantism that was the preferred ethos of many of the early settlers to this country, including many of the most prominent citizens, and it has done much to shape the American philosophy about capitalism and how the rich and poor relate.
Calvinists believe that God's favor in this life is shown through the ability of individuals to amass wealth and possessions. Those who do so are prima facie favored by God as members of the Elect, and worthy of heaven; those who do not are not favored and will not go to heaven. So, the poor obviously are not favored by God, and since they are not, it makes no sense to try to help them through charity or government program, as they are unworthy anyway, or so the circular reasoning goes. In other words, poverty is a failing of individual morality, not anything to do with a rigged system, so one's under no obligation to "help", or even notice, the poor.
It doesn't take a genius to draw a short line from this to rapacious capitalism, Social Darwinism, "makers" vs. "takers", and fear of a black/brown/female planet.
Most of the oligarchy holds the poor-are-unworthy belief; they may not know the religious origin, but American views on poverty cannot be understood without acknowledging this.
20
Ah Calvinism. The bleedings will continue until you see the light.
War on the poor. . .It sounds so dramatic and so cruel. Having worked for a large housing authority for seven years, I support some of these proposals. During my employment, I moved from believing housing--safe, sanitary housing, was a basic human right to full-blown disgust with HUD.
Are you aware some people are actually paid for living in public housing or having a Section 8 voucher? It's called a utility allowance. A household's rent is calculated based on a formula using its income, then an amount for utilities is subtracted. If the amount remaining is negative, some housing authorities pay that amount each month to the household.
If someone needs a modification to their unit, the housing authority is required to provide it at the authority's expense. This includes not just wheelchair ramps or bathroom grab bars but air conditioners. In Seattle, where a small percentage of houses or market rate apartments have central air conditioning, the housing authority was frequently required to provide them for residents.
The waitlist for housing or a voucher at the authority I worked for was years long. However, households who had this scarce resource where able to add people to their lease claiming they were relatives, and essentially pass on the unit or voucher like it was grandma's china set. The original resident or voucher holder would move out, and the relative who was added would retain the unit or voucher.
I'm surprised, but I fully support the Adminstration's steps.
10
The answer to your complaint is the same for many agencies: increase independent audits and have robust arbitration panels. Reformed procedures makes sense; throwing the baby out with the bath water does not.
12
Problem: as soon as you study what happens overall, in this country, your personal and subjective experience is clearly the exception, not what constantly happens everywhere.
So why would you want to support policies that aren't fact-based ... ?
5
"Having worked for a large housing authority for seven years, I support some of these proposals. During my employment, I moved from believing housing--safe, sanitary housing, was a basic human right to full-blown disgust with HUD. "
You condemn HUD based on anecdotes? Clearly you had no business cashing a government paycheck to work for an agency whose mission you hold in contempt. You have that in common with several members of Trump's cabinet.
4
Face it. Krugman and like minded Keynesians live to spend tax dollars. Unfortunately that spending can have detrimental results for those of us taxpayers who fund the spending. As in the current $20 trillion federal debt, $11 trillion of which was created in the 8 years of the spendthrift Obama administration. Sooner or later, even Keynesians run out of other people's money to spend. By then the permanent damage to the nation will have been completed.
7
1. Bush left with a STRUCTURAL (and record) $1.4 trillion deficit. "Structural" means: which cannot be eliminated overnight, but takes decades, EVEN if all new presidents wouldn't sign any unpaid for spending bill into law.
2. To know WHO created a debt increase, you have to analyze WHAT is increasing it, not who happens to be president at the time of the increase. As soon as you do so for the Obama years, you cannot but notice that it's Bush who created the $1.4 trillion deficit that he inherited, and that Obama not only didn't add a dime to it, he CUT it by two thirds in only 8 years, and even though he had to turn Bush's -9% GDP into a stable, solidly growing economy.
Compare that to the fact that contrary to the Democrats, the GOP now once again dropped the pay-as-you-go rule (which stipulates that Congress can't pass any unpaid for bill, so may only pass bills that don't add a dime to the deficit), and then immediately passed two gigantic spending bills, creating once again a structural deficit for years and years.
That means that the fact that this year the Obama deficit (2/3 lower than the Bush deficit) will DOUBLE once again, and only because of GOP decisions. So THAT debt increase will - once again - be the GOP's fault.
3. Most Democrats and Americans don't mind paying taxes, in order to get national security and well-educated, healthy citizens in return, allowing us to compete in global markets. So what's actually your problem with contributing to MAGA?
45
The structural deficit Obama had to contend with, in the middle of fighting a grinding recession, was "created" during the Bush administration. Trump's successor will face the same reality.
Speaking of welfare, how do you feel about paying for Trump's multiple golf trips, and Pruitt and Price's cone of silence and first class travel?
5
And Repubs don’t take great joy in weapons systems that work about as well as pie in the sky but break the bank? Who benefits from outrageously expensive weapons?
3
Though I agree in general, it might help the columnist if he also learned how folks in suburbs think of the poor. I live in the suburbs and many of us can tell a tale of someone on disability who works at side jobs or of an unmarried mother who seems to have a partner. None of this suggests that benefits should not be granted; but if the writer wishes to speak to those who vote for Tea Party Republicans, he ought to learn their narrative. Perhaps it would also help if those who support the welfare state (as I do) would accept that some abuse really does occur - as it occurs with any program where a reward is paid.
5
So true. It's too bad that there is such an over-reaction to the abuses that do occur.
5
Krugman already replied to that "narrative".
It's false. Fake news. A myth debunked long ago already. Welfare abuse occurs BUT is rare.
The error here is to imagine that in order to know what the average situation of someone on welfare in America is, you can simply look around a bit in your own neighborhood. That's like living in Florida, and deciding that to know the average temperature in the States, you can simply look around you and then extrapolate Florida's temperature to the entire country...
"Averages" don't work like that. You have to analyze studies and statistics to know whether most poor people receiving government money are truly poor or not. And THAT is what Krugman did (and what any reader can do to, all you have to do is click on the links he's providing).
As to the Tea Party: I don't remember them to want to end Medicare though ... . The Tea Party was funded in order to end huge deficits combined with bank bailouts, like what Bush left us with when Obama took over. Many Tea Party members then merely took over the GOP "narrative" that Democrats spend and increase deficits, without doing any fact-checking, and that's how they turned against Bush's neocon Republicans as well as against Obama at the same time.
All that we can do to stop the war against the poor, is to engage in real, respectful debates with Tea Party supporters, so that together we start fact-checking the news, and together we get closer to the proven truth.
3
This in not about welfare abuses, it is about how white voters who really do not live near black people perceive them.
Of all conservative conceits, the attitude towards the poor that they are solely responsible for their economic pain, as if there is no such thing as society and policy, is the most baffling. It is also completely contradictory to the Christianity to which they profess to subscribe regardless of how they try to argue otherwise. Even from a completely secular perspective, it makes no moral sense to further punish people who are clearly suffering for whatever reason and even from a pragmatic perspective, it ignores the reality that what affects some of us in this interdependent, connected age, affects all of us.
35
The author does not explain why the SNAP (food stamp) program has not contracted with the end of the 2008 recession. As the author knows, Keynesian economic theory holds that government assistance programs should swell in a recession and then contract in better times. The SNAP program tripled in size and cost after the 2008 recession but has hardly budged from its peak despite historic low unemployment – lower than 2007. The US government seems to always grow in a recession and then “hold the gains” in better times.
The reality is that the Obamacrats have engineered a permanent expansion of the welfare state based not on economic need, but on political advantage. SNAP serves a Democratic political constituency and has the happy side effect of serving as corporate welfare for the food industry.
The author also does not address the role of SNAP and other government food programs on the epidemic of obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes that plagues poor communities in the US. Part of the problem is that there are almost no restrictions on what food SNAP vouchers can purchase. Would it not be reasonable at least to restrict SNAP funds to purchase of healthy nutritious food?
7
Perhaps, JMBaltimore you would provide the objective evidence that you have found to support your opinion?
I have read opinions that Obama and the Democrats have engineered a permanent expansion of the welfare state. But, I have not discovered or read objective evidence to support that opinion.
Opinions = yes Facts = no.
What I have read and discovered is the growth of numbers of "poor" and of the "working poor." People who have slide down the income scale (or not moved up the scale) from middle to lower economic strata. Hence, a larger number of people who qualify for gov't run assistance programs; and the growth of those programs to serve the larger population of needy people.
I am not aware that either of the two major political parties have encouraged or provided stimulus for people to slide down the economic income scale.
How do you develop the opinion that you describe?
17
The number of households in poverty has not declined after the economy recovered from the recession; in fact, I believe poverty rates have increased. So there's no surprise that SNAP support has not declined.
15
SNAP is a poor example. It is a benefit conferred on low income people...the ranks of whom have swelled unaffected by the improving economy, because of redistribution of wealth upwards.
6
Creating a larger, more desperate middle class: cheaper labor without all the fuss of unions and the “perks” unions managed to wrestle from management and owners during their brief history. This is like the erosion of an ocean-side cliff. The current middle class will see the lower class slide into ever deeper destitution and will give up everything to avoid a similar plunge. Trump is all about creating a nation that conforms to his need for greater wealth and power, and he has surrounded himself with mostly white, mostly men who are eager to share that dream.
What happens when one of those liege lords threatens to overthrow the king? So far, Trump has mastered the art of the steal, but someone like, say, Mr. Pruitt seems overly-anxious to live the royal life. Might he not pose a threat to the sitting monarch?
A paranoid royal might lift and drop his lackeys at an astounding pace; he wouldn’t want to face threats from the inner circle. Trump has his foot on the necks of his subjects; it doesn’t appear he’s about to let up.
17
Paul,
It's called genocide - the deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (see definition at UN Office of Genocide Prevention).
This time the inferior group is defined to include persons that depend on government support to survive. For Republicans, persons include only real persons and not the Supreme Court's definition of persons which also includes corporations. Government support to and for corporations is permitted under Republican policies.
If we are unwilling or unable to properly identify Republican policies for what they truly are, then the inhumanity will never end.
16
I would not be surprised if the Republicans and the SCP re-instituted Poor Houses, a feature of the 18-19th centuries that made sure that the poor were punished for being poor. It fits with the Ayn Rand philosophy that is the darling of the Republican Elite, but probably never read by the Republican voting class.
15
Do they really want to be cruel? It's astonishing that they are so cruel, I agree, but if they do not directly see the results of their cruelty, is it really cruelty? Certainly on the receiving end, it must seem like cruelty salted with humiliation. Given Sen. Chuck Grassley's recent expression of boorish ignorance about the poor; or Mitt Romney's purchase, lock, stock, and barrel, of the idea that some huge percentage of Americans are takers, fleecing the makers, there are plenty of people who have no idea what poverty is about.
A very close friend works at a food pantry as a volunteer. The "means-testing" that these people--who are just hungry, for God's sake--have to endure is just breathtakingly humiliating. But, according to her, these folks maintain their dignity, despite the cruelty.
And most of these politicians consider themselves Christian. It is impossible to imagine the Jesus in the Bible that I own condoning this kind of jealous greed and miserly cruelty.
So, yeah. I guess it is cruelty to create a new, endless cycle of poverty so that corporate titans can pay nothing, force their employees onto Medicaid or food stamps, then the political titans can humiliate them. Guess it makes you look good at the country club.
299
If those GOP Congressional members bothered to get out their armored cars, private planes, mansions, yachts, you name it - and actually met with their constituents, talked to them, asked them what they want, what needs improvement, and how they can actually help their constituents rather than their rich corporate owners, maybe there would be hope. It's so easy to be critical of others when the others are just that - "others."
28
And when the radicalization flourishes and that Islamic, Marxist, Nationalist, Racist reaction explodes we’ll ask who lost America?
9
The reality is that you cannot save everyone, nor should we try to flush money down that toilet in the ultimate exercise in futility. Programs like Food Stamps or Medicaid are actually the ultimate corporate welfare, and allow corporations to underpay labor. To suggest that people wanting to keep the bulk of their wages vs “donating” their earnings to the government are reprehensible and greedy is plain wrong. It is not cruel to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor, even if well beyond what one needs, while others suffer. Call it social Darwinism if you want, but maybe we should be letting our poor incapable of supporting themselves lead shorter lives by not intervening to help. Those of you who have donated every penny to charity after taking care of your most basic needs are free to disagree...the rest can acknowledge your hypocrisy.
"So what’s really behind the war on the poor? Pretty clearly, the pain this war will inflict is a feature, not a bug. Trump and his friends aren’t punishing the poor reluctantly, out of the belief that they must be cruel to be kind. They just want to be cruel."
I have observed that "Thanos" of the Avengers movie want to destroy the universe pretty much because he likes doing that sort of thing.
Which would make him a natural for Trump's cabinet.
4
The third element of the republican "philosophy", if it can be called that is their failure to discuss the impact of their policies on inequality. Their hidden philosophy is the transfer of wealth from the bottom and middle class to the top 5,1,.1 and .01 percent at the top of the income pile. After the top goes to the trough and eats its never diminishing hunger, it goes after the elements of a civilized society. They are voracious in their greed. Education, healthcare, social security, civil society are eroded and the rich use a larger spoon to eat Beluga caviar. Even national defense is a source of enrichment as cost overruns and wasteful spending are never examined. The idea of a "national welfare" is dismissed. So what are we left with? The 1 percent buying and selling congress and white privilege. And Trump. Is there anything to be angry about in this miserable mess? And don't start waving the confederate flag.
9
It is much easier to govern by ignoring problems than it is to find realistic solutions. To justify policies based on ignorance, many declare made-up beliefs that freedom and liberty equal self-reliance and self-determination.
The Constitution confers freedom, liberty, and equality to all with no restrictions of balancing any equation. The whole enterprise of the Americans Experiment is a history of struggling toward these goals for a free society despite racism, bigotry, and class bias. This has demanded investment in The People through laws and social policies.
In essence, those demonstrating ignorance or a lack of empathy toward human beings are also demonstrating they no longer accept the explicit and implicit responsibilities of governing philosophy demanded within our founding documents. They have chosen cruel, inhuman, and undemocratic disparity, discrimination, suppression, oppression, and inequality.
103
I'm sure if our Founding Fathers came back today and saw the mess the GOP has put this country in, the ignorance and lies they promote, and their absolute abdication of their sworn duties to serve their constituents, I'm sure they'd be taking all of them to task and recommending that Trump and hi deplorable minions be tossed out on their derrieres and thrown into jail.
16
Self-righteous nonsense. Let's return to the so-called "safety net" and tax rates that existed when those documents were written. Deal?
The teachers in the US, especially in red states, are pointing out that the conservative culture that does not welcome evidence based policy or ideas is robbing public education in the name of trickle down economics.
The homeless, the poor, the beggars on the streets, neglected veterans, are signs that our priorities are askew. The poor are simply a convenient target of the GOP. "I'm doing well, what's wrong with you?"
Trump and his team are criminals, nothing more.
15
What is the nature of evil? I suggest that it can be boiled down to a person or group whose view point is narcisstic to a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. Its exploitation of others seldom wavers. And those who are such do not see their what they are but only see their entitlement.
5
This war on the poor did not start with Trump, it started in 1980 when Ronald Reagan exploited a recession to lay blame on “welfare queens.” Our votes for him back then let all politicians know they could use one dishonest person to take needed benefits (which barely account fo 2% of the budget) from millions of honest ones. Do politicians ever hold up unethical investment banks who costing us billions? No- because those banks contibute to their campaigns, and the poor do not.
335
I think you mean "unethical investment bankers." The banks get fined; the bankers get bonuses.
3
"But while the war on the poor will disproportionately hurt minority groups, it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
Of course they will. These people will have even less options, when it comes to learning how to fact-check, so they'll become even more vulnerable to fake news, and as it's the GOP and the GOP alone who's massively investing in and spreading fake news, Republicans will notice the effect of their policies right at the ballot, with even more people voting for them.
Problem solved.
5
Funny the double standard the GOP uses. A small percent of people on food stamp program might abuse it, getting a few more dollars than they should. Well this is a major deal and the program should be cut. Our dear leaders cabinet spends dollars for phone booths and dinning room sets while he spends 2 million a week flying around to play golf and that is just great.
9
Why do they hurt the poor? Because they can.
5
Many wealthy Americans, including congressmen and women, have viciously criticized poor people who have been forced to live in often dangerous ghetto housing with few good jobs available, few decent and inexpensive food markets, few hospitals, underfunded and under staffed schools, lack of good transportation, safe parks and playgrounds for children. Access to safe suburbs is unavailable because poor people lack the key to these suburbs - money. And what have our congress men and women, who earn almost $300,000 with salary and benefits, ever done to help poor Americans enter the other America? Many successful Americans look down on and blame the poor for being poor, even though most of them were born on third base but think they hit a homer. Will we ever do what's needed to make the American dream accessible for ALL Americans?
3
No one is forced to live anywhere as you suggest. Or forced to perform certain jobs as you state.
It’s vital to be precise in such contentious matters.
1
Mr. Krugman's headlines scream progressive cliches: "Cruel", "War on [fill-in-the-blank]".
When all else fails, these are the arguments of sore losers. The accusations of those who cannot tolerate.
1
Dr. King observed that a society is only as strong as its weakest link. Governance according to the principles of novelist Ayn Rand has resulted in a stark contrast between the two Americas, the comfortable and the poor. With all the proclaimed prosperity, one must search diligently for all that promised trickle down. Forget Washington for the moment and look at the states and their problems under Republican-controlled government. Why do teachers protest and strike? Have they no shame for all that has been done to make them economically better off? Come to my state of Georgia or any neighboring states and ask about the rank hostility for food stamp applicants and those who need medicaid. The Biblical promise of a reckoning should be at hand. Register the poor, the threatened, the miserable and all those despised by these tyrants, get the oppressed to the polls and send these sick white men and the sad Dr. Ben Carson home to wallow in their bounty.
5
It is as if Tom Joad from "The Grapes of Wrath" decided that it wasn't the rich and powerful that were destroying his family, but that it was black, brown and liberal people. Joad eloquently stated that he would spend the rest of his life protecting and standing up for the weak and downtrodden, if he were a Trump voter today, he finally statement would have been a racist screed.
2
In Trump World, the unreformed Ebenezer Scrooge, Henry F. Potter, Gordon Gecko, etc. are paragons of virtue. It's a prosperity gospel world righteously turned upside down where the life and teachings of Christ are inverted to justify self interest, greed, humiliating those in need, debasing truth, and wrecking planet earth. "War is Peace", "Slavery is Freedom", "Ignorance is Strength", etc.
4
I suspect this message will fall on many deaf ears, such as mine.
Many of us are tired of supporting these entitlement / welfare programs. Unemployment ticks down each quarter, yet these programs ask for more and more funding.
You say the poor are being taken advantage of, tired and treated badly, I would say it's we, the taxpayers who are being treated poorly. Like banks.
These programs grow each and every year. I stand behind entire families with rolls of food stamps each week on my way home from my 11 hour job. I do well, yes, but I earn every penny and crawl to no man for food to eat or feed my loved ones...and I would rather die before doing so.
2
It would be truly frightening to have to serve in a military unit alongside people with these views.
Would that any notion of a commonwealth depend on such a view there’d be no republic to try to save.
Dear Mr./Ms.There: Congratulations. You don't need anyone! I presume you had the good sense to choose the environment you were born into and the that you'll never, ever be subjected to life's random, sometimes catastrophic misfortunes. And if you are, so what? You'd rather die than accept a helping hand, because if you did get seriously ill, laid off, lost your savings during a financial crash or to an unscrupulous bank, or anything else like that, it'd be all your fault. So, very good for you because you're so smart and virtuous, you don't need invest in or care for one moment about your fellow man or your community. You sir/ma'am are awesome.
3
How wonderful.
Trump’s miscreants are making a mockery of the long-held belief that American government was meant to be “of the People, by the People, and for the People.”
It is bad enough that it has evolved into a government of the special interests, by the lobbyists, for the wealthy. Now, in a shifting nuance, it is apparently also for the miscreants themselves.
The malicious assertion of not indifference, but of overt hostility towards the less well off under the guise of empowering the disenfranchised amounts to a deceptive hijacking of the Peoples’ government in what some have called a “long con.” The indecent and willful and conversion of taxpayer funds for the private benefit of office holders is, however, unprecedented in its scale, immorality and brazenness. It has become pervasive.
Americans with blinders on are kidding themselves. We are on a slippery slope and in this case, all slippery slopes lead to the muck of the Trump swamp.
This isn’t “fake news.” It is a head fake by Trump and his enablers. His tan-trumps and unhinged emotional outbursts are designed to mislead the American public, and if he is indeed draining the swamp, all it is accomplishing is making the misdeeds of his administration’s own swamp creatures all the more visible as they greedily writhe in the ooze.
1
From a link in Krugman's piece:
"SNAP has become increasingly effective at supporting work among households that can work. More than half of SNAP households with at least one working-age, non-disabled adult work while receiving SNAP. Because people often participate in SNAP when they are between jobs, work rates are higher over a longer time frame: more than 80 percent of SNAP households work in the year before or the year after receiving SNAP. Work rates are even higher for families with children: more than 60 percent work while receiving SNAP, and almost 90 percent work in the prior or subsequent year."
To anyone who still believes in the myth of the lazy welfare person, you are wrong. To those who believe this myth while taking their mortgage interest deduction and charitable deductions for church, etc, you are dishonest. The government gives you far and away more money than it does to working people who need SNAP benefits.
2
The problem with Pruitt's double-secret cone of silence is that it is not big enough to cover all of Washington.
Imagine the bliss of a nation spared the vacuous rants of its "rulers".
I don't like Trump and you couldn't pay me to vote for him. He will crash the economy like his GOP predecessors. But the war on the poor has been going on for a long time in this country, and the GOP isn't the only perpetrator. I was surprised to find that it was even going on under Clinton (read the work of the late Rita Jensen, founder of Women's ENews, on Clinton's cuts to welfare). I may sound like a broken record, but the fact that my town and my governor think that free PreK for all is more important than housing the homeless shows that liberals have a blind spot for the poor too. If liberals don't face their own shortcomings - that their little overpriced paradise for the rich shuts out the poor and even the middle class - we are going to continue having a country governed by demagogues. If we don't recognize that we are part of the problem, we aren't going to fix it.
1
"The interesting question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are. The question, instead, is why."
I would say it's the same mentality at work as deliberately separating young children from parents when they seek asylum. Yes. The point is cruelty. They intend to deter immigration and benefits seekers by sending a message of stingy cruelty. Trump and company love punishment as incentive rather than positive incentives. In his world kindness is weakness. His base is apparently in line with that ethos.
1
This is a surprising piece coming from an economist. Are the hacks in this Administation as craven and cruel as any before? Without question. But let’s set aside that reality to forthrightly evaluate another: That few HUD programs work as hoped and intended originally and have evolved into costly problems that require a serious overhaul. Would we all be better if we have an Adminstration with the technical skill to tackle these issues? Sure. But when we get that from Democrats we regrettably also get an unwillingness to perform the surgery needed. The right is heartless and inept on these matters. The left empathetic and unwilling to make changes.
3
"Trump and his friends aren’t punishing the poor reluctantly, out of the belief that they must be cruel to be kind. They just want to be cruel."
I'm not sure I share that opinion, Paul. Yes, the Trump cabal is certainly cruel to the poor, but I don't think it's because they have an innate cruelty streak running through them. It's more that the GOP policy makers are held hostage by the predatory greed of their donor class. That's what drives Republican policies - greed. OK, throw in a few dollops of cruelty, too. But the mix is still mostly about raw greed.
71
I don't entirely agree Max. I think it's mostly about the GOP's obsession with the judgement of "others" -- it's binary: people are either deserving on non-deserving. They believe that one's condition is entirely dependent on one's choices. If a person encountered misfortune, it's because they must have made bad choices (like drinking contaminated public water). So why should they pay for another person's poor decisions? They live in a black and white, choose a side, "you're either with us or against world" where they decide who merits aid based entirely on their own subjective, often biased views.
19
There's another theory, too, called Dominionism. I won't go into the details of that, but the essence is that God shows his love for some people by bestowing wealth upon them. And conversely, he shows others that they are not in his favor by not bestowing wealth on them. Since the wealthy pay more taxes, anything that uses those taxes to benefit the poor is therefore against God's will. So, safety net programs which are tax supported are against God's will, and must be stopped. It's crazy, but some people believe in that kind of thing. Others just believe in greed. But specific cruelty isn't a major factor in this. Delusions may be, though.
In that case, they clearly adore to be hostages, as the Democrats absolutely want to see campaign finance reform signed into law, beginning with abolishing the SC Citizens United ruling.
All that the GOP has to do to no longer be a "hostage" is to write such a bill and hold a vote on it.
Problem solved.
6
Not every elected GOP official is a philosopher - to say the least - but I do believe that if you want to get to the bottom of this kind of war, you have to take a look at conservatism as a philosophy.
Since it exists, and for a couple of centuries now, it was a philosophy designed to keep the old, absolutist royal regimes intact, not necessarily as political system (many conservatives have been "republicans", for a long time already), but as a conceptual system supporting this kind of organization of society as a whole.
The aristocrats (and many members of the Church, often coming from aristocratic families) defended their own wealth and the enormous gap between it and the rest of the people, through the notion of "merit".
They deserved to be so wealthy, they believed, BECAUSE of the hard work of their parents or grandparents etc. Those were the people who managed to get rich, and once you get there, you're rewarding by a political system that allows you to keep that wealth inside your own family for generations and generations to come.
The poor, on the other hand, are punished by the very fact that they didn't have "good ancestors". They're condemned to suffer, as nothing is "for free" in this hard and brutal world.
So conservatives see welfare as social INJUSTICE, for historical and philosophical reasons. And injustice towards the wealthy, of course.
That's why Edsall was right yesterday when writing that to win elections, the GOP HAS to lie about its policies...
4
People on the left are always worried about economic fairness to the poor. What about fairness to productive people? If they don't think that's a live issue then it's no wonder they don't understand why Mr. Trump got elected.
23
Indeed, as I just wrote, conservative philosophy presupposes that a fair reward, if you work hard, is to have lots of money, enough to allow your children and grandchildren etc. to no longer have to work (or at least not the hardest kind of jobs - so to suffer less).
The left has always replied that societies based on this kind of concept of social justice, are de facto societies where social tensions are so high that real "national security" is almost impossible.
First of all, their are of course even among the wealthiest people "idiots", who suffer from envy and self-hatred, and then, as history has shown, hire entire armies in order to try to steal the wealth of their neighbor.
And secondly, those masses of poor people won't just work hard their entire life, only to see that their children will have to face the same hardship because they didn't have access to education and decent healthcare. As history has shown, sooner or later they'll start massively revolting. And that too implies a LOT of violence, including against the wealthy.
So IF you want social peace, you cannot but switch to a political system where there still are ultra-wealthy citizens, but where at least the others have real opportunities to move forward in life - during their own lifetime.
Since the 20th century, all countries on earth learned this lesson, and started to create governments distributing wealth in order to invest in basic things such as education, HC, R&D etc. It's called "civilization".
47
In "Wealth and Democracy." Kevin Phillips points out that there is a feedback in economic distribution because as the rich get richer, they use their wealth to get more power. They then use their power to get more wealth and so on. In the olden days they hired gangs of thugs called knights to extort money from the peasants and merchants. Today they hire politicians to pass laws that benefit them financially.
There seems to be a tipping point where this process becomes impossible to reverse. When inequality becomes bad enough, the country soon goes down the tubes. He gives several examples, e.g. the 18th century decline of the Dutch Republic. Chrystia Freeland used 14th century Venice to illustrate this process in a Times article, but history is replete with other examples.
The point here is that the kind of unequal society promoted by Mr. Duke is not stable and eventually has always led to disaster for all.
According to Phillips, the great success of America has been that before the tipping point was reached, something has always happened that reverse the flow of money upwards, e.g. the rise of unions, FDR's reforms.
Will that happen this time?
59
Read about the teachers' strikes and the conditions they work under. It's not just the poor, Republican cruelty and efforts to dismantle our government system are directed towards the entire 98%. The benefits the Republicans promise for the working people, like jobs and fair wages, never seem to appear. Instead the rich get richer. Republicans are turning us into a third world country - devaluing education, not fixing a crumbling infrastructure and enabling an administration peopled by crooks. Look at the facts, don't drink the cool-aid.
55
The War on the Poor will continue until the concept of a minimal basic income returns to mainstream discussion.
It is clear that technology and not outsourcing is the main driver of job loss in industrial nations. It will continue. Fast food franchises are right now developing devices to eliminate even burger flipping as an occupation.
Richard Nixon proposed a form of basic income support in the 1970’s. Studies have shown that providing a minimal income to people struggling to survive actually increases their productivity to society.
The math is inexorable. There are not enough “high paying” jobs to sustain everyone. Minimal Basic Income is both humane and economic.
Until this concept re-emerges as policy, Americans will continue to suffer from the War on the Poor.
5
Ever heard of the working poor?
Krugman: "This year...the G.O.P.’s main priority seems to be making war on the poor."
My perspective is that this has been an ongoing war. Ronald Reagan and his "Welfare Queen" slander helped make the war acceptable, if it was not already so. Newt Gingrich and the Republicans during his days in Congress took the war to another level.
The latest causality of the war appears to the be chaplain for the House of Representatives, Jesuit Patrick Conroy, who had the audicity to pray that "their (legislators) efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans." Spearker Ryan apparently had enough of this nonsense and asked for his resignation.
The religious tradition in which I grew up frequently reminded me that the justice of a society could be measured by how the most vulnerable were faring and being treated, assuring me this was the tradition embedded in the message of the Hebrew prophets and Jesus. They obviously got the message wrong.
13
This is the central tenet of the Tea Party. Tea Party members strongly feel that their tax dollars should not be used to support the poor. Full stop.
They have theirs, they feel they earned theirs fair and square, and they object to giving any of theirs to others who didn't earn it. It doesn't go one inch deeper than that.
Here in Virginia, Tea Party members badge their cars via the "Gadsden Plate". Easily half the cars with that plate have at least one bumper sticker that says, in some fashion, the poor deserve their poverty, and they don't deserve my money.
Is there a some race- and class-driven animus there? Sure, no doubt.
But mostly it's a prideful indifference to and denial of the suffering of others. The idea of empathy for others is not part of the equation.
It goes hand-in-hand with an absolute denial that there is any such thing as a civil society with any obligation to take care of others. The polar opposite of "it takes a village". It's the embodiment of Ayn Rand's atheist philosophy.
Don't expect them to change, don't expect them to see the light. Those folks are perfectly comfortable allowing the children of the poor to die of starvation. Or, at least, they feel that the government has no proper role in addressing that.
25
All the while, the hollowing out of the middle class continues as well. One third move up to the upper middle or upper class, two thirds of the middle class move down to the lower class. The numbers of lower class moving up to the middle class are dwarfed by the people moving the other direction. Add to that, 78% of all workers live paycheck to paycheck. All those lower class Trump supporters are just one disaster from government help.
18
The report this AM that Paul Ryan "fired" the Chaplain of the House ( demanded his resignation) after Father John Conroy offered a prayer that Congress be mindful of those left behind and asked:
“May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”
Even tho' Ryan is on his way out, even tho' his party invokes religious values as an excuse for denying health benefits to women, he couldn't abide the reminder to consider the effects of their legislation on the poor.
26
Welfare is a negative word when it applies to the poor and working poor, but it is re-defined positively when the government subsidizes companies and the rich and businesse with tax write-offs. It's the branding that counts.
24
How many sports stadiums are financed by corporate welfare. Guys making millions a year but the clubs can't afford a place to play.
11
My only beef w Prof Krugman's column is his labeling this Trump's war on the poor. This is only half-correct.
This is the same War on the Poor that was launched so gleefully by Reagan, and has been enthusiastically prosecuted by every GOP politician of note since 1980.
This is mainstream Republicanism, pure and simple. It does not begin w Trump, nor will it end here. Given the same dynamics of control of WH, House, and Senate, every one of the GOP prez candidates in 2016 would be pursuing the same economic policies.
And all those never Trumpers liberals are learning to love? Recall the parable of the scorpion and the frog to see how that is going to play out.
28
Would Trump be ambivalent about signing any legislation reinstating debtors' prison? He could sign it out of the sheer malevolence discussed in Mr. Krugman's essay--coupled with a general desire to "lock 'em up" and further improve the economic status of private prisons. And that might force him to make good on so many of his own, past unpaid bills--but probably not.
The above is currently in the realm of speculative fiction. The lack of empathy for the poor by the guy in the White House and so many of his top appointees is not. Given their (Republican) tax plan, they are also willing to punish a wide swath of the middle class.
The "best and the brightest" was a cynical phrase in the hands of David Halberstam. These days it is more of a cruel joke, particularly at the level of the executive branch and its appointees.
13
Short answer to concluding question: No!
7
Republicans in power reflect the meanness among their voters, and produce an amplification effect. They are mean because they can be mean.
Today's republicans, without apology - want to be the first to feed at the federal teat, and want others debarred, imprisoned, or deported. You call it meanness toward the poor, they call it "this is ordained by god." And if they cannot be in charge, they will fuel ethnic nationalism and go full on nihilist. The country, and legal system, may no longer question their lack of ethics, and the crimes they commit (if democrats try Trump in court, he will win with bigger margins next time around).
Their results are unprecedented. They have reduced a forward thinking country that put a man on the moon, into a reason-blind, anti-learning, anti-education, anti-choice, anti-healthcare, pro-pollution, pro-global warming, ethnic-nationalist, poor-hating, misogynistic country in short order. Not all, but enough to stay in power.
Meanness is now embedded in our DNA; it resulted from radioactivity spouted by republican machines (Fox, AM radio, church). What, if not a mutative sociopathy, explains Hispanics voting for Trump, poor voting for republicans, and women voting for a misogynistic predator in Alabama?
I recognize a successful con when I see one. I marvel at the total powerlessness of those who see it, can call it, but can do little more than cry over completely spilled milk with candles lit, and pink caps on.
32
In the absence of a Winter Palace, the White House will do.
7
This unholy war was begun by Richard Nixon, who used the Public rough as his own personal piggy bank. The came Ronnie Reagan who apparently believed his comment the homeless want to be homeless. and now we are being plagued by a bunch of street thugs, who lie, cheat and steal, and who would kill to anyone, who gets between them and their desires. This is going to get worse - much, much worse before it gets any better.
13
I first encountered this problem in Russia approx. 20 years ago. The former KGB et al were busy plundering and raping even though those very actions guaranteed an opportunity cost compared to taking a more nurturing and husbandry approach to taking from the less fortunate.
For example, a good farmer knows that they can increase profits by increasing the potential of their assets and then enjoying the much great yield. Farmers who rape and plunder their assets will eventually face the consequences of diminishing returns.
The actions by the uber rich to diminish the capacity of the poor and middle class are literally an act of shooting oneself in the foot. Even if we intentionally or inadvertently allow them to continue their rape and plunder, no such approach has ever yielded long term viability.
continued/...
12
Trump fans wouldn't care if Donald shot someone on 5th Ave. He himself has said so. They also do not care if he takes cash from their pockets and gives it to the super-rich GOP owners that put Trump in office to service the wealthy.
Trump's true fans are racists, religious fundamentalists and people with little or no education. Economic issues have always been a cover story. They are fed inflammatory lies and propaganda 24/7 by Fox/Hannity/Breitbart and Donald Trump is now their Holy Saint who can do no wrong. The Republican leadership is desperate to keep these blind Trump followers on board and they do all that they can to protect Trump for this reason. Deplorables and traitors, quite a mix: the Republican Party of today.
25
I can see it now. Trump triples poor people's rent. Then, shortly after a Democrat is elected in 2020, the right-wing echo chamber blames the new president for the terrible terrible increase in homelessness.
32
When dealing with Donald Trump I'm always brought to mind of that scene in the movie Titanic, with a sleazy wealthy guy talks his way onto the boat with the women and children. Listening to Trump rant on Fox news for a half-hour about how not guilty he is. And even sadder when Fox news hosts say to him basically, "while I'm sure you're busy Mr. Pres." and kindly hung up on him. Watching the American political system, or a should say 'lack of' play out with all Mr. Trumps sleazy appointees pillage the middle class and poor in order to take care of their already exaggerated fat cats and their friends and relatives plan. They really haven't the slightest bit of remorse about robbing from America's children. I say to all of those people, remember when the French revolution and the beheadings became the sport of the day….….. or maybe that's fake wishes.
14
Mr. Krugman is right. The programs to assist the poor are being cut, because Trump admin knows they can do it without upsetting their rich donors and then convince the voters that they cut spending massively using the stereotypes of those who abuse those programs.
But I also fault democrats on this for not giving the unfortunate segments of our citizens the voice to speak up. They are so enamored with the latest Trump reality show theatrics on nominations, Russia, Stormy Daniels and obsessively focused on illegal immigration including shutting down the federal government that they no longer fight with a coherent message for the American citizens on issues that matter most to them such as healthcare, welfare, education, infrastructure and environment. Why did they not shut down the government over the 1% focused tax plan for example?
The toxicity of breaking all decent acceptable norms by the administration and coupled with Democrats not fighting for bread and butter issues have led to the current dysfunctional state.
8
I have somewhat of a hard time calling the crusade to obliterate the weakest among us by taking away vital programs that in many cases provide the difference between life and death for some "Trump's War". He did not achieve his election in a vacuum but with the votes of so-called Evangelicals who are the most bereft of grace and dignity of all Americans. Moreover, it would only have taken the smallest number of defections from the GOP ranks to have sunk the worst of the worst policies that this tragically evil Chief Executive has submitted to Congress. They did not, for instance, sink Obamacare thanks to the ONE VOTE of McCain. I point this out because it's too easy and too forgiving to place the blame for the attacks on the poor with Trump alone. Every person who voted for him and every Congressman who agreed to support these immoral policy initiatives have an equal measure of responsibility in my view. I have neither respect nor understanding for divergent views from my own when those views attack the very basic understand of our sense of human decency towards one another. Remember that a civilized society is (and should be) judged by how it treats the WEAKEST of it's citizens, not the strongest, and in that vein we have hopelessly failed as a country and as a caring and compassionate people.
110
Well-stated, ManhattanWilliam. Cruelty runs deep in our veins, I’m so very sorry to say. Witness the testimony that is the new museum in Alabama on lynching, a most vicious practice if ever there was, a national stain and sin on our souls. These morally-bankrupt politicians and voters who support this regime (and regime it is, for sure) are just par for the course, unfortunately. They make me sick.
8
They may notice but they won’t care. Trumpism isn’t about making working class whites better-off, it’s about making them feel better about themselves by giving them scapegoats and feeding them crackpot conspiracy theories.
There is no other rational explanation for them sticking by him as he betrays them again and again.
29
Will they notice?
The Trump campaign, the GOP, Russia/FB, the Kochs.... managed to convince many voters that Trump would be good for them. Democrats must figure out how to connect, positively, with these folks. Telling them they are stupid or deplorable might resonate with the left, and they might even win... but it won' do anything to mend a terribly divided citizenship. There is a way.
9
Sorry, there's nothing wrong with calling a spade a spade. It may be futile, but their actions define them.
Thank you for writing about this--a badly needed analysis that comes down to what's really going on here--flat out disdain for poor people. And, of course that includes people of color. But, coupled with the war on reproductive rights, it also includes a large segment of the female population, many of whom are single mothers. There is just no hiding the fact that Trump and many of the white, male (and female) GOP simply hate women and people of color, and are threatened by them. I will always believe this also explains why Trump was elected--exploiting that fear and energizing the misogynistic "base" that doesn't care how many women he assaulted but in fact that believes it's appropriate to assault women to keep them in their place. Even as he cuts their benefits, they would vote for him again in a heartbeat.
9
Mulvaney is just flat sadistic - but then, so is Trump. His rallies were appalling. He practically begged for violence. I'd bet anything he longs to inflict pain on people and animals - would love to do it personally, probably - meanwhile we see outright cruelty to immigrants and their families, and these attacks on poor people that may well put many of us on the streets.
This is sick. Watching French President Macron speak so stirringly to Congress was such balm for the spirit - here is a person saying more to reinforce American values and ideals than any Republican I can think of let alone anybody from Trump's administration - and of course he represents a country where this kind of torture isn't allowed. France has strong, generous safety nets.
America has a mean streak. It isn't just the President. We are still reflecting the values of the Puritans but worse, Southern slaveholders wielding bullwhips, who slashed human flesh and raped generations of women.
29
In the middle ages the Catholic Church explained to the wretchedly poor that God had inflicted that burden on them in order for them to earn heaven.
The concept of the Worthy Poor (all wealthy are worthy because God has bestowed His blessings) allows/demands the disdain of those found lacking in the battle of material gain. Mental/physical illness, disability or bad luck are signs of unworthiness in the human family.
Ironic that a religion that repudiates evolution can so easily and completely buy into "survival of the fittest" for the human race.
This is why the evangelical churches support Trump and the Republican ideals. They have created a twisted version of "Christianity" that demands that humans be judged and punished in this world, not the next.
12
Trump is simply carrying out policies he mastered while in private business. In essence: stiff the little guy. In his previous life, he had the time and money to outlast those small businesses who tried unsuccessfully to be paid for their goods and services. Now he sits atop the federal government wielding much the same power. With indifference or disdain, he knows the "value" of perseverance, smug in the knowledge that eventually the poor will just give up.
Not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, he sees the poor as "excess population."
10
The odd place we find ourselves is we’ve allowed the rich to set up a grievance echo chamber. It feeds resentment and paranoia. It allows them to pass income reversing tax cuts and regulatory reform that will make us all sick. The deplorables are so pathetic they cheer as their rights and incomes disappear. See union busting.
The deplorables flock to to this and the Trump media empire feed them. The MSM in desperate need for clicks and views (think Chuck Todd & Maggie Haberman) feed a metooism to legitimize abhorrent behavior.
At some point the other 60-65% need to take our country back. November seems about right.
8
DP exactly! And you 'hit the pin on the head' with your whole analysis, including your great and humorous phrase, "allowed the rich to set up a grievance echo chamber."
Thomas Frank wrote a similarly 'on target' analysis of the 'low information' voters in his 2005 "What's the Matter with Kansas?" about these unfortunate folks who can be so easily fooled and propagandized into 'voting against their own interests'.
Now under faux-Emperor Trump this scam has been raised to such a fine art that Frank should write a new book titled "What's the Matter with America" ---- as Trump has suckered just under half of all these naive but poor fellow Americans, who don't realize that he is just a better scammer for the Empire that put this con-artist in office.
I feel very bad for these cheated and looted average Americans!
1
There is never really a "war on the poor."
Abusing poor people isn't meant to put poor people in their place.
There has never been an uprising of poor people in history that has succeeded.
It is about a "war on the working class."
It is making an example of the poor so the middle class will be too fearful to rise up.
We are beginning to see glimpses (the teachers' strikes are an example) of the working class rising up to throw off the chains of their Republican oppressors.
If you want to judge a society, see how it treats its poor, elderly, and disabled.
To the middle and working classes, I say, "Look around. You may be next."
13
What is so astonishing about all this is the Republican sale on government to the rich and rampant Trump amorality. It is like a huge neon sign screaming danger and yet the looting and lying continues, unabated.
4
Trump has no empathy for anyone, let alone the poor. Add to that, he sees them as losers, as he defines the game of life, so who cares? For most Republicans of the religious right the poor are not favored by God, so they deserve their fate. Then there is the Republican tenet that if some "other" gets something, then I, the hard-working, God-fearing, decent American loses something to the "other" who doesn't deserve it. The America of Trump and the Republicans is a mean place.
5
Indeed, it is Trump in the Oval Office saying "let them eat cake". After all, nobody he knows or knows of AND respects is poor.
3
Pruitt's telephone expense was done by a holdover Obama era person; it was done intentionally. That is why every past president's people should be dismissed. We cannot afford Medicare and Social Security as they are going bankrupt as Medicaid. Obama increased Medicaid and worsened the situation. We cannot afford healthcare and single payer would take out significantly more paycheck money (like 80 %plus). We need safety nets to be just that and not abused by theft we so frequently hear about. Nothing wrong with getting everyone to work Mr. Krugman. It is a foreign concept to the socialist democrats.
It’s racism pure and simple but a particularly virulent type. Racism was something perpetrated on people who don’t look like Trump but now it’s increasingly about poor people who could work for Trump and his associates. Going all the way back to the Ante Bellum South white people were an exalted class regardless of wealth status but with Trump we’ve gone further back to a time of class struggle and white on white. Trump was born when there were fewer than 3 billion people on earth and today there are over 7 billion. Resources are strained and the lesson of this era is pitting tribes against each other because the rich have to stay rich no matter what.
1
Tax cuts for the rich and cruelty towards poor people will do nothing to change the minds of trump supporters. Until you show how Republican policies hurt the middle class nothing will change and we will continue to watch the United States race to the bottom. So far students and now the teachers in all these red states are showing the way.
3
What goes around comes around right?
It's the same fatal nonsense that somehow worked for the slave owning elites back in 1860.
They represented a minority of the population in the south, but by owning most of the media and appealing to the same racist false logic, most of the fighting and dying in the Confederacy was done by the poor yeoman farmer who did not own slaves.
But they were convinced that a free black man was a threat to their wives and daughters.
This cynical manipulation of the poor white base- convincing them again to vote against their own interests-
seems almost historical somehow.
Read Greenhouse's editorial on The Supreme Court and the New Civil War.
Remember, the Civil War was sometimes called the War Between the States. Now they are Red and Blue.
And Sessions and Trump are treating the poor undocumented like the slaves who fled to the north via the Underground Railroad seeking sanctuary.
And when we recall that now 10% of the most wealthy in our country own about 75% of it, and how our last two losing Presidential candidates actually won a majority of the vote...
Maybe we should be asking ourselves now
who are the enslaved?
Who are the Corporate Masters?
5
These poor people should get off the dole, get a college degree in education, and go teach in a public school (especially in a red state) or dedicate themselves to young children as a preschool teacher in a for profit or not--for-profit preschool or child care center. Then they would be contributing to society in the most important way investing in our children and making stable middle class wages. Oh wait that does not seem to be working out for the dedicated people who are already doing it so well does it?
5
Who is going to pay for their college degree? If they can gain admittance to a college, they will spend the rest of their lives in debt, paying off their loans.
1
I as of course being facetious but in serious answer to your question there are many need based types of support especially at state universities and Pell grants. Not enough of course, but still much more than people realize for the poor and working poor. Of course I imagine Pell grants will be next on the chopping block so there will be enough money for all Trump's visits and golfing in Florida, Pruitt's phone booth, and Carson's dining sets. But you are correct about the expense of college and university but this a problem that goes for beyond the poor to the middle class as well.
1
Stephanie,
Turn your irony sensor back on.
1
One of my mother’s favorite sayings when talking about the poor was, “there but for the grace of God, go you.” My mother was not particularly religious, and could be harshly and unfairly judgemental about people in many other respects.
Her attitude about poverty was formed not only by her having grown up desperately poor during the Great Depression, but by the way people treated her because she was poor. One story she would tell was about the shop owner who would loudly announce to everyone, whenever my mother (a child) entered the store, how she had given my mother a free banana once.
Under Trump, evangelical Christians have been asserting their self-proclaimed right to arbitrate morality. They have been willing to risk charges of hypocrisy by overlooking the behavior of Grabber-in-Chief so that they can impose their views on reproductive rights and sexual orientation. But when it comes to economic issues, they preach the prosperity Bible.
Yesterday, in the most shameful episode of our current Congress, Paul Ryan, himself a beneficiary of the social safety net, fired the House chaplain because he dared to suggest in a prayer that lawmakers be mindful of the poor when they voted for the tax scam.
I watch all of this with increasing dismay and disorientation, because even as an atheist, I know caring for the poor is good for the soul.
8
Excellent column and the best explanation I've seen yet for this cruel administration. Just an example of those who think I've got mine and to heck with everyone else.
3
The Tax Cuts for the Rich and Poorly Paid Jobs Act is so Republican.
They love the overworked and underpaid poor that generates the obscene wealth at the top.
They hate the poor who are not working for sub-livable wage because they're not adding to the the wealth at the top. This includes children, the elderly, sick, handicapped and worst of all the retired - instead they should drop dead while they work to generate wealth for the top through to their last breath. Maximize profits!
The wealthy complain they cannot afford to pay what little taxes they might pay to house their employees they pay too little to afford any housing. They're like slave owners who claim they can't afford to feed their slaves and certainly can't cover their health care costs - but demand that slaves must continue to be "productive" for their masters. Oh, and pay their master's taxes.
How about a work requirement for idle rich tax dodgers.
How about better pay as an incentive to work! Indeed, how is an unlivable wage an incentive to work hard?
Hurting the poor is just fake-Christian and "depraved" - a word synonymous with trump and Republicans of late.
6
Professor Krugman touches on an important feature of Republican policy on the poor: the racialization of poverty. The animus that racist whites feel towards black people--and in particular, the conviction that black people are getting "special treatment" or benefit from a "secret" welfare system (see Trump's sarcastic claim 20 years ago that he wished he were "an educated black" because they got special treatment)--entails the view that the suffering of poor black people is, as Krugman says, "a feature, not a bug." They're getting what they really deserve.
Republican policy for years now has been extending this set of feelings to poor people in general. Poverty, like blackness, is a sign of a special moral failing. Poor people deserve to suffer. It's a violation of the moral order to alleviate their suffering, and an affirmation of that order to take steps to increase it.
We have yet to learn just how long is the shadow cast over American experience by the legacy of racism and white supremacy.
2
And this white supremacy is even in blue states and so-called progressive towns, which are driving out minorities to replace them with whites.
"Will they notice?"
Eventually, they will notice, but they aren't smart enough or well enough informed to place the blame where it belongs. There is no cure for stupidity.
1
You are soooo right. Trump's cruelty is totally 'gratis', as it is based on bias from his deep ignorance about the facts; I bet that capitalistic inequality to Trump is just 'business as usual', and blaming the poor for their own predicament, instead of the system we have, always trumping labor in favor of capital, and disregarding the poor as lesser beings, with no influence in politics whatsoever, as Mulvaney just reminded us (pay to play!). Trump is a despicable thug, destructive and unscrupulous, as he doesn't give a fig for the least among us. His so-called populism is a charade, a big lie, even if not assimilated yet by his adoring fans, thoughtless and misinformed as they are. Trump's installment of a pluto-kleptocracy of misfits is a disgrace to the country and to the world. Of course, Trump is just the more salient big mouth of these attacks on the poor, as the republican party has been guilty, as charged, for a long time. Pettiness and contemptible indeed.
3
I hope the poor white people who voted for Trump realize who's to blame when their lives become even more difficult - it's not Hillary. It's not Pres Obama. It's not Nancy Pelosi or CNN or the New York Times or Rosie O'Donnell. I've been saying this since Trump's descent on the escalator at Trump Tower that fateful day: He wants their collective votes and loyalty but as individuals, he'd never share a meal with them. By voting for a man who openly bragged about courting the uninformed and uneducated, the uninformed and uneducated proved they were uninformed and uneducated. Thanks for sharing this national nightmare with us, Trump voters. It seems to me many of the President's supporters believe poor people of color must be weeded out, deported, marginalized (or left to die without health care) under Trump's Survival of the Fittest. But it's his poor white base that will soon be made to disappear.
6
The fact that Pruitt still has the EPA position says all that needs to be said about Republicans. They are anti-American, un-American, treasonous despots. I saw media reports about his performance at the hearing today and it was described as a "grilling" and "faced tough questions" - but that was not true at all. It was softball, lightweight, bumbling - and he was quite comfortable and he is still there! And it is gut-wrenching that he is anywhere near any influence over any environmental matter at all! These foul con-men, demagogues, liars and cheats need to be cleared out of the temple that is OUR government and OUR places of democracy! He is the lowest of the low and among Republicans, that a low that is almost unimaginable.
3
For our economy to grow, we need 25-30 million more people. "Give me your tired and your poor" is our essence as everybody here came to America from somewhere else, generally with just the clothes on their backs.
The First Amendment is the glue keeping our Constitution and Bill of Rights alive.
Yet when was the last time you saw any person, not chosen by the "political parties" deliver a political speech without some news person moderator holding the microphone, or any person chosen to serve on the court a judge not a member of the political party in power.
The two political parties have trumped our Constitution.
The department of De Fence was voted 710 billion dollars in Congress' recent budget deal.
For every barely flyable jet costing hundreds of millions of dollars to build we could have 100 state-of art hybrid copter drones, each with four smart multi-warhead cruise missiles; also a cost effective one-time-only aluminum two-hour throw-away jet engine so the defense hybrid drones defensively hang high or low 24/7 in flying fighter groups, remotely waiting to shift from copter mode to jet propelled attack, topped off with a scary kamikaze term of service X 100 hybrids.
The billions of De Fence dollars saved could be better spent on Medicaid, SNAP, The VA, bridge repairs, renewed airports and transcontinental mag-lev railroads cruising across the prairie at 390 mph—a great tourist ploy plus plenty of work for our missing 20 million immigrants to grow our economy.
2
More evidence of the GOP's petty war on the poor: Speaker Paul Ryan just dismissed the popular House chaplain, the Rev. Pat Conroy, a move that outraged both House Democrats & Republicans.
Why? Apparently because the Rev. Conroy offered prayers like this one when the House was considering passage of the tax heist: "As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”
Ryan & Conroy practice the same faith -- Roman Catholicism -- so Ryan didn't have a doctrinal difference with Conroy. Rather, one can surmise that Ryan's problem was that Conroy reminded Republicans that their war on the poor -- & on middle class -- violated the foundational tenets of their shared faith.
"Christian nation"? Not if Paul Ryan can help it.
9
Dr. Krugman should recognize the logic of the war on the poor derives from neoclassical economics. Neoclassical economics assumes resource scarcity and unlimited wants. Therefore, if people want everything, but they can't have it all, then they must choose. Thus, neoclassical economics becomes a study of choice. And, if the poor and homeless have a choice, they must choose to be poor and homeless. They prefer it to making a decent living and having a nice warm place to call home! It logically follows that they deserve what they get. Thus, it's not the normal profitable operation of capitalism that creates unemployment, poverty and homelessness. It's irrational choices of flawed individuals. This is known as blaming the victim and neoclassical economists are very big on blaming the victim.
4
Maybe it’s time for the “best and the brightest” to eat some humble pie, and acknowledge that they’re not all that.
Unemployment claims are at historic lows. Wage growth is finally here. The Fed’s biggest concern has shifted from propping things up, to cooling things down. Consumer confidence and small business owner confidence are at all time highs. And markets have taken off.
Does it matter that the people who helped us get here aren’t the best and brightest by Mr. Krugman’s standard? Does it matter that they’re a little crass and gauche?
To me, it doesn’t. The tax reform package has been a personal boon to me three times over now - payroll taxes went down in Feb, my employer paid much larger bonuses and gave large salary increases due to the growth that it triggered, and our accountant tells me that next year is going to mean a nice windfall with the new brackets. And I’m hardly alone here.
And while I get the need for a safety net, and fiscal prudence, we can’t cut or tax-transfer our way to higher rates of growth. No business person in their right mind does this. So why should the government? Medicaid is great, but expanding it helped spawn the opioid epidemic. Even Krugmam admits here that these programs are being abused and are holding people back.
In short, times are really, really good if you’re not consumed by anti-Trump animus. So now is the time to help the poor get in the game, and achieve their full potential. That’s hardly a war on the poor.
4
Maybe you can say that in Atlanta - for now. But remember that GOP presidents Reagan and Bush crashed the economy, and we've never recovered. My family had to pay over $142,000 in inheritance taxes, and Jeff Bezos' billionaire heirs won't have to pay a penny, thanks to Trump & Co. I'm living on $30,000 a year because most of my income is eaten up in taxes. Trump will increase those taxes. So what if my paycheck is a little bigger - for now. The whole economy is going to crash because the rich won't pay their fair share of the taxes. Bridges are going to collapse, people are going to die, and the housing market will again go kaput. It will be worse than 2008.
5
Bill M’s response is worth noting because it well encapsulates the type of thinking off large segment of population, and a so startlingly poor one. I could list the many counter arguments here but the points is that the NYT should corral some readers like this an walk than thru facts in a systemic thinking process to see if they are capable of changing their minds away from a mistaken to an accurate understanding. This isn’t about political is or conservative vs democratic. It’s not even about hatred for Trump. It’s about testing whether (a sample) of people can shift their mindsets to embrace reality.
1
'In short, times are really really good if you're not consumed by anti Trump animus.'
That may be true for you but did you ever consider that you might just be one of the lucky ones?
This article discusses the lack of empathy for the poor and it seems that you may also lack such empathy.
I'm pleased it's all working out for you but what about other people?
"[T]here’s good evidence that some of the programs under attack actually do what tax cuts don’t: eventually pay back a significant part of their upfront costs by promoting better economic performance."
Candidates have to convert this wonkish argument into lingo that will resonate with the working poor. They can identify with the suffering of those victimized by changes in the global economy, but They'd better not appear to be professional victims. That will invite more bulls into the china shop with no way to file a valid insurance claim. Those who helped create the present crises of governance have to have a message they can feel as well as understand.
1. In a functioning government, the parties would analyze the data and compromise on solutions with an eye toward strengthening the country as a whole. That is their job. Any candidate for office who does not espouse that ethos, should not be considered.
2. Government is a service business and as such requires modesty. We do not have kings and princes for good reason. Pruitt and Carson should be removed from office.
42
Means tested programs are used by the rw GOP to enflame polarization , increase resentments and get votes. You have to be very poor to qualify for help. Many working people don't qualify, yet have low wages, few if any benefits, and no pensions. ACA leaves out millions, and is the world’s most profitable for insurance and drug companies.
When various groups have to compete for crumbs in a political system set up for inequality, our democracy isn’t fulfilling its basic purpose.
In countries with shared social supports that benefit also the middle class, not just the very poor, there is less polarization politically. Abroad, everyone has affordable health care. Employees have union protections. Vocational training and college tuition is low cost. All families get benefits for children and free pre school.
This can only work with fair and progressive taxes that tax the super rich adequately. Everyone gets some benefits, but the rich pay higher taxes.
US tax rates are distorted to benefit the rich, which cuts public services for the majority, and lays the burden on the middle class. Then the GOP fans the flames of tax resentment.
Our priorities are creating a class stratified society, with little political cohesion----the opposite of the American dream.
The Gini Index of inequality ranks the US lower than many countries.
We know about Trump/GOP. When will PK mention what the Democratic Party might propose? An election is coming up.
25
Sadly, this is also true in blue states. Basically the taxes and cost of living are crippling us. It's feudalism whether the dems or GOP run the show. It's the same circus in which we're tied up and have threatening chairs thrust at us. If you don't pay, you are out on the streets.
The question is always what measures governments should take to mitigate or maybe undue the deleterious effects on society by poverty. Is society improved by the presence of persistent poverty? Is leaving them to their scarce resources better from an economic and moral perspective. While lifting millions from poverty is, indeed, a hard and often unsuccessful task, should we give up the effort? And if we are successful with only 10, 15%, isn't the effort worth making? Finally, what is the alternative? Work? fine, great, now provide it.
15
In an political economy built as an extraction economy, on wealth extracted by producing vast waste, the carnage on people mirrors the impact on the environment. Mountaintop mining destroyed entire ecosystems. Offshore drilling nearly took out the Gulf and has lasting effects in LA. Globally, fish stocks are being depleted. Blood diamonds are another example. Diseases and viruses affect millions of food products. Pig farms and coal generating power produce untenable waste. Waste is the byproduct of modern wealth.
The impact of this structure especially hits the poor; their statistics scattered within a mature economy, as human slurry. The Times featured a homeless wedding recently; blame competed with love in the comments. The problem is not in character, however; left to their devices the homeless and the poor create their own societies little different than those in the middle class--except for the absence of material things and protections.
The issues of the poor are structural, as Paul describes. How infrastructure acts as a barrier to their integration; how services are reserves for wealth when policy makers need to find a few billion by cutting healthcare funding, raising rents to pay for tax breaks.
Structurally, the poor have few advocates; their voices do not sit at the roundtables, aren't quoted on business shows. Their cohesion has weakened.
They are a source of wealth: think Detroit. Once thriving, with rows of family homes and great buildings, it is a shell!
15
This contempt for the poor by some of the rich goes back to 18th and 19th century in England and Scotland and Ireland when the rich landlords stole from the poor peasants by enclosing Common areas in England, clearing peasants off the land in Scotland in favor of sheep and the government denying food aid to the starving Irish peasants when the potato crop failed year after year resulting in the deaths of one million Irish by starvation.
Some rich have nothing but contempt for the poor and forget that there but for the grace of God go I.
87
The English would feed the Irish, but only soup, and only if they renounced Catholicism.
To this day, it is a big insult to a Protestant with an Irish name is to ask them if they took the soup.
7
"The interesting question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are..." This ex parte nonsense is not convincing. It fails the truth test. It passes the fiction test.
4
Then why are they cutting programs for the poor when poverty is increasing? Never has the poor been able to get out of poverty on their own. It takes work and programs to help them.
The republicans have stated many times that the poor deserve to be hurt and now they are proving they are willing to do that.
22
"It takes work and programs to help them."
Unfortunately too many of the programs become an end in themselves where people become so comfortable on them that they forget the work part. Not only the recipients but also those who administer them.
Foreigners are making beds and cleaning hotels and businesses, planting and picking produce because program recipients can do as well financially with less effort. Don't say it isn't so, I've seen it in my own family.
There are some who have never worked and so have never developed a work ethic which includes pride in a job well done, any job. How many middle class people started out washing dishes and other menial jobs while planning and working for a higher goal? Far fewer than those who sabotage their lives with underage births and dropping out of school or getting a jail record.
The problem with the programs is too many went from being a hand up to a hand out and people on both sides of the counter are happy with that situation. The goal should be to get people off the programs not expand the array of services and make the recipients more comfortable with them.
". . . it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
People who have bought into the Trump propaganda will drink the cool-aid.
17
I would argue that the Kool-Aid drinkers are those who refuse to acknowledge the success Trump has experienced. Unemployment at historic lows with a strong focus on job creation. When republican policies succeed, the progressives will always find a victim to make their case otherwise.
Oh, and the rich are convenient scapegoats -- too convenient, in my view -- when anger at republican success needs an outlet.
The answer to the question is no, the rubes will not notice.
10
If they do notice, they'll blame it on Hillary and Obama.
There is great news for Trump in this op ed. You see, when Trump ran it was the poor white vote that served as his adoring base. The people willing to believe that a man who made his money in large part by using bankruptcy laws and stiffing working people (see the 3500lawsuits filed against his companies) will simply believe anything. So, when they are told that stories like this are fake news they will happily boo reporters and cheer their hero.
Just because a few thousand gullible union teachers in red states are starting to wake up and realize that the Republican Party is doing to them exactly what it promised does not mean that all hope is lost for Trump. The base still believes and they will continue to vote against their own self interest just so they can feel good chanting, “build the wall”and “lock her up”.
15
I don't have a degree in psychology but I have lived long enough to know that people project onto others those things that they hate in themselves.
So as far as I can tell, the grifters, cheaters, and mooches of this administration are desperately and despicably attempting to replace their own self-loathing with hatred of an easy--and pretty much defenseless- target.
26
This Op-Ed dovetails with Charles Blow's "The White Rebellion" article of April 26, 2018. And it's something I've thinking through for months. The election of Trump, the appointment of his type of people to his cabinet, and the support of mainly white voters all feel like resentment and sense of aggrievement by white, wealthy, entitled men--the same people who have always had most of the power in this country. They are acting out of cruelty to show everyone that they can behave as they want and that there is nothing the rest of us can do about it (they are right, we're utterly powerless). Corruption, misogyny, polluting the air and waterways, ignoring the need for action on climate change, use of our military and economy power to enhance their own wealth, complete disregard for people of color and the poor--they can get away with all these things.
13
We are not “utterly powerless.” Vote for Democrats in November. They won’t be perfect, but they will make a difference.
1
They only "get away with all these things" as long as the rest of us are silent and not moving. When we rise up in the kind of numbers that drove people into the streets in this country in other times or in other countries for other reasons, when they are forced to see and hear what we think of them and how desperately we want them OUT of OUR offices and institutions and beloved places of governance and symbol, when they know they will NOT "get away with" poisoning our waters, dismantling our institutions, endangering our nation, betraying our country, they will be forced to go away - some of them to prison! We must rise up as a nation and put an end to this outright robbery and treason!
But only if we let them.
There was a time when Paul Krugman heaped scorn on the research put out by so-called "think tanks" that made no secret of their conservative and/or libertarian leanings. Here is Krugman in an unusually benign mood: "Since the policy recommendations that come out of Heritage, or the Cato Institute, or even the American Enterprise Institute are so predictable, what purpose do these organizations serve? Good question."
So you'll understand my surprise when I checked out the links he provides to support his claims about SNAP. Guess what? The first source was the Hamilton Project. Here is what Wikipedia says: "The Hamilton Project is an economic research group and think tank within the Brookings Institution. It was originally launched in 2006 ... by former Clinton administration economists. It went dormant after Barack Obama assumed office in 2009, because many of its members left to work for the White House, but in 2010, it was relaunched with Michael Greenstone as the new director."
The second link was to the "Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ... an American think tank that analyzes the impact of federal and state government budget policies from a progressive perspective.... CBPP was founded in 1981 ... to provide an alternative perspective on the social policy initiatives of the Ronald Reagan administration."
That's right. Krugman is now outsourcing his research to progressive think tanks. That is lazy and unprofessional. It is also hypocritical.
3
Or maybe truth just has a liberal bias?
1
There is nothing hypocritical about taking sides in an ideological war.
Krugman denounced conservative think tanks for their policies.
Conservative think tanks are pushing out nonsense.
The Trump/GOP war on the poor "will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
They may notice. But they won't care.
This is why Trump "loves the purely educated."
So long as Trump bashes black NFL players, and the BLM movement, so long as he calls for Muslim bans and a border wall with Mexico, Trump's white working class voters will cheer him on with gusto -- even as they lose their healthcare, jobs and a better education of their children.
Yes, their fear and loathing is that deep.
12
"Seriously, a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel no empathy for the poor."
If the lack of empathy exhibited by the current specimens inhabiting the GOP Zoo is even remotely surprising to any so-called human being who cares, please raise your hands.
<crickets>
We (liberals/democrats/left wingers/progressives/etc) have known this for decades. Many of us have spoken up about this. Some of them very loudly and consistently. But it hasn't worked yet; change is elusive.
The only cure for the present is to work hard for a better future. Register. Vote. Contribute.
13
The vast distortions of representative apportionment make the US a complete travesty of democracy. Voting is a total waste of time for a majority of Americans.
1
I've been voting democrat since the late 80s, and all they do is tax me, destroy my neighborhood, lie to me, make false promises, and treat the white people with kid gloves while running a railroad through a minority neighborhood for the benefit of white people. I'm finished with both parties. I'm an atheist, but preferred to vote for a 3rd party pastor then to toss my lot in with Phil Goldman Sachs Raise Your Taxes to Support the Rich Murphy.
While enumerating the flaws in a particular school of thought, Dr. Krugman very cunningly once again places the spotlight on Trump. The logic seems to be (correct me if I'm wrong), "Trump is evil. Trump thinks this way. Therefore, if you think this way you are evil." That is a broken syllogism, and any first semester logic student would not only immediately spot the error, but gleefully point out the form and style of that error.
The real, actual, substantial problem is that the federal government has so vastly exceeded its charter that the potential points and modes of failure are incalculable. We are on a ship of state that is 1) on fire, 2) leaking water in and oil out everywhere, 3) losing stability, 4) experiencing an outbreak of e.coli, 4) in mutiny, and 5) without a captain.
And Dr. Krugman's solutions seems to be, "Be compassionate." How about an honest conversation about the basic problem? When a state solution fails, it hurts the state. When a federal solution fails, it brings the nation to its knees. Basic Tenth Amendment stuff.
3
The states of the US are a circular firing squad undercutting each other. There is no national popular election in this fractured nation, and no real national perspective about anything besides waging wars.
Maybe we should stop throwing our money to the rich which is causing the problems you cite.
1
It is the last resort of progressives. Call the right "mean" and "cruel". They're like code words -- dare we call them dog whistles -- to the left.
In effect, they've lost the argument and are now appealing to base emotions and fears.
1
I energetically dislike all involved in 45's maladministration; they seem like a who's who of selfish, greedy, calloused, unqualified, and inefficient public servants.
My political credentials thus established, let me quibble with Dr. K's verbal bait-and-switch:
"They just want to be cruel," says our Nobel Laureate. Which he dilutes a few sentences later: "Seriously, a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel no empathy for the poor." Er, aren't cruelty and apathy in two different categories? Stalin was cruel; the Repo Man was apathetic.
Words matter: I'd rather be in Hunan than inhuman; and I'd rather be considered as one who smells than as one who stinks (thanks, Dr. Johnson).
1
Lack of empathy is more than just apathy or indifference. It is the enabler of cruelty.
When the low-income whites are eventually affected, they'll blame Obama for their predicament. After all, he wanted to take their guns and bibles from them. However, they see absolutely nothing wrong with Trump.
9
US farmers are starting to see that his tariff is hurting them. I just don't understand how they can vote GOP after Reagan and Bush. But the high cost of living in Blue states has hurt the liberal cause too. There is no party for poor, working and middle class people. In the US, politics is just a game for the rich. PS: Trump lost the majority vote and was appointed by the electoral college.
1
Trump's war is on all of us, whether we are rich or poor or voted for him or not. A vote for Tump was a vote against our country and ourselves.
13
Trump has nothing but contempt for everyone else.
Will they notice? No.
The most bewildering aspect of Trump's agenda and in essence the Republican agenda for decades is its devastation is aimed at the people who elected him and them. One might say that Reagan created this monster and Republicans and now Trump are just trying to feed it.
5
Is there any greater welfare program then the Military Industrial Complex? Is there any greater incentive to cheat the tax man then off shore tax havens and the other tax avoidance loopholes that Congress writes into our laws at the behest of special interests? Is there anything more hypocritical then a bunch of people with the best healthcare in America, provided by the government, trying to demean and degrade the healthcare of poor people because it is provided by the government? I guess, when you're a bully, it's best to make sure the target of your scorn, contempt and harm remains as weak as possible.
585
You nailed it. It's really the Bully Club, who will take from anyone they can, and win any situation, by bringing asynchronous power to bear. When no Congressman, CEO, or world leader wants to be savaged by Trump for any perceived slight (as in not doing what Trump wants), what chance does anyone really have?
28
At least they work for it. Dare we ask others receiving such "welfare" to work for it?
AACNY - Can we agree then on the following:
In 1797 Tom Paine proposed a job guarantee program. The federal gov would become the employer of last resort. It would guarantee a decent job or paid training for such a job to everyone able to work.
There are plenty of things that need to be done--fixing roads & bridges, education, research etc. BTW there are plenty of support jobs in education and research that do not require a degree. As with unemployment benefits today, you could require each worker to show that he had applied for a comparable private sector job periodically.
How would we pay for it?
A) It would to a certain extent pay for itself.
1. When people are working, producing, & spending, they pay more taxes than when they are out of work. The money they spend provides jobs for others who also spend & pay taxes.
2. We could reduce much of what we currently spend on welfare.
3. It would raise private sector wages and thus taxes.
B) We could raise income tax rates on the Rich as we did during the Great Prosperity of 1946 - 1973. This would not only raise revenue, it would reduce inequality and financial speculation, both of which are bad for the economy.
C) We could sell Treasury bonds both to the public locking in low interest and to the FED which returns the interest.Since we would be producing more, there would be little inflation.
See http://www.levyinstitute.org/topics/job-guarantee
24
The work of Daniel Kahneman (another Nobel Prize winner in economics) definitively shows in his work that wealth is almost entirely a function of luck. If this is true (and there is a lot of evidence that it is), then there is certainly a moral obligation for the rich to help the poor in more than a trivial way.
25
Add in the war on the elderly with gross incomes of under 26 K a year.
16
Empathy is certainly wanting, but the love of punishment (of others, of course) trumps all other considerations for the modern-day "conservative".
You have to marvel, in the case of Trump, why someone born to every advantage and comfort, who's never done a real day's work in his coddled life and who's received public subsidies for all of his long regrettable excuse of a career, would be so full hate and resentment.
And yet, he and his associates are. In another age, they'd be slave traders, and love every minute of it.
25
Every day I grow angrier and angrier.
I had assumed that when my “flower power” generation came to power, that we would do everything we could to improve the lives of our citizens, never blunder into needless military actions and preserve our planet...yet somehow we end up with people like Trump, Pruitt, Carson et al—men who proudly declare that they never smoked pot—perhaps if someone had “turned them on in the 60’s, the world would be a better place.
10
Cannabis prohibition was key to the triumph of the worst elements of the baby boom generation. It cut people of more liberal dispositions out of careers in government, industry, and academia.
Those affected Trump supporters/voters will notice. They will also rationalize that it's good for the country and them as it is all tribal. Remember Jim Jones, his followers, and the Kool-Aid?
5
When Congress decreed the US "under God", it blew the brains clear out of the US.
1
Money is only for HIM. Others do not need money. Only HE.
This pathological pattern is nothing new. Remember king Louis XIV. squeezing out the poor of France. Even the craze that everything has to be gold plated is the same.
11
I'm not sure I agree with you. You know the old saying, if someone says, "it's not the money, it's the principle," its the money.
1
" in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice? "
No.
2
thank you. It is the poor who have been the target all along. It is venal. It is endemic yielding to temptation in the capture of power dynamics echoing calvinist ideals, catholic guilt, denial, and, when all else fails, fear. Nobody wants to give up power. While our republican brethren find themselves trapped in a snare, the poor fall into a pit.
Racism is bigly a strategy to isolate and turn the poor against each other. The same guiding principle extends to all strangers and people of difference, including the poor. It's time for a new influx of immigration to the United States to mix it up some. We fear our own shadows.
5
The last time we had such a war on the poor was when the previous administration decided to ignore to the opioid epidemic in order to please its base.
Since the base that you talk about are white males who voted for Trump and not Obama, are the ones suffering. Yet when offered ways to do better, their tea party refused to work with Obama at all.
Maybe instead of fighting to make him a one term president, they should have worked to help their base. They weren't ignored by Obama, they were ignored by their own party who decided doing anything that was good was a victory for Obama. And not considering that it would be a victory for themselves also.
1
Trump is not religious, and I doubt he has much knowledge of what is in the bible. It is likely he is unaware of Christ's compassion for the less fortunate. But what I don't get is the evangelical Christians. They should be well aware of what is in the bible, yet they lack compassion for the poor.
9
Trump caught religion from the Evangelists who consider his unlikely victory an example of divine intervention, not evidence of the resurgent cancer of slavery in this country rooted in it. Now he invokes God frequently.
The biggest welfare check of all, ZIRP went to the Banksters and Hucksters on Wall St. It made some rich and millions of others, poor.
Class struggles have been around for a very long time.
9
Yes, the great Bank Bailout after 2008 was paid for by depositors, according to the directives of the bank-run Federal Reserve Bank.
2
Ben Carson seems to believe that only those of inferior character are poor. Yes, he worked really hard to get to where he is. But he doesn't realize how lucky he is. He shares that trait with an unfortunately large number of his fellow citizens. I dream about the day when this supposedly Christian nation begins to treat the least among us the way Jesus did.
8
I called both my senators and my congressman today after hearing the latest pearls of wisdom from HUD. I called to tell them that I felt the Trump administration had reached a new low - if that is possible.
And Trump and his minions do the cruel things they do because they can. And they can because we let them.
It is really time for those of us who hate what is happeneing in the name of America to vote these people out of office and show them that we are still a country that cares.
My religion tells me to care for the widow, the orphan, the poor and the needy and the stranger. For we were strangers and were cared for.
We have an obligation simply as human beings, all created in God's image, to treat other human beings with care and with dignity.
The Trump administration cares only for those with money, acting as if money makes you a worthwhile human being. They are a perfect example of the fact that that is so not true.
8
America is failing, and these politicians are angry and fearful. Everyone should be able to work, but for some peculiar reason they can’t, or won’t.
The poor, the old, the disabled, are the new detritus; these laws are going to punish them for just being visible.
4
Economic policy dictates that there must be unemployed people. Businesses demand a certain unemployment level. This policy was enacted under nixon and kept in place since then.
It is designed to keep wages down for most of us and has worked well, which is why wages are stagnant for most of the population.
The US has always sustained surplus labor with false promises to immigrants to hold down wages.
Yes many poor people are affected by the cruel policies issued by the trump administration and his sycophants. The problem is that such policies not only affect poor people but also are increasing poverty in the US. If you look around in most cities, there is a worrisome increase of street beggars, homeless people, and street vendors trying to sell you anything; they are men, women, and children, and all these is happening in plain sight for every body to see. This is not different of what you see in the streets of many developing countries. Many decades ago this level of poverty in the US was something unthinkable. Now most US cities are looking like third world cities with many poor people on the street trying to survive. The problem is that this situation is precisely what increases crime. People need basic things like food to survive left alone a place to leave. The funny thing is that ‘academicians’ are studying poverty to try to understand the causes that make people to become poor. You do not need to be a rocket scientist to clearly deduce that the policies of the trump administration and the GOP are the actual cause of poverty in the US. We need to fix this soon. Can’t wait to see the WH occupants to leave in disgrace.
11
Race is a big part of the GOP's continuing success in cutting the nation's social safety net. But it's not the whole story.
Extremely wealthy people have always felt set upon by and divorced from the poor. Feelings of superiority and privilege are endemic to the class. It's as if the very wealthy, regardless of whether their wealth is earned or inherited, feel that those with little or nothing are not quite human. They dehumanize the non-wealthy as a class and that dehumanization makes it much easier for the wealthy to feel morally comfortable – indeed justified - grinding the non-wealthy into the dust. Any call by society on the resources of the wealthy to help anyone else is looked upon by them as unfair, almost as if they’re being asked to subsidize the failures and sloth of a lesser breed of human. Any aid extracted by the state is wasted. Poor people are poor because of their own lack of ability, or luck, or God’s blessing, or something, so what’s the point of helping them? England’s poor laws from the 19’th century, Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform, and now Trump and the GOP’s full court press to gut any aid to the poor before the 116’th Congress are basically legal codifications of these feelings.
I’m not claiming that all rich people feel this way, but I do think that all rich people who support Republicans do. Outside of race, how else can you explain their callousness and turpitude?
11
Children just aren't an economic asset to parents anymore.
I suppose defeating the poor is easier than creating better job opportunities for them?
6
The Republicans have fostered this war on the poor since the
Nixon administration when he directed his two henchmen, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Richard Cheney to all but dismantle the Office of Economic Opportunity. They gutted Lyndon Johnson’s War On Poverty.opening the door for Ronald Reagan’s specious attacks on Cadillac driving welfare queens.
In other words, castigating and punishing the poor is part and parcel of the Republican mindset. Trump and his cronies are the latest, but certainly not the first, to kick the downtrodden.
13
Maybe it's not so much a war on the poor as it is a systematic way for nurturing the supply of working poor. Our service economy need tens of millions of workers ready, willing, and able to work at near poverty wages, with little or no benefits.
Mr Trump, a prince of the hospitality industry, knows all to well that the industry could not survive without an ample supply of working poor. Per the the Bureau Of Labor Statistics, the industry employs about 14 million non-supervisory workers with an average hourly wage of about $13.60, and an average 25 hours work week.
Keeping the poor devoid of entitlements, hope, and union membership is good conservative way to shepherd that workforce. Trump's abundant capacity for cruelty and utter lack of empathy , except for those he sees in his very small hand held mirror, does make the task easier,
Eventually AI and automation will also nourish that workforce.
11
"Is it about saving money? Conservatives do complain about the cost of safety net programs, but it’s hard to take those complaints seriously coming from people who just voted to explode the budget deficit with huge tax cuts."
Have to disagree here. The tax cuts were just part one of the one-two punch. The second part is going to be the "discovery" of the big deficit and a demand to cut programs to "save" them.
Long term the goal is to reduce taxes on the wealthy, and everything makes sense when viewed thru that lens.
18
Subjugation requires subjects who are unwilling or unable or both. The more people have to focus on survival, the less they are able to consider more abstract problems. Those are the "best people."
3
Absolutely. Still, "keeping our eye on the ball" is a character defect which Scott Pruitt viciously attacked today in the Congress of the United States as the motive for quibbling about his repugnant mismanagement of personnel and of himself, in his office. Quite naturally, they blame the informed for anything we know about: today their whores, tomorrow their crimes against humanity, the earth, the unborn and the unprotected, everywhere. This, it must be reiterated, is Republicanism now. Call it by that name, its own.
13
The present population growth spurt looks like a mass effort to exhaust the whole planet right now.
It’s basic social Darwinism: if you’re poor, you deserve to be poor, because you didn’t make an effort to work your way out of poverty. If we help you, it merely encourages you to persist in your slothful ways; so it’s actually hurting you to feed you when you are starving. Your hunger is good, because it will motivate you to become a virtuous and productive worker, piling up surplus value for your capitalist overlords.
All of which means that the powerful don’t have to pay any attention to the poor, deserving or otherwise, because the poor are responsible for their own condition. And if they can’t quite manage to do any better, to get basic food and shelter? To borrow a quotation, “Then let them die, and decrease the surplus population.”
I don’t know how many Victorians bought this kind of drivel. I would have liked to believe that we had progressed a little since then.
But maybe not.
18
It's not good to keep people hungry and ignorant, but a little bit of stigma goes a long way toward encouraging productive behaviors. At least it used to.
I grew up in a "proud but poor" family in a small Northern California town. When we went on "commodities" (the equivalent of food stamps in those days) and got rent assistance, my brothers and I lived with that, and each of us found within ourselves the resolve to never, ever put ourselves or our families in that position.
Take help when you must, offer help when you can, but avoid both whenever possible. And do all within your power, on both sides, to make that the new reality.
1
I hope I'm wrong, but it seems as if FDR's New Deal up through the Great Society of LBJ, may be just an abnormal blip of history as we re calibrate back to the norms that brought us the Charles Dickens stories and the Little Match Girl.
Remember, it always used to be the poor and powerless who paid taxes to support the lavish lifestyles of hereditary aristocrats.
Unfortunately, the bait and switch tactics, outright lies and propaganda are effective; especially when they are accompanied by the real and present danger of job loss from automation and monopoly.
8
Poor uneducated white people in rural areas look down their noses at people who use these programs. (Of course, they imagine that it is mostly people of color who use "welfare".) It's important to feel superior to at least somebody, even if that occasionally means feeling better than other white people. This is in spite of the fact that due to the opioid crisis, their worlds are already falling apart. Shocking.
6
I was waiting, while reading the article, to ask a question until the end of the column when Dr. Krugman said: "it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
The question I was trying to ask are these the same poor who voted for the liar-in-chief? If so, I have not much sympathy for them. As they said, election has consequences. Yes, I am in a mean spirited, revenging, mood for what they put the country through. Undoubtedly, some of these poor whites did not vote for him but as they say in any war, there are always "collateral damages". Those who voted for him should notice but I am afraid they are so blinded by their racial resentment of the "others" to notice.
As one woman who needed the ACA said in an interview, she likes and needs the ACA but hates the name Obamacare. What, something I need is named after a black man?
10
The real villain in the war on the poor is budget director Mick Mulvaney. He turned off his deficit hawkishness when it came to huge tax cuts for the rich and corporations. But after the tax cuts were passed, he returned to his deficit hawkishness, blaming safety nets for driving up the deficit. It's no surprise he's also the one gutting the consumer financial protections.
When it comes to cruelty to the poor, Mick Mulvaney's name should be in bright flashing lights. You have to give him the credit for it.
11
In all war zones, people flee. Trump's vicious war on the poor of Puerto Rico, who now number over a million, means flight to purple states where they will not forget.
8
Anony
Many of the areas in Puerto Rico were difficult to reach
The president was not waging a "vicious war."
He cut off help when they still were out of power on the island, had diseases, and many were not getting drinking water.
And he insulted anyone who begged for help to improve the situation. Yes, he is waging a vicious war on the poor.
Not 6 month's worth of difficult. Yes, he's waging a "vicious war".
Trump is like a caricature of the stereotypical son of a rich man--got his start through inherited wealth but thinks he is self made, is intellectually limited, feels entitled, is unsympathetic and unempathetic, and behaves boorishly and selfishly.
Nonetheless, he engenders a certain masochistic slavishness in certain people, like Michael Cohen and Kellyann Conway, who willingly grovel and humiliate themselves to try to please him. And yet only a fool would not know, based on his history, that he demands loyalty but offers none in return. He will toss them to the curb when they are no longer useful to him.
Pretty simple calculation for Trump. Once you can't do things for me, I've no use for you. Look at the trash heap of relationships that makes up his whole life up until now--ex-wives, ex-paramours, ex-lenders, ex-business partners, ex-lawyers, ex-advisors, thousands of lawsuits, multiple bankruptcies and countless broken business deals.
In this context, his war on the poor is completely understandable. To him, poor people are just losers who offer him nothing he wants--no money, no connections, no loyalty, no flattery. Why would he want to help them? There is nothing in it for him.
89
Jack, well-spoken. Spot on. Altho descriptive of other presidents, GWB and Clinton come to mind, the utter disdain for the working class and the IMAGE of it all, is new imo.
4
Neither Clinton despised the working class. Both came from the working class.
jack sonville
Your post is mostly untrue.
Of the approximately 36,000 gun deaths per year in the U.S., about 25,000 are suicides. Maybe Trump is just trying to make life so difficult for people at the bottom end of the spectrum that he hopes to increase that suicide number to 50,000. There are many Americans who don't have a problem with that.
5
"Will they [Trump and his people] notice?" They will if they get voted out of office. There is no other message that will ever get through and even if that one does get through, it will surely be obtusely misinterpreted in a torrent of political self-pity.
Just as surely it will never change the mindset of people who have cruelty wired into their nervous systems and coursing through their cardiovascular systems. There's no redemption from the meanness of spirit that ultimately afflicts us all, after all is said and done.
10
There is, and for many years has been, a lot of money to be made from poor people. You can charge them more for just about everything, get judgements and garnishments, and have a never ending supply of customers. That supply is guarantied through poor housing, poor healthcare, poor nutrition, low functioning schools, and artificially low minimum wage. The added bonus is that they are so broken, they don't know they have any collective power and therefore don't vote. So there actually is a reason for all this cruelty, it is indeed intentional and directly benefits the wealthy ruling class.
26
Why this animus toward the poor among Trump and his appointees? Simply, it reflects the animus felt by many of Trump’s supporters.
To wit: "We work hard to make ends meet while 'those people,' who are able-bodied, freeload on Democratic programs."
A far more nuanced and persuasive explanation of this animus toward the poor can be found at:
• "Who Turned My Blue State Red?," Alec MacGillis, NYTimes, November 20, 2015 http://tinyurl.com/n7gbnye
13
Trump ran on a Birther Liar political platform that celebrated white male supremacy, guns and cultured stupidity....and he and his Whites R Us party are sticking to the platform, even if it starves them to political death.
Trump and the GOP voter base was - and are - apparently unaware that the vast majority of welfare beneficiaries are not black.
In 2017, Trump met with the Congressional Black Caucus. During the meeting, someone mentioned to Trump that welfare reform would be detrimental to her constituents— adding, “Not all of whom are black"
The president was incredulous. “Really? Then what are they?”
Whites are the biggest beneficiaries when it comes to government safety-net programs like the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also known as welfare.
For SNAP - or food stamps - here are the numbers:
40% of SNAP recipients are white.
26% are black, 10% are Hispanic, 2% are Asian and 1% are Native American, according to the Department of Agriculture.
The percent of all Medicaid recipients in each state who are white is:
Idaho 98%
West Virginia 93%
New Hampshire 89%
Utah 88%
Maine 79%
Kentucky 77%
Wyoming 75%
Montana 74%
Vermont 71%
Ohio 67%
Indiana 66%
Missouri 65%
North Dakota 63%
Oregon 63%
Kansas 60%
Tennessee 60%
Minnesota 58%
Michigan 57%
Nebraska 57%
Arkansas 56%
Pennsylvania 56%
Wisconsin 56%
South Dakota 55%
Oklahoma 54%
But as long as Trump's GOP and voter base thinks they're chasing black welfare queens, they're as happy as a pig in fecal matter.
738
And you know what's really sad about that Socrates? The ones they are truly hurting are themselves and their futures. Countries that divide themselves the way we are tend to wind up in worse shape and with more problems rather than fewer. They also tend to fall apart. But I guess none of that matters to these folks because white is right and Trump is in office and he said that he was going to Make America Great Again! He just didn't say that the greatness would be only for him and those like him.
125
What makes it possible to attract voters to Republican candidates who consistently exploit them relies on their fear, ignorance, hatred, and identity. Why Democrats fail to recognize these characteristics lies in hubris, ignorance of voter priorities, and greed.
24
I see your numbers. If 40% are white, 26% black, etc., what are the other 21%? Because your numbers don't add up. I'd certainly like to agree with you, but you're also missing a lot of States in your breakdown, big states with large populations.
I'm curious as to why, because, again, I'm prone to believe your thesis, but troubled by what it left out.
11
Krugman's idea of compassion - you are born to single mother who relies on public assistance, and you and your children live the rest of their lives on public assistance. Same policy that LBJ enacted in 1965.
Real compassion is trying to instill a work ethic, with the hope that people will need minimal or no public assistance.
So who is really leading the war on the poor?
2
Instilling a work ethic that is funded by the government's tax "reform" and distributed as dividends to stockholders certainly accomplishes that.
And aren't tax reductions largely distributed to corporations awash in money public assistance, i.e., money from all taxpayers assisting a favored segment of the public?
Just one final thought, will all those giant world-wide corporations that go for years paying no federal income taxes actually be qualified for a negative tax that they use to claim money from the IRS while not paying anything?
14
It's hard to let this opinion go unchallenged. A good fraction of the poor are children. Another fraction are people with handicaps and some who are old. Repubs want to cut medicaid which mostly pays for kids, Repubs want and have cut education spending in states they control, even though educational achievement is a proven path to higher incomes. There is no principle at play here in denying help to the poor. It's all about the money.
15
@Erik
Most direct welfare benefits max out after 5 years over a lifetime. Maybe Westchester is more generous. The Bay Area is among the more generous of welfare programs: San Francisco pays $395.00 per month in general assistance cash aid, Alameda County pays $336.00, Contra Costa County pays $167.00, and San Mateo County, adjacent to Silicon Valley, pays $58.00.
I doubt if anyone, let alone a single mother with a child, enjoys a comfortable lifetime on public assistance.
11
Trump and the Republicans leading Congress are waging war on the poor. But it's worse than that. It's really a war on the middle class, anyone who isn't in one of the top income brackets. The housing voucher and food stamp changes hit the poor. Now add: the attack on public education by Betsy Devos; the attack on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by Mick Mulvaney; the loosening of financial regulations under Dodd-Frank; the $1.5T tax cut that mostly for corporations and wealthy people. These place everyone outside the top 10-20% at a disadvantage.
Clearly these policies benefit the wealthy donors, not we average citizens.
320
Ken L nails it. The real goal of Republican policy is to redistribute money from the Middle Class to the super wealthy. As the poor have little money to take, the poor are merely useful to demonize and blame for the lose caused the Middle Class by Republican policy.
But the Middle Class is not blameless. It is their own hatred, mostly hatred of minorities, that allows for this bait and switch. In fact I do not think it is really a bait and switch. Rather, many in the Middle Class are more than willing to pay the Republican price for their hate.
1
As a retired minister who served in rural and semi-rural areas I encountered some social parasites, people who could and should have worked but didn't. These people would typically show up during the first month of a new minister's arrival in the community, and hang on as long as the donations flowed.
For every social parasite, however, I encountered roughly ten people who had simply received a bad break: the young father paying on a mortgage who while cleaning the gutters fell from a ladder and broke his back; the homemaker involved in an auto accident with a driver who had inadequate insurance; the young person diagnosed with MS, etc., etc.
Are we going to make such people work to receive Medicaid, which is already extremely difficult to obtain for anyone who is not a child or elderly?
Social Security disability is usually difficult to obtain, but are we then going to expect someone who is disabled to work for benefits?
Even with the recent explosion of the homeless begging on our streets (due in large part to the opioid epidemic and insufficient veteran care) we have been blessed not to see the elderly and disabled having to beg. I believe we are now moving inexorably toward a society in which the elderly and disabled will be on our street corners with their hands out, as is the case in many Third World countries, because we are determined to limit the "entitlements" toward which people have contributed their entire working lives.
845
Your ideas are compelling. Please add to your list of bad breaks those who have lost their employment to job dislocation or technological disruption.
72
Insufficient veteran care, for the most part. Oh, and about not seeing disabled people begging? There are two regulars on my way to work, so...
15
Sure there is a war on the poor, but it is a war where opportunity and a job eliminates most of the poor. Sorry if that means they won't vote for Dems or be dependent on the government, that is the plan.
1
actually, most poor people work.
7
Can you expand on this? I don't get the point you're trying to make. Or it makes no sense to begin with.
3
Most poor people work, not just one job, but two and the wages they earn are still not a living wage. People are dependent on food and housing and without the basic needs don't do well at all.
It is not to make people dependent, but to help people who are struggling because wages are so low in the US that they can't make a living.
3
Universal basic income is going to be a requirement to keep people from starving and an enormous increase in crime. When my son got sick, I went through considerable retirement savings, then sold my house and went through that. With the help of my older son, I was able to return to work a few years later and made ends meet with the help of an old friend. Now, that same friend has generously provided a great college education for my two sons while I take care of my younger one and work part-time. Both are A students at two of the best universities in the world. If it were not for the fact that I had built savings and I had a loving friend, we would have been homeless and my kids would not be able to acquire a first-class education. Help the poor--the result will be economic benefits to the country. Also, ask the poor to help themselves as much as they are able. For Christians, Christ said that in troubling times, he will be yoked with you like two oxen pulling a cart. We can use that model to help those who need it, taking more of the weight when necessary and always moving forward together. Then, the field gets plowed.
16
Christ never said anything of the sort. Just ask Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell.
1
It’s interesting how an argument can limn the most detailed assumptions about a person’s worldview.
If you believe that poverty is an unnatural state for human beings imposed by an uncaring power bent on keeping people down by denying them a natural “right”, which is a basic sufficiency gifted with no expectations of effort on the part of the beneficiaries, then it’s quite natural to view anyone who doesn’t dedicate his life to protecting and extending that “right” as waging a “war on the poor”.
Conversely, when you regard man’s natural state to BE poverty as starting-point from which an individual might emerge through his own efforts, focusing instead on helping an economy to generate well-paying jobs that SUPPORT the poor’s emergence from poverty under their own steam, and on providing tools that qualify them for the well-paying jobs, then Paul’s view of Trump is seen as the ideological polemic that it really is. Those who hold such a view opposed to Paul’s don’t believe that we create a strong, strategically viable society by giving overmuch to ANYONE.
Now, nothing is purely black or white. We do a lot but not enough to provide those tools – especially as regards education -- and, unlike the most extreme conservatives, I don’t believe that we can afford to do away with a basic social safety net. But it does irk me when I read an argument with such transparent assumptions that are offered so blatantly as revealed knowledge when half the country regards them as invalid.
4
The Pruitt controversy will play out as it will – he does seem to be an entitled git who hasn’t first bothered to earn the money required to keep him in the style in which he insists he be kept. But his idiosyncrasies and those of others, such as Mnuchin and his wife, are hardly the stuff by which a worldview held by many millions should be judged – those millions don’t regard such extravagances as justified, either.
As regards Ben Carson’s policy, obviously Trump’s, as well, to increase rents in subsidized housing, this goes a fair way to defining the difference between Paul’s unchained liberalism and conservative thought. Our government is not in the business of providing a free sufficiency to our people: our people must EARN their sufficiency and by doing so claim their American self-respect; and pass on such values to their children. It’s by THAT conviction, and the guts to enforce it, that we build a strong and viable society.
Now, frankly, I see Carson’s policy as an opening shot, much like Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs that had Paul’s hair afire for so long. In the end, we’ve granted exemptions to our trading partners and those tariffs, except with China, turned out to be brinkmanship to leverage more balanced bilateral trade agreements. In the dickering, those rent-hikes may well be negotiable depending on circumstances, but they send a TANSTAAFL message (There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch). One hopes that many will hear the message.
3
Richard, you really should learn to quit at 1500 characters or less, so you won't dig a deeper hole for yourself. Your reply to yourself either misses Dr. K's point or willfully ignores it. The personal foibles and misdeeds of trump's appointees may be important but they shouldn't obscure news about the damage their destructive policies are doing to their departments and agencies.
Only in bizarro world does the person in charge appoint people with a mission to act like foxes with designs on the henhouses they are supposed to guard. The environment? Education? Public lands? Health? Diplomacy........? Gut all of them. One wonders if trump is an evil genius who appoints people with obvious character flaws that he knows will dominate coverage and obscure the real damage being done out of public view.
There's a good reason why, as the heading to a Times editorial put it, "Trump’s ‘Best People’ Are the Worst". The “best people" have too much sense, integrity and interest in the General Welfare of this nation to even think of joining this joke of an "administration". The one exception was fired because he actually wanted to defend and improve the VA.
17
Richard, your argument is as much a polemic as Prof Krugman's is, and I would argue more so. Yours is completely divorced from the reality of how it is that people either become poor, start out poor, or are kept poor. There are policies, deliberately written by politicians and special interests, that work to keep certain people poor. There are particular qualities that are exploited to prevent certain people from accessing the levers of success. There is a cycle of poverty that once in it, it is very hard to emerge from no matter how hard one may strive. Your view of your fellow man is even more impoverished - or self-justifying.
12
Oxford University predicts up to 47% of all white and blue collar jobs will be lost to AI, robotics, and other technologies within the next 25 years. Perhaps trump and his corporate sidekicks have already decided their is no point in worrying about education, health care, housing or feeding people who will never be “productive” members of society. Why prepare for that eventuality when it will be far more profitable to simply turn their backs?
6
Two experiences observing people collecting unemployment:
1. I terminated an employee, a respectful, hard-working young man who just didn't have the mental speed and capacity to perform the job. He collected unemployment for 8 months until he found another job.
2. A couple years after graduating high school, my two best friends found out they could claim unemployment benefits by claiming they were seasonal lay-offs from landscaping jobs for 1-2 years. They lived at home and did not honestly search for a job until they were legally cut off by the limits of the program.
My sample size is not representative of all people using the safety net, obviously, but I think I could see myself as a Republican legislator supporting these program changes without doing so because I secretly want to inflict pain on poor people because I lack empathy as a result of racial animus (this racism claim comes out of nowhere in the final paragraph with no attempt at justification).
Your article even says that the data actually supports their viewpoint:
"What about the idea that anti-poverty programs create a “poverty trap,” reducing the incentive for people to work their way to a better life?
...
It’s true that some calculations indicate that means-tested programs — programs available only to those with sufficiently low incomes — can create disincentives for working and earning."
I don't get the conclusion that these people wish to inflict pain on the poor. I expect more.
2
My experience is I don't want $1.5 trillion, $150 billion a year, added to our huge deficit, a burden on future generations, and over twice the entire food stamp/SNAP budget, so Republicans can dole out enormous permanent tax cuts for foreign investors, corporations and the richest Americans.
13
Cherry picking, Adam. Some data may "support their viewpoint" but most studies do not.
Reducing benefits to the poor without any offsetting policies that could help them is in fact inflicting harm. You may disagree whether it's intentional, but they are smart enough to know what the effects of their decisions are. And it really doesn't matter if it's intentional. It's harm, by deliberate policy. And the race element goes without saying.
And I think you need to get out more.
6
Come back when you have been a working single mother, holding down 3 jobs and trying to go to school, staying up half the night to study. And then, getting fired because you can't come to work on short notice, because you have to get a sitter for your 5 year old.
You do not have a clue.
6
Jesus didn't say 'Do onto others as cruelly you want to'.
Take everything away from people and they will have nothing to lose. Then they will be looking at those that do.
8
Republicans and the rich measure a person's merit not by character, sacrifice, service, selflessness or any other virtue.
Their measure is money, net worth, assets...what Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption, with emphasis on conspicuous.
Only wealthy is worthy. The keys to heaven come denominated in dollars. The poor need not apply.
The root of this perversion is Calvinism, with its central tenet of preordination or predestination. Rich folks have reservations in god's gated community with high status neighborhoods exclusively set aside for the wealthiest.
What's the point of heaven if you have to die first before luxuriating for the rest of time in the lap of god's luxury? Why not enjoy the bounty waiting behind the Pearly Gates while earthbound. All that's necessary is a fat bank account and a high FICO score.
Of course that means those who aren't rich aren't deserving and it's god's way of saying "we don't want your kind lowering our celestial property values."
The poor are damned. The rich are saved. Helping the poor is defying god's will. The poor are bad because they're poor, which is the mark of all who are bad. (Only god is entitled to tautology. )
Welfare is sin. Compassion, charity, a helping hand are the devil's work.
Bet it occurred to no one -- besides his evangelical acolytes -- that Trump is doing the lord's work
It's not a war on the poor. It's honoring god's will.
By his purported billions, Trump in fact is a saint.
37
I suspect you live in a fantasy alternative reality where what you think is reality.
Yes, I have seen this strange set of assumptions in evangelical branches: God blesses the worthy with riches. So, if you're not rich, you're not worthy, and deserve scorn. So much for the teachings of Jesus. Dovetails perfectly with cultural decline into a value-less, consumer society. Strange bedfellows indeed.
17
As Weber said (thanks for reminding me Yuri), the Calvinist capitalist had a very good conscience: "he" was one of the selected. And how did "he" know? He'd worked hard, i.e. made a lot of money exploiting workers and the women in his household. The feudal lord was 'born' to exploit with taxes, tithes and pillage; the princely caste did nicely also via birth; the communist boss imposed exploitation for the greater good. No wonder Social Democracy and labour parties always have a hard time.
10
No because they are too stupid, will continue to support Trump no matter what... Wasn't it the book, what's the matter w/Kansas, well it's still what's the matter w/Kansas?
8
What happened to “The meek shall inherit the earth” ?
Where are the followers of Christ and the bible right at this moment because the poor certainly need you badly.
13
Alas, it appears that in America the so-called followers of Christ started selling their souls sometime during the late 1970's, early 1980's.
That's when they became "born again" started following the prosperity gospel. I actually had one of these fine people, who was trying to convert me, assure me that Christianity wasn't about being poor and humble, so forth; but rather about doing well economically.
Now, they are willing to forgive that mega sinner Trump and grant him "mulligans" and even claim that he is on a "spiritual journey" and some claim he was sent by God.
I can't stand it.
8
This is sadopopulism, as explained by Timothy Snyder:
https://youtu.be/oOjJtEkKMX4
3
DJT and his fellow travelers continue to maintain their thuggish malevolence meme towards the poor, many of who bought into the DJT Kool-Aid. Do they still like its taste? We'll see in November.
8
At the outset of this debacle a blogger referred to the situation as an attempt by Trump to institute Bonapartism, that is, the distancing of the "ruler" from the people to the extent that neither had any idea of what the other was doing. Poor people likely did not vote for Trump, or, if some did, then they were surely inveigled, and one cannot help but notice the racial angle which Trump worked was invariably tied to celebrity status, or something very like it. The answer to the question "Will they notice?", being not likely, confirms the proposition advanced by the blogger. The self-made man idea had its roots in 19th century Germany and the steel business. Trump's initial inherited wealth enabled him to invest successfully, and borrow enormously and build fatuously to the extent that he began to equate "well-constructed buildings" with that idea, although he "loves debt"; so there is something incongruous here. But it is nothing compared to that which characterizes the stratified nature of this society and the claims of democracy and freedom. They seem to take out this confrontation with reality on less fortunate people, these willing lackeys of the plutocrats. (government types) In the mythical underworld, under the false god Pluto, the damned toil away with no recourse to salvation. The cosmetic effects of inadequate welfare programs is not dissimilar. If war is the solution, then what that says is not only reprehensible but also criminal.
5
The poor are an easy whipping post for a country of parasites.
9
Do tattoo parlors take food stamps?
I ask because where I live, I see a LOT of women with kids in the store, paying with SNAP cards, and they are COVERED with tattoos. Large pictures, flowing scripts, butterflies, tigers, barbed wire..you name it.
Whenever I see a woman with 2 or 3 kids extend the SNAP card to pay, I ask...do those tattoos, which cost MONEY, improve your kid's education? Get them better food? Teach them to read?
I am white. They are white. I live in a white, ruralish W. PA area. Trump won here. I WORKED my entire life and am retired now. I had NO kids.
I can tell you that it's all I can do to keep silent when the cashier then asks me, as I pay with money I've earned, "do I want to contribute a dollar to help the hungry?"
NO! I feel like saying "I just paid for the groceries for that tattooed monster mom and her brood!!!!"
There DOES need to be a LOT more screening. Section 8 pays 70% of average rent of 1000/mo today or 700/mo (or 8400/yr) and SNAP @654/mo (or 7800/yr) for a family of four, forks out 16000+ for these 2 benefits alone.
Add WIC for cheese, milk, cereal and fruit, Medicaid, free phones with basic plans.....I'm sorry that is a LOT of money because you want to have kid after kid after kid because SOMEONE ELSE PAYS for them.
It DOES get infuriating. If I couldn't afford something, I didn't buy it, and went without. Today, if YOU want something, just ask someone else to pay for it. YOU are entitled.
11
So true. But is it reasonable to expect stress-out, flawed people to make perfect decisions all the time? Walk in their shoes before you judge. And let's not forget who are getting the really big subsidies in our culture, like the polluters, the exploiters, the users.
8
I would urge you not to punish children for whatever sins you believe their parents have committed.
4
America's poor have been sacrificed at the altar of illegal immigration and low wage migration. Our immigration system absolutely crushes our most vulnerable citizens. This isn't a debatable point. The Democrats aren't serious above poverty.
3
How true Stephan. Except remember that the repubs, while in power, didn't even enforce existing immigration laws to stem the flood of illegals. Or pass tougher immigration laws. Let's face it: the rich want cheap labor to crush unions, and to push down their labor costs. They got their way.
3
No, but the left is utterly blind to this. They see themselves as the pals of BOTH poor black Americans AND poor illegal aliens. They don't see the conflict inherent, or that it is poor blacks who have suffered THE MOST from massive illegal immigration.
2
A dictatorship is formed by insatiable greed.....hence Trump.
This era will have a backlash...and it is happening right now.
10
Certainly greed is a big part of explaining the Trump event. I would respectfully suggest that alienated working class whites were another factor. Feeling abandoned by the dems in favor of minority rights and globalisation, they had no advocate. Trump filled the void.
Look, anyone who does not make the rich richer is of no value to Republicans. Stop pretending not to know that what they really want is for poor people to be eliminated, they would have no problem herding them into gas chambers.
8
So the solution is that we need to vote out the entire bunch of callous, greedy, mean-spirited Republicans. But here is the problem. The poor don't vote. The middle-lower-middle-class Trumpites have drunk the Kool-Ade or are willfully ignorant. Many receive benefits and either don't recognize it or don't acknowledge it ("well, it was only for a little while"). These folks think Medicaid, food stamps, etc go to the (non-existent) hordes of non-white often illegal immigrant loafers who are spending their time thinking of ways to rape their white daughters instead of working. So these voters care not a lick about the war on the poor: in fact, they probably secretly cheer it, thinking there dollars are supporting this.
the Dems either need to mobilize the poor to vote, or quietly work for them while not making it a primary focus in elections. It is a guaranteed losing strategy.
So point out data exposing the fallacy of the GOP arguments, point out their mean-spiritedness, and advocate for sound policy. But find another way to connect with the non-rabid Trump supporters.
2
PLUTOCRACY.
That is the Republican goal.
12
Leavened with a healthy supply of kakistocracy.
Being able in inflict misery and suffering on the poor makes them feel all master of the universe-y. Their testosterone levels go up.
6
Vulture capitalism compliments of the GOP.
6
The 21 century gop Robbing HOOD. with an emphasis on the HOOD. Gives to the Rich at the expense of the poor.
6
Why? Because we can.
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping a human face -- forever."
George Orwell, "1984"
6
Starve the hungry, apply pain to the suffering and cast out the poor, all while enriching the already rich and claiming devotion to Christian values. Amazing.
13
Yes, this IS the questions "...it will also hurt a lot of low-income whites — in fact, it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?"
Exactly! Trump's base -- will they notice?
Or will Fox convince them that, even now that the GOP holds all three branches of government, all their problems and struggles are somehow caused by the Democrats... and immigration... and...
5
No, unfortunately they will not notice because many of such white people are illiterates, do not read, lack basic education, and probably have no idea of what is happening at the government level. Most trump base is ignorant. Hence the reason they voted for trump and the very same reason they will not notice.
1
It's really the GOP's war in the poor. And the working and the middle class. And the blue states. And everyone but themselves.
6
"So what’s really behind the war on the poor?"
Squeezing out every dollar and wringing every bit of propaganda value out of those least able to defend themselves politically.
11
Krugman:
"At this point, our default assumption should be that there’s something seriously wrong with anyone this president wants on his team."
Almost...the real issue is that anyone that wants to be on Trump's team must have something seriously wrong with them...
I'm talking to you Kanye
10
Trump has waged war on everything and everyone. He fired Rex Tillerson (is he poor?). there is no doubt poor cities are set to collapse. I live in one. We may have a lot of little Detroits on our hands. And Trump could care less. Talk about refugees....
4
The poor whites PK refers to will notice benefit cuts, but will not really care as long as it appears poor blacks are doing worse than them. The poor whites may simply take more opioids.
Look for a steep rise in racial animus, its about all they left on the right now that both sides have essentially agreed to leave gays alone.
2
As more and more of us get squeezed down and out, as the cost of almost everything goes up except wages, as access to the safety net becomes more difficult, one wonders if the Republicans have a plan on how to keep all the unsightly new Hoovervilles out of sight.
The Republicans seem to have a nostalgia for ghettos.
7
If only there was a party that represented labor not Wall Street, that could fight back. You know a party that did not have “Hope and Change” just as a campaign slogan.
5
For many, many years it has been part of the southern political playbook (by republicans now and by southern democrats in the old days) to make life hard for what I call the weak (mostly people with dark skins, different religions, etc.) and to be solicitous for the well-off and well-connected.
Many people in the red states hated Obamacare because 1) they hated President Obama, and 2) they mistakenly thought that Obamacare was just a scheme to give a lot of goodies to the dark-skinned. It is strange but there is a large part of the electorate which thinks it is great to give tax breaks to corporations and old white guys and love it when benefits are taken away from the poor (especially if they are black or brown).
Of course trump knows nothing about people on Medicaid, food stamps, or any of these programs and probably cares nothing about them. He is just playing to his base.
The republicans love to talk about the "takers" who are living in luxury on food stamps. But if you qualify for these programs in Alabama you can't be living very high on the hog.
6
While I applaud Prof. Krugman for highlighting some of the more egregious "kick 'em into the gutter and let 'em rot" actions of the Trump administration, this is just another example of Trump and his West Wing goons doing explicitly and gleefully what the GOP has striven to do "behind the scenes" for many decades.
For most of the last hundred years or so, the GOP has been a deeply Calvinist party. John Calvin taught that worldly wealth was "God's reward" for "righteous living" - and that conversely, the poor were poor exclusively because God disapproved of their "poor life choices". In short, the GOP fervently believes that the poor have no one to blame but themselves for their lot in life - so from the perspective of Government, "It's not our problem".
However, the late comedian George Carlin had a slightly different take on this subject. He said (and I'm paraphrasing here) the following:
"Why is it that corporate welfare is a necessary tonic to enhance economic productivity, while personal welfare is a soul-sapping disincentive to individual initiative?"
The Times just ran an article about the massive amount of corporate welfare (tax breaks, "economic incentives" and other fiscal largess showered on the wealthy and well-connected - all financed by We the Taxpayers).
Until the GOP can satisfactorily answer Mr. Carlin's question noted above - I (and most Americans, according to polls) would much rather see "welfare" directed to the neediest rather than to the greediest.
11
If you think that wealth is a result of being superior (and not a combination of good luck, hard work, and great timing), then you have to think that those who are poor are inferior (and not a combination of bad luck, hard work that didn't pay off, and poor timing). Inferior beings do not deserve anything. They don't fit into the plan; don't follow the playbook. Therefore, according to this viewpoint, they don't deserve help.
6
VOTE. November 6, 2018. It's one big way to stop the cruelty and inject rationality into our safety net.
12
... and the deeper problem is an economy that systematically underpays many while grotesquely overpaying the few.
At this point I have trouble listening to my wealthy friends who tell me that they feel guilty at how much I make compared to them. They admit to me that it is unfair. They admit that our political system is (on some level) for sale. But they keep making millions of little decisions based on maintaining the status quo... a status quo that works for them. They don't want any change that might actually lower their overall wealth. They really like that Jag and Beemer and Musk-mobile. They send checks to politicians who call themselves liberals but who largely enact economic policies that don't do anything except keep the donor-class in french cuffs.
I'm sick of it. They are my friends.... or are they? They sure don't act like it when I'm not looking.
Tax the rich or eat them.
424
I have a couple of friends who are billionaires. Their beliefs and moral values put them in the left of the political spectrum.
However, both rely completely on wealth managers, whose directives are growth and capital preservation. In other words, continuation of wealth concentration (see Thomas Piketty) and other economic effects detrimental to society in the longer term.
It isn't that my two friends are evil like the Koch brothers or Grover Nordquist. It is that they are human, with lives to live, and wealth management is something they've delegated to the professionals rather than do themselves. Hard to blame them. Who, being a billionaire, would want to spend his or her limited life on managing wealth if that service could be hired?
So while each donates to worthy causes, their enormous fortunes have become part of the machinery that grinds our hoped-for egalitarian society into dust. Given their outsized wealth, their money managers are disproportionately effective. It's a discouraging phenomenon.
95
@Ridgeguy, one would hope that people who that much wealth and support liberal causes would be donating heavily to groups advocating for change. Yes it will cost them but they can afford it. And it preserves America for their grandchildren.
Their behavior really is inexcusable if they do not use the influence they have as large share owners in one of two ways: 1) as activists in shareholder meetings which is probably too time-consuming for them; or 2) by choosing socially-responsible investments based on the actions and values of companies in which they invest. The latter might well reduce their rate of return. But, who can better afford that option than a billionaire? Please speak to your friends about their opportunity and responsibility to make the world a better place.
Yes, I've got mine.
And, I'm keeping it.
And you have some loose change there...
I'll take that too.
9
One of the nights after passing his tax cut for the wealthy, the alleged "Middle Class Tax Cut" Fox News keeps calling it, Trump was in Mar-a-Lago, bragging to his $200,000 a year membership guests, "I just made you all more rich".
That sums up what a "populist" Trump is and has always been.
11
Food stamps seems to be the dividing line.
If you're a family with one wage earner and one ex-wage earner on permanent disability, you're angry about the families in your neighborhood with no wage earners. They're getting food stamps, and you're paying for them. Their grown-up children are living at home, not working, and doing opiods, probably somehow paid by medicaid.
At least your own family has one person working very hard for a meager salary, and another person who worked hard, and was injured, and according to the doctor, can no longer carry out that specific duty. That's why we have Workman's Compensation. We paid into that.
And here are these people on food stamps, never worked in any job, and just look what's in their shopping carts. And they have cell phones. Probably Obama phones.
The good people vote, while the losers who are just collecting from the government are staying home on election day.
Now you understand the Republican Party strategy.
4
“People who put principles before people are people who hate people. They don’t much care about how well it works, just about how right it is … they may even like it better if it inflicts enough pain.” – John Barnes
5
I think some wealthy people lack empathy toward the poor because they don’t want to feel guilty for having so much. If they can blame the poor for their lot in life they can convince themselves they deserve everything they have. Its not only the poor they hate, they also hate the middle class.
The irony is that people who have more money than they know what to do with often waste it. Does anyone really need a pair of $600 high heels or a $10,000 watch?
9
Ask Hillary with her $12,500 Armani jackets.
The idea that Trump is responsible for the policy of his administration is laughable and gives him much more credit than he has earned.
As far as conservatives wanting to cut government aid to the poor, of course reducing taxes is always part of it, but what liberals need to understand is that there is a war between rural mentality and urban mentality on the best way to care for the unfortunate.
Those who live culturally in the modern world may know that social problems cannot be adequately addressed by churches and communities alone- that the power and organization of the federal government has proven to be the best and most consistent provider of relief to the poor for a very long time- now more than ever as churches face lower attendance and community bonds have weakened for numerous reasons.
But money given to the government to help others seems like no pathway to heaven to evangelical Christians and defeats the spiritually uplifting aspect of charity.
The idea of communities taking care of their own still has strong resonance with many Americans, and it is unfair and unproductive to write it off as entirely inspired by greed and cruelty.
2
Perhaps it depends on what is meant by "community". Is it simply the people who live near you in your small town? Or is it all the citizens of your country, even the ones whose lifestyle and politics are different from your own? Yes, of course, it's difficult to get away from responding more strongly to those who are closest to you, first by bonds of family, then by physical proximity mingled with similarities of race, religion, ethnicity, class, and other discernible traits. I think liberals have to some extent managed to look beyond the narrower definitions of "community" to realize we are all in this together and that a world that works for everyone is a world that is both moral and practical.
"Will they notice?"
They might, but as long as the Republicans stick it to "those people" (POC, Liberals, LGBT, uppity women, immigrants, Muslims) they don't care. This election was never about jobs, or the economy. It was and is about culture.
379
Recently there was a great article in the NYTs exploring whether the Trump voters had been motivated by economic issues in their decision to vote for Trump. The conclusion, which really has been known since soon after the election, when it became clear that Trump voters typically had incomes in the $70,000 range, was a resounding NO.
They were motivated by finally having someone evil enough to vote for.
34
No, they will not notice. They will not connect the dots, they never have. Neither do most humans around the world who support dictators and corrupt governments.
Politics is emotional, not intellectual. Our brain actually works against intelligent decisions because once we commit to a position based on religion, culture, or values, our brains actually stop looking for answers. Instead, when we feel the personal pain of policies the government enacts, people fall back on preconceptions and rationalizations. We simply don't connect the dots except in extremely painful events such as genocide or war.
Humans don't learn from history. We learn science to design new technologies that improve our lives, but politics (emotionally based decisions) are part of our DNA until we fight each other into extinction.
7
And the GOP have used the culture war to the max. Democrats need to stop re-enforcing identity politics and come up w/ jobs ( retraining for renewable energy jobs that pay more), increase health care options by taxing the wealthy their new tax cuts to treat the opioid crisis,high prescriptions and the environment. Use those commercials with graphic pictures of the Arctic melting, fish and seafood growing scarce, islands going underwater, etc. Reinforce the fact that the tax cuts didn't help the middle class nor the poor.
5
"... a lot of people both in this administration and in Congress simply feel no empathy for the poor."
That really sums it up. It's a dehumanization of the Others, those who cannot fully provide for themselves. They are considered weak, to be discarded at will, because there are many more where they came from who can get the jobs done, so why waste resources on "losers?" It's Givers versus Takers in our leadership. Our sadistic reality is that the Takers are winning right now. Trump and his minions would just as soon leave the unfortunate and the disadvantaged to suffer and die. They mean nothing to Trump et al.: eyesores and wastes of space, at best. This is what we voted for in 2016: non-empathic, aggressive, arrogant, narcissistic sociopaths.
We have another chance to make things right this fall, assuming we've seen enough. So have we?
8
Social programs and health benefits to aid the needy are viewed as "handouts" to people who don't want to work, another racially coded message that resonates well in Republican America. The mention of "welfare" is enough to make conservatives see red, or black, as in people.
Paul Ryan once said that people are poor because they lacked the character to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make better lives for themselves. Situations, circumstances or life can throw poor folks a curve that they can't handle for any number of reasons.
Many people voted for this president because they were as angry as he was but when low income white folks realize that they can't make ends meet, they'll find out that they don't really matter to the president or Republicans at all.
252
Would that be the Paul Ryan who got Social Security payments as a youth? That one? At this point, Republicans lack any credibility when it comes to deriding "welfare" - given the handouts they make to corporations and the already very wealthy... what else is that but "welfare"? The paradox of the working-class Republican voter is that when they vote Republican, the vote only to harm their own interests, a Phyrric victory for their political selves.
57
Great « Times Pick, » mon ami. How true. People like to imagine that they and others have total agency over what happens to them, but of course there are circumstances beyond anyone’s control.
Trump doesn’t care about the struggling people. He fleeced them with his fake university, he fleeced them by not paying them, he fleeced them for his electoral college win.
When some of Trump’s supporters find priorities other than looking down their noses on people of color, they will indeed see ugly reality that they were had.
52
Trump fleeces us still by forcing us to pay for his bad decisions, cruelty, incompetence, his tax bill, trips to Mar Lago, etc. He reduces the dignity of his office by the hour and knows he didn’t gain it legitimately.
"it will surely end up hurting a lot of people who voted for Trump. Will they notice?" - No. Simply because of Fox, Hannity, Brietbart, Ingraham, Limbaugh, etc.
9
I once read an interesting article about water shortages in Southern California. When voluntary water conservation measures were called for, people in the wealthiest neighborhoods increased their water consumption while everybody else cut back. Moral of the story: people with wealth and power tend to be stingy and mean.
Unfortunately, they can afford to hire propagandists (Fox News, etc.) to put lipstick on their piggish behavior and blame everything bad on civil servants who are actually doing good work.
12
Unfortunately, for the poor, the war is already lost.
Trump and Carson's prayers have been bizarrely and cruelly answered.
5
Republicans think poverty is a character flaw--one that can be beaten out of the poor by punishing them and making them poorer.
7
Many of the changes Trump and his party want, and not just in healthcare, would result in more poor people dying. I guess such people think "they better hurry up and do it, and reduce the surplus population."
10
Often the message heard is different than the one being sent. The only message that should be heard is simple—VOTE. Thos wouldn’t be happening if the underprivileged voted.
4
What Republicans refuse to admit is that people can work and still not earn enough to pay the ever-rising rents, utilities, transportation, childcare and medical costs. When wages don't rise, they can't get ahead much less survive setbacks like illness, injuries, old car breakdowns, and layoffs. This is true not just for the working poor but for working families higher up the income scale. Millions are working and living one paycheck, illness or injury away from eviction or foreclosure. Meanwhile, Republicans use government to further enrich, empower and entitle the already rich and powerful. It's not only heartless and stupid, but immoral.
7
I think it is a big stretch to say Republicans in general and Trump in particular know enough about the effects of safety net policy to say they are being deliberately cruel, (except for policies targeting women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, the disabled, and immigrants).
Fox and Friends doesn't do rational policy analysis...
3
Trump & crew don't lack empathy for the poor. They actively hate them. It's otherwise hard to explain their taking every opportunity to degrade the poor and make them yet more miserable.
7
Those most hurt by Trump are his most fervent supporters.
A nation gets the government it deserves.
The United states we knew is gone.
2
"Will they [lower-income whites] notice?" I don't think that's the point, Dr. Krugman.
The Trump administration, from top to bottom, is evil. It certainly wants to damage non-whites, immigrants and the poor.
The GOP is confident in the dog whistles that have called in the baying hounds since 1964. Barry Goldwater was crushed by LBJ in 1964 but today's GOP owes a debt to the Arizona Senator for shouldering open the door to hate. Goldwater ("extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice") established a template that every Republican administration (1968; 1972; 1980; 1984; 1988; 2000; 2004; 2016) has summoned to its aid.
The white working class will feel the bite but, as we learned recently, economics is not what drives their hate and fear and drove them into the thorny embrace of Donald Trump. Their mindset seems to be that they're fighting a last stand at the Alamo and they mean to empty their bullets into the Mexican hordes that, somehow, stalk their feverish dreams.
They hated President Obama simply because he wasn't one of them and failed to appreciate that his healthcare plans would benefit them and their families. It didn't matter; the drug of racism is an opioid they can't live without. They feel that they're under siege. With Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh in their heads, they have neither time nor patience for an alternate viewpoint. The hate is comfortable--if not rewarding.
Yes, these angry whites will suffer but they'll also take pleasure in others' pain.
11
The bitter irony is that Trump campaigned as a populist who would help the poor and working class as he portrayed the country as being in a "mess." It wasn't but that didn't stop his demagoguery. Many Trump supporters say they voted for him because they wanted change but without regard for the quality of the change he would bring. Now, they're finding out that Trump's idea of change is cruel and callous and not in their best interests.
9
Trump can't understand poverty because not only he never experienced it but also because it's beyond his imagination. Something vague to the point that he thinks that poverty is a choice, a bad habit that should be punished.
6
"The interesting question is not whether Trump and friends are trying to make the lives of the poor nastier, more brutal and shorter. They are. The question, instead, is why."
The answer is simple, they are morally bankrupt.
9
It's not just "Trump's War on the Poor;" it's his war on everyone who's not rich. Teachers, now striking across red-state America from West Virginia to Arizona, are an example of the impoverishment of what used to be middle-class Americans not just by Donald Trump, but his fellow "tax-cuts for the wealthy" Americans in those deep red Republican states. The poor and the middle-class are being systematically robbed by the Republican kleptocrats and the striking teachers are just one symptom of the social and economic unrest it's causing. Of course, the poor are the most vulnerable having little education, often poor health made worse by cutbacks in Medicaid, and lacking leadership to make their case as the teachers are doing today in Arizona. It is a titanic class warfare or struggle that has come to the shores of America at the hands of the Trump oligarchy who blatantly steal from the poor and the public at large and then try to cover it up with notions of "workfare" and "lazy" and all the other classic political gimmicks like racist fear they use to shift blame to the poor. It's cruel, it's callous, and it's pure unfettered, narcissistic greed that lacks any empathy, as you note, or basic Christian compassion. And the real tragedy is that there a real programs like Head Start that reduce crime and poverty that are under-funded.
455
While I agree with what you are saying please note that compassion is not solely a Christian value.
2
Is it possible that the real issue has to do with our "post-industrial" economy?
I get the sense that the underlying macro issue is the value of time - specifically "free" time. If both real purchasing power, and, perhaps more importantly real opportunities for growth and advancement decline as our technologically-oriented society becomes ever more utilitarian and "one dimensional" (think Marcuse) then limiting one's investment in - and possibly dropping out of - the work force becomes ever more "rational." How many computer languages that are going to become obsolete in two years must people learn?
As the workday becomes elongated and the workplace de-territorialized, the grind of production becomes constant. And, as always, diminishing returns apply to psychological satisfaction and fulfillment: hence the increase in non-working middle class men.
All to say that I get the sense that the true "goal" here is not so much to remove the safety net for the non-working poor (who have no voice anyway) but to keep the working middle-class honest - which is to say scared. The "investment class" needs a compliant, motivated "middle management" class, and what better way to keep them "honest" than to increase their risk to even contemplating non-market solutions to market-generated dissatisfaction?
9
These policies will lead to another consequence: higher crime. Where people become desperate, they resort to any means to feed themselves and their family.
10
The almost complete lack of empathy...actually, cruelty is probably a better term...displayed by the current incarnation of the Republican party, and especially the party leadership, is genuinely depressing. But it is perhaps even more depressing to think how many Americans have been brainwashed into enabling the GOP's cruelty, even against their own economic interests, by appeals to factors such as nativism, racism, feared loss of cultural status and so forth. Growing up, I always thought of America as a basically generous country and that was a major reason I took pride in being an American. Sadly, that generosity, and many of the democratic ideals I also took pride in seem to be eroding away, leaving a much harsher society. I hope and pray that the erosion can be halted, and the more generous, democratic spirit can eventually be restored.
15
A theme runs through Paul Krugman's important piece, and that is the GOP relies on wishful beliefs that is at variance with evidence.
The heading of the piece is perfect, because lack of empathy is at the heart of the matter, and research in political psychology shows this to be the case.
6
The GOP hasn't met a welfare program it likes unless it concerns corporate welfare. And most of the Democrats in Congress have no real understanding of what life has become for the average American. We're living on the edge even if we aren't poor. We're forced to pay high premiums for high deductible narrow network medical insurance. We're spending more than we should on housing or we're commuting too far because there is no affordable housing near our jobs. We're unable to save for retirement or the proverbial rainy day because we're underpaid, owe money on a car, a house, our educations, etc. We have nothing left except a prayer.
Long before Trump was even considering a run for the presidency there was a war on the poor. There was a war on the average American. Reagan started it with trickle down economics. Clinton helped with his changes to welfare. What no one did was take a long hard look at working Americans or what would happen if businesses did whatever they pleased. No one bothered to seriously consider what would happen as technology eliminated certain jobs while we had no programs or plans in place to retrain people for the new ones. They are quite happy to call us lazy when we can't find jobs.
Trump is merely more obvious about his disdain for the poor. But that disdain extends to most of us because we are poor in comparison to him. In fact our representatives in DC make more than most of us will ever see. That's the real problem.
47
Bravo. You're exactly right.
Even the most well-meaning politician or business person who is in the top 5%, say, has no idea what average people experience. How could they? They live in a different reality.
I've been observing this and thinking about it since the 1980's, when inequality apparently became a goal of the Reagan Administration but also, when materialism and the celebration of wealth became the American ethos - not least in (white) Evangelical churches which were NOT about helping the poor, but rather about getting rich.
15
You are the second commenter so far to have said that Clinton "helped with his changes to welfare." Of course I could be wrong but I believe that Congress passed the legislation with a veto-proof vote. It is irresponsible to only consider factors such as, for example, Clinton was president at the time. There has been an ongoing campaign, and a predilection of some, to discredit the Clinton's at every turn. It is unfortunate that some, even apparently Senator Gillibrand, have bought some of the propaganda.
15
Michael Allen, there were several people close to Clinton who objected to what he was trying to do. They were looking ahead and felt that the reforms he was proposing would hurt us in the future. They were right. Clinton could have tried to reform welfare in a better way. He didn't and we're paying for it now.
2
This bunch is cruel and sadistic
No science, no art, ideas mystic,
Petty chiselers and grifters
And no heavy lifters
On tweeting the Donald's insistic.
Instincts savage and no compassion
The Pope pleads but he's not in fashion
It's dunning and cunning
The larceny's stunning,
And all led by Trump, a real rash 'un.
43
At first it was novel to have a 'President' who sounds like us; says it the way it is; does not mince words, and at one with the People. Nothing too fancy; does not give himself airs and lord it over us. None of this political codswallop, but who gets to the point and is going to set us back on our feet on the road to America.
Thirty years ago in New York there was a long line of men, mostly white, waiting in a long squirrel tail around 'Croc' Plaza, a book in hand, causing an economist to ask what was going on. Probably a book signing for Trump or Howard Stern was my reply, while he snorted.
We are poor in this beautiful valley, Mr. Krugman. There are few jobs to be found and our dairy farms are dying, while the future looks grey. Few educational opportunities are available, although we are trying. Trying to escape this poverty, some of us of all ages are depressed and becoming ill in heart and spirit, while continuing to put on a brave face.
Few of us know the names riding this political grim-a-round at The White House, or care for that matter because we don't trust The Press at best and it's politics as usual. Some of our children are on drugs; domestic abuse is high, and it is the family-community bond that keeps us going, while we are not having a musical festival this year for this silent spring where vultures are to be seen soaring high.
22
Heartfelt and poetic. Thank you.
3
He doesn't sound like me. I speak in full sentences.
1
Not a mention of the Democratic Party, and for good reason: they haven't exactly been staunch advocates for the poor.
Bill Clinton signed the legislation decimating our already meager (by European standards) welfare system. And his mass incarceration policies directly targeted poor communities.
A look at minimum wage adjusted for inflation by year shows that regardless of Republican or Democratic congresses/administrations, it stayed stagnant over several decades.
Obama twice proposed (joined once by Pelosi) cuts to Social Security COLA increases. Obama's response to the housing crisis was the pitiful HAMP program which placed principal reduction decisions in the hands of banker.
In his last few years in office Obama bragged about the deficit reduction achieved during his administration and he signed a Republican bill that cut food stamp funding. Austerity always targets the poor.
It's time for the Democrats to decide what they're all about. Lately, they're more of a Wall Street party than main street, too worried about antagonizing their corporate backers to propose much-needed, bold economic justice policies.
89
Both parties do more work for Wall Street and the big corporations than they do for the people they claim to represent and care about. That's why we are treated to so many idiotic statements about what Americans want, how easy it is to find a job and how lazy we are, and why we have such a poor social safety net. No one in either party is truly looking at 99% of us.
Senators and representatives might be voted out of office but they don't have to worry about finding jobs after they leave. If we lose our jobs finding new ones, especially if we're over 50 or handicapped, can be next to impossible. If we need extensive medical care and can't afford it we're told it's our fault.
Some Americans may have believed, based upon what Trump said, that he was the answer to their problems. The blame for many of those problems can be put on how political campaigns are financed, how few Americans understand that they are being played, one group against another so that politicians don't have to work for us, and on the economic elite (Koch Brothers anyone?).
Last but not least, it's our lack of critical thinking skills that are hurting us. We don't need to love a candidate to vote for him/her. Clinton was far more qualified than Trump but that wasn't enough so she lost the electoral college. And America lost.
3
I work with poor people. They want jobs. The need jobs
I also study the economics of Syracuse . Once upon a time well off, with Carrier, GM , GE providing employment. All left , moving to locations where people were willing to work for less. GM produces in China, Carrier in Mexico.
But who promoted globalzation, that devastated this city without ANY understanding of its distributive effects ? Those, most prominently include Mr. Krugman, who responded to letters of complaints sent to him by those laid off asking ""Well, if you lose your comfortable position as an American professor you can always find another job--as long as you are 12 years old and willing to work for 40 cents an hour."
With " Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization--of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. "
Mr. Krugman's criticisms of Trump, correct as it is, would be far more believable if it would come from someone who responded to the plight of the laid off with accusations of moral outrage.
Let alone someone who during the Presidential campaign declared "Trump is Right on Economics" while labeling "Sanders over the Edge"
10
You didn't have to support Bernie Sanders if you wanted to help the poor.
10
Trump is the ultimate welfare king. Hundreds of Million in tax write offs taken on the money lost by other investors, not Don.
Tax payers got to pick up the tab for Trump's tax credits. Way to go. In debt a hundred million due to over spending, alimony payments, and just poor business acumen? No problem. Vlad's pals will shuffle another 100 million in dirty money via real estate, etc to cover Donald's short-fall. Well, Donald, we'd like you to pay for your own hair spray. Get out of the White House. Buy your own food.
204
If you've read David Cay Johnston's book, The Making of Donald Trump, I would say that more than one person left bereft in the wave of a Trump scam has probably turned to safety net programs. He's a real-deal parasite.
3
The whole point is to pit poor people against one another so as to deflect attention from the rich getting more obscenely richer by the day.
The aporophobia*as practiced and preached by the GOP has gotten so bad that Paul Ryan even fired the House chaplain, of all people, for allegedly having had the gall to mention record wealth inequality in one of his prayers.
Ben Carson thinks that poor people are "gaming" the Section 8 program by educating themselves too much about the medical deductions allowed when reporting their incomes to the government. Loopholes for the poor? What an insult to the only people allowed to use loopholes and get welfare in this country: the ultra-rich and the corporations. Instead of informing Section 8 applicants about their rights, Carson would punish the whole class -- the working class, that is, given that most of the people he insists must go to work for their assistance already do have jobs.
He's telling those who can't get help that it's all the fault of other poor people. What we have to do, of course, is elect liberal majorities to Congress and state houses, to construct vast new public housing stock as well as diminish the cruelly long lines for Section 8 vouchers. About 600,000 desperate people were expected to sign up in L.A. after the wait list finally reopened last fall after an outrageous 13 years!
*intense hatred/fear of poor people.
https://kmgarcia2000.blogspot.com/2018/04/ben-carson-says-rent-is-too-da...
162
and of course rich white people and enablers like thomas and carson are as illogical as the poor whites they oppress. conservatives used to pride themselves on being clear eyed and pragmatic..... not like those bleeding heart liberals. well? what does it take for them to understand that yes there are people in our society that are not going to "get it together" and their number is growing as they have children and opportunities dwindle? we as a society have a problem that needs a solution and that solution does not involve cruelty and sticking your head in the sand. i think they want immediate gratification and when they do not feel gratitude or think that the poor are not sufficiently improved? they trash the program instead of realizing that this something that will take generations with incremental results.
5
The bosses have always known if they can get the white working stiff to hate and fear the black working stiff they the bosses can steal more from both guys.
5
Let us look at the sequence of events in the tRump administration. His cabinet was and still is being chosen to minimize all those agencies, that is to cut costs as much as possible. This is your GOP at work, so to speed up this process they pass a tax cut that can not be financed without massive cutting of government spending, Some constituencies are too big and influential, they like DOD have to treated gently.
So you start with those least able to defend themselves. The poor, and lower income entities are the first, they are the ones that do not have expensive lawyers and lobbyists to protect them from these attacks. It is easy to make them the scapegoats for these cuts in their health and well being. They are portrayed as not doing their share to get these benefits, able bodied not working, spurious charges, and in most cases part of some minority ethnic. This is the first step in the GOP march toward smaller government.
They are the easiest to pick on, but that will not be enough, there are more waiting just above them. To paraphrase a famous quote. first they came for the poor, but I am not poor. Who will be next?
These moves are not obvious and all the talk about them masks their real purpose: to create a Fascist style utopian society, by the rich, for the rich, and dedicated to the perpetuation of the rich.
35
Well of course that's who Trump hires. How many self-respecting people are willing to associate with him? There is a reason he was always excluded from "high society" in New York. And it won't be any different when he returns there.
When he said he would hire the "best people," he left out one thing. He has hired the best people that he knows.
31
Republican voters seem content to vote against their own economic interests, as long as they have someone to scapegoat, in this case those on welfare (a plurality of whom are white) and illegal immigrants.
The historical record is clear, the economy has performed better under Democratic Presidents in terms of job creation, stock market returns, and GDP growth. Trump himself has admitted as much on film. Deficits are also lower under Democrats. (See The Economist-"Timing is Everything" from 2014).
Of course there are only about 11 million illegals, an immaterial number in a country of 327 million, and these illegals tend to cluster in cities, so they have nothing to do with the so-called "plight" of rural Republicans who vote against their own economic interests. It is the white executives who offshore their jobs, not the immigrants. It is 90% support for Republican politicians who cut taxes for those same executives that makes one realize economics is not driving GOP voter behavior.
Never mind that going into the election we had a record number of jobs (since 2014), 20 million more with health insurance thanks to the ACA (since 2013), record real GDP, record household net worth and stock market (since 2013). Obama had raised taxes on the top 1% in 2013, shifting $600 to the average family in the bottom 40% via ACA.
What did the GOP faithful do? Kept right on voting to hurt themselves economically. We need a national intervention to help these people wake up.
43
I live in one of these: "Meanwhile, the administration has been granting Republican-controlled states waivers allowing them to impose onerous new work requirements for recipients of Medicaid — requirements whose main effect would probably be not more work, but simply fewer people getting essential health care."
For seven years, the GOP-controlled legislature has hesitated to accept any Medicaid expansion dollars because they might cease, and the state might have to put out more Utah dollars to help the poor -- a reluctance demonstrated even before the state was eligible to expand Medicaid. This year, the legislature -- which is more conservative than even the governor -- passed a law seeking to get the kind of work-tested Medicaid Mr Krugman describes here.
So I conclude that the Republicants believe that it is not fair for Utah to aid its residents with federal dollars they have sent out-of-state, but it is fine to aid them with federal dollars they have worked for twice.
All my life, I have heard Republicants rant about "Tax and Spend Liberals." Since at least Ronald Reagan, they have been spending without taxing. They find governing too taxing, I guess, to ever balance a budget.
253
They are the Borrow and Spend Republicans who tell us we can have a free lunch in some cases and no lunch at all in others while they line their own pockets with cash and convince people that fear and loathing of “the other” is all that they need to do to be patriotic.
19
Trump and the Republicans wage this war on the poor because they can. And why is that? Because poor people generally vote in very low numbers.
Why do poor whites vote Republican?
1) They are paid off with guns. We will give you guns everywhere and you let us rich folks do what we want.
2) They are paid off with the promise of abortion restrictions. I am convinced that Republicans do not want to implement a federal ban on abortion. They want to stretch out this campaign against reproductive rights for years on end. It's the gift that keeps giving votes.
3) White power! Republicans will restore the White Christian male to his God given role of dominance in society.
4) Libertarian nonsense. We will eliminate regulations and federal programs that are holding you back. Works really well for billionaires.
Poor whites are not poor because they did anything wrong. They are poor because the non-whites get all the breaks that they don't deserve because they are aren't white.
Attacking the poor and vulnerable gives the super wealthy an easy cause to rally around. This has always been the case. The rich even have the Prosperity Gospel which gives them divine privilege.
And then top it all off with trickle down economics which is the biggest lie ever told.
So tell me. Are people rational? No. They do what satisfies their emotions. See items 1 thru 4 above.
947
Soooo true. But the gun thing. It's like nobody puts two and two together. When the fan encounters the solid wastes everyone will be very well armed.
But nobody seems to be concerned about that.
puzzling...
34
Since we often don't even even know why we make the choices that we do I don't think that logic can really tell us why someone else is making the decision that they are making. I agree that the outcome of the policy decisions is cruel but I am a bit hesitant to conclude that the reason behind the decision is that they just want to inflict pain.
3
Dr. K. is obviously correct saying:
"Trump and his friends aren’t punishing the poor reluctantly, out of the belief that they must be cruel to be kind. They just want to be cruel."
It's all part of the country-club/Mar-a-Loco ethos which promulgates the 'makers vs. takers' mythology, and the refusal to acknowledge corporate welfare or close the carried interest loophole for Wall Streeters, while proposing cutting Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/get-there/wp/2018/02/19/attention-se...
deriding those programs as entitlements when they are actually programs workers have paid into directly for decades.
His Unhinged Unraveling Unfitness should spend less time hob-nobbing at his resort echo chambers with its $200,000 membership fees, and more time with hoi polloi.
155
I’m one of the hoi polloi. Keep him away from me!
30
@rjon - If he spent more time with any of us sitting in IHOPs and coffee shops, instead of listening to paying members of Mar-a-Loco, the country would be lots better off :)
29
R. Law - Not true. If he spent time with us, he would just be telling us how wonderful he is and how thankful we should be that he gave us the chance to vote for him.
Trump and the GOP are pushing unpopular positions because the public has lost its ability to hold our "elected" officials accountable.
Victoria Collier: How to Rig an Election - The G.O.P. Aims to Paint the Country Red https://tinyurl.com/y9xx63f6
"As the twentieth century came to a close, a brave new world of election rigging emerged, on a scale that might have prompted Huey Long’s stunned admiration. Tracing they sea changes in our electoral process, two major events have paved the way for this lethal form of election manipulation: the mass adoption of computerized voting technology, and the outsourcing of our elections to a handful of corporations that operate in the shadows, with little oversight or accountability.
“This privatization of our elections has occurred without public knowledge or consent, leading to one of the most dangerous and least understood crises in the history of American democracy. We have actually lost the ability to verify election results.”
There is a vast amount of exit poll data which indicates that some election results are "statistically impossible," and pattern evidence such as exit poll discrepancies appearing in competitive elections, but not in non-competitive races.
The manipulation of vote counts has been in one direction: to the right. Is it a coincidence when a handful of extreme rightwing companies count our votes in secret on proprietary software?
The vote is the bedrock of a democracy. We must return to counting ballots by hand.
136
The powers-that-be are concerned about “election meddling,” yet computer security experts have proven over and over that electronic voting machines are easily hackable, and it can be done by using self-deleting code.
Researchers from Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Rice, Michigan, Ohio and Stanford Universities, the Brennan Center, the GAO, and the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have shown that elections can be hacked without leaving a trace.
NYT: Computer Voting Is Open to Easy Fraud, Experts Say https://tinyurl.com/ycanp24r
Hacking Democracy - The Hack https://tinyurl.com/y7c9oopu
(The full-length Emmy nominated HBO documentary https://tinyurl.com/y7mydv7z
How a 16-Year-Old Hacked a Voting Machine [at DEF CON 2017]
https://tinyurl.com/y7dxpb56
From “How to Rig an Election”:
“In 2005, the non-partisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, stated unequivocally that the greatest threats to secure voting are insiders with direct access to the machines. ‘There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries.’”
Canada, Japan, Australia, and European countries count their votes by hand. It’s the international gold standard. Germany, Ireland, The Netherlands, and Norway went back to hand counting after realizing the vulnerabilities with computerized voting.
"The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." - Joseph Stalin
48
The GOP radically changed as of Election 2010. The Tea Party, as represented by the likes of Sarah Palin, the Cato Institute mouthpiece and activist wife of Justice Thomas, Newt Gingrich in his post-2008 incarnation, and religious political figures such as Pastor Robert Jeffress who, as a member of the clergy, actively has had no moral qualms in actively working to remove SNAP and welfare benefits from recipients during the height of the Great Recession when it was known that a third of the nation was food and shelter-insecure. 2010 was a watershed year in that the GOP dropped any pretense of being a political party for the people it represents.
In a nation in which class, gender, and race have been used from birth, to divide and conquer. economic downturns have always provided fertile ground for renewed right-wing nationalism of the kind Donald Trump used in order to win an election. But make no mistake, the war on the poor is hundreds of years old. This particular battle, started in 2010, wasn't started or managed by Trump, but by the Kochs, through proxies.
As I wrote when Trump won the GOP nomination, ""From the ashes they (the Kochs) expected a beautiful phoenix to rise. Instead, they got trumped by a Trump…"
Koch proxies are who are actually running the Trump government we have today. Trump will go. The Koch's minions? They should be our focus.
---
https://www.rimaregas.com/2018/01/07/politicos-running-list-of-what-trum...
60
Cruelty comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. No side is immune from practicing some version of it. While one may make distinctions between parties' intent, motivation, and purity or impurity of heart, the consequences borne by the targets of austerity and bootstrapping politics are just as dire. In that sense, the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party should be no less immune to criticism.
"Within the Democratic party, quite sadly, a majority of legislators are just as beholden, even as they continue to pretend that they are a progressive worker’s party. Progressive worker’s party legislators in any other nation would never be caught dead triangulating on healthcare and voting to keep 25 million citizens out. No progressive workers’ party would have voted to cut the lifeline to older laid off workers in a compromise with the other side. Long term unemployment insurance was ended as a part of a deal between Senator Patty Murray and Rep. Paul Ryan at the end of 2013. No progressive workers’ party legislator anywhere else would have voted to protect the banks during the financial crisis, but decided to leave homeowners in the lurch. But that is precisely what they did in 2010, and voters have disengaged in increasing numbers ever since." https://wp.me/p2KJ3H-2Jr
Steny Hoyer's and the DCCC's behavior the secret audio below is unacceptable in any primary/
https://theintercept.com/2018/04/26/steny-hoyer-audio-levi-tillemann/
But here we are, nonetheless.
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And what are you doing to change the landscape, Rima, besides blogging about neoliberals? Twenty thousand people from all walks of life, many of them women, have stepped into the arena to run as Democrats, to BE the politicians they want to see elected.
Why not you?
Trump is a cruel person. The GOP leadership seems to be composed of cruel people. And the people Trump selects for key positions are incompetent and cruel. In the current administration cruelty and the love of it seem to be the main qualifications along with being rich enough to be insulated from experiencing the effects of their cruelty.
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Well put, as usual. To answer your final question, the Trumpists who will be hurt won't notice because they'll be fed the story that no matter how badly they are hurt, the people below them (read of a darker shade of skin or a different gender) will be hurt even more than them. And that has worked for a long, long time.
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beaujames,
Some of us are no longer trumping for this president; we are trying to repair the damage Mother Nature inflicted on our houses this long winter last; wondering if we have enough in the cupboard to feed the children through another season, and whether we can move to a milder region with lower taxation.
Family matters, and remains of solace; but our vision of the future is bleak and we are seeking to place the blame on the poorest in our midst, and the 'outsiders' who are regarded as thieves. We might be dependent on some rich enterprising urbanites to save our damaged trees and restore our towns.
While local politics remain of import, 'Washington' is in another country and we are no longer carrying on about Mexicans and walls, the color of our complexion, onward Christians, but whether we are going to make it through this bankrupt and broken political Season.
If Governor Cuomo is planning to give 10,000 prisoners a pardon with the right to vote, perhaps our roads and bridges could be restored with their assistance. In the meantime, hope is fading.
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There's also a lot of truth to the comment that LBJ made about poor whites: as long as there is someone, usually black, who is poorer than they are they don't care. (I paraphrased it.) Therefore a good many of those who feel that way won't notice until it's too late.
Oh, and a lot of others feel the same way: as long as it's not their lives going down the tube they don't care.
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Also worth noting that the average Trump supporter income is 70k. They never were the downtrodden masses that people made them out to be. If you've ever spent time in a heavy Trump/GOP town you'd pick up on an under current of meaness and racism. Weirdly, they themselves don't see it but there is a palpable scorn of people on public assistance as all being worthless moochers and minorities. It's like they can't imagine ever being in desperate straights were maybe you don't have family or connections to help you.
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