[re-post] The media wants us all to believe that Ayn Rands most ardent acolyte, Lyin Paul Ryan, is a fiscal hawk. After all, hes earned the moniker of serious from his consistent advocacy of snatching the security out of Social Security and willingness to force granny to make the shared sacrifice of choosing between food and medication so that transnational corporations can continue to pay zero taxes on their record profits... Ryan is a walking illustration of our broken political system if only for the fact that, rather than being laughed out of town, the man who stood in front the entire nation and gave a speech described as an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech still has a political career. Disregard his photo-ops scrubbing already-clean pots and pans at a closed soup kitchen... forget his constant plots to turn guaranteed medical care for the elderly into a coupon with which to shop around, Ryan wants us now to know that he really, really cares about the poor. So much so, that hes serious enough to inform us that the war on poverty was/is a failure... except... the facts tell us it wasnt. From: The Daily Beast: (tinyurl/pln7gxo) ...in the ’60s, those [war on poverty] programs were fully funded, or close. And what happened? According to Joseph Califano, who worked in the Johnson White House, the portion of Americans living below the poverty line dropped from 22.2 percent to 12.6 percent, the most dramatic decline over such a brief period in this century. That’s a staggering 43 percent reduction. In six years. The war on poverty then lost steam in the 1970s... conservatives were able to say, See? ...And so the public started electing politicians who told them poverty couldn’t be cured by government but only by pulling up one’s bootstraps and friending Jesus more aggressively. It will be Democrats’ job to make sure Rubio and Ryan can’t get away with their ideological sleight of hand. But even for its shortcomings, the Great Society and the war on poverty did absolutely amazing things. I’d like my fellow West Virginia natives to imagine our capital-poor state without the billions the Appalachian Regional Commission has spent since 1965 on roads, local economic development, community health clinics, and numerous other projects. The Great Society brought federal billions to schools, made college possible for millions of kids from modest means, educated innumerable doctors, and so much more. And it’s always worth remembering that the official poverty rate, now 15 percent, overstates the true number because it doesn’t take into account certain policies that don’t offer direct subsidies to poor people, notably the Earned Income Tax Credit, a once bipartisan policy that went to 27.5 million families in 2010 and encourages work and lifts many millions of families above the poverty line. The political problem is that Americans don’t know about or focus on these successes. They just know that we tried, and poverty still exists. Thus has the war frame ended up being extremely handy for conservatives, who will always be able to point to the existence of poor people and therefore to make the claim that the whole thing has been a failure... Read the entire piece from The Daily Beast, here: (tinyurl/pln7gxo)
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 03:40:07 +0000
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