Insensitivity to human plight taken to new extremes.
By Joshua Holland
December 27, 2012 "Information
Clearing House"
- There's a new economic myth that's now
being amplified by the conservative media. It
demonizes vital public services and suggests that
the poor are doing just fine thanks to
the largesse of the country's “makers.”
Conservatives are being told that the United States
is now spending vast fortunes combating poverty—more
than we dedicate to national defense, Social
Security and Medicare.
This new spin
is notable not for its mendacity—although it is
completely divorced from reality—but because its
origins are easily traced, allowing us to see how
these kinds of distortions come to be. This one
originated with the work of an analyst at the
Heritage Foundation who is well known for his
intellectual dishonesty. It was then picked up by
Republican staffers on Capitol Hill, who lent the
claim credibility by requesting a Congressional
Research Service report on the analysis. They then
further distorted the narrative before distributing
it to friendly writers at conservative media
outlets, who dutifully reported the falsehood. It
will soon become conventional wisdom on the Right,
further distorting conservatives' view of taxes and
spending.
Several
conservative outlets had the story before Daniel
Halper at the Weekly Standard, but his
piece is the one that's been cited
by hundreds of conservative blogs, right-wing
radio talkers and Fox
News. Halper, citing “the minority side of the
Senate Budget Committee,“ framed the story like
this: “[W]elfare spending per day per household in
poverty is $168, which is higher than the $137
median income per day. When broken down per hour,
welfare spending per hour per household in poverty
is $30.60, which is higher than the $25.03 median
income per hour.”
For fiscal
year 2011, CRS identified roughly 80 overlapping
federal means-tested welfare programs that together
represented the single largest budget item in
2011—more than the nation spends on Social Security,
Medicare, or national defense. The total amount
spent on these federal programs, when taken together
with approximately $280 billion in state
contributions, amounted to roughly $1 trillion.
Common sense
should tell you that this is a ridiculous claim.
Given that the United States has one of the weakest
social safety nets in the world, it's pretty obvious
that we're not spending more on each family in
poverty than the median income—or more on the poor
than we spend on defense, Social Security and
Medicare. But let's dig into the details.
The first
problem with this claim is mathematical rather than
ideological. The story is that we spend $168 per day
for each family in poverty. But the eligibility
cut-offs for most of the 80 or so programs
identified by Senate Republicans are higher than the
poverty line; in many cases, significantly higher.
Given that
there are around 600 different eligibility
requirements for these programs, most determined by
the states, it's difficult to calculate an average
without a staff. But in Colorado, which I chose
because it tends to be ideologically
middle-of-the-road, the average eligibility cut-off
for the 10 means-tested federal benefits listed here is
$18,075, or 62 percent above the federal poverty
line.
The myth can
be expressed mathematically like this: Total
Spending On “Welfare”/Families in poverty = $168 per
day. But these services benefit many more
people than those struggling under the poverty
line—one may as well divide those costs by the total
number of rabbits or blue cars in the U.S.
The reality,
expressed mathematically, is: Total Spending
On “Welfare”/Those who receive benefits = $24.77 per
day. That's a lot less than $168.
Merriam-Webster's dictionary defines “welfare” like
this:
a: aid in the
form of money or necessities for those in need
b: an agency
or program through which such aid is distributed
But that
definition represents only a small share of the programs
identified by the Republican staffers. Many, or
most, are things no reasonable person would ever
call “welfare.” There's aid to communities
recovering from natural disasters; a number of job
training programs; education grants—from
Head Start for pre-schoolers to Pell Grants for
low-income college students; money to enforce child
support orders; programs that improve teachers'
skills; and even screening programs to detect breast
and cervical cancer in low-income communities.
Halper writes that the programs
provide “direct or indirect financial support,” but
“indirect” is a key sleight-of-hand. A number of the
programs identified by the Republican staffers
provide money to institutions and communities rather
than indviduals in need. Included is a program that
gives money to “eligible colleges and universities
to strengthen their management and fiscal
operations,” funding for Americorps—which
trains and places teachers in low-income communities—and another that
gives rural communities assistance upgrading their
water and sewage systems.
I asked an
economist and budget expert—who
didn't want to be named—how
a grant for community projects can be considered
“means-tested.” He explained that they aren't.
Instead, they're awarded according to “a variety of
considerations, including the median income of a
jurisdiction's residents.” He added: “If you want to
call that means-testing you are welcome to do so,
since in America we are all entitled to our own
definitions.”
The important
takeaway here is that many of the programs that
serve these communities provide benefits to people
who aren't poor. When the federal government helps a
rural community upgrade its water system, it may
well help a lot of poor people, but clean water will
come out of the taps of everyone in that community,
rich, poor or somewhere in between. Aid to
universities that serve a lot of low-income students
will also help that university's middle-income
students. And when you help a town with a lot of
low-income residents rebuild after a natural
disaster, the richest person in town will also
benefit.
Another
example: according to the Congressional Research
Service, a number of the education programs included
on the list result in “students from relatively
well-off families receiving assistance, as there is
no absolute income ceiling on eligibility.”
Fifty years of
political science tells us that Americans hold a
very favorable view of most programs that help the
poor, especially educational and job training
programs which, in theory at least, help them lift
themselves out of poverty. But there is one
exception: Americans don't like “welfare.”
In his classic
book, Why
Americans Hate Welfare, sociologist Martin
Gilens found that significant majorities of
Americans told pollsters that they wanted to
increase public spending to fight poverty at the
same time that majorities said they were opposed to
welfare. Gilens concluded that this disconnect was
driven by a widespread belief that “most welfare
recipients don't really need it,” and by racial
animus – “perceptions that welfare recipients are
undeserving and blacks are lazy.”
This is all
very well understood by everyone who had a hand in
creating and amplifying this new falsehood. If you
take programs that offer low-income people job
training or adult literacy or legal services—or
programs that fund community health centers and
improvements in public works—and
call them “welfare,” you can instantly turn very
popular programs into something else: handouts for
the “undeserving” poor. And that's just what they're
trying to do.
A great deal
of conservative economic views are shaped by myths.
Think about the fact-free narrative that slashing
tax rates for the wealthy will
result in more revenues coming into the
government's coffers, the common claim that half
of the country pays no taxes, or the
idea that increasing domestic oil production can
lower global oil prices enough to bring down the
price of a gallon of gas here at home.
So it will be
with the idea that the federal government spends a
trillion on “welfare.” But this particular myth is
interesting in that we can trace its provenance, see
where it came from, how it was amplified, and how it
was shaped along the way.
In May, Robert
Rector, the Heritage Foundation's “senior research
fellow on family and welfare studies,” testified
before the House Budget Committee. He identified
79 of what he described as “means-tested welfare”
programs, with a total price tag of $927 billion (in
combined costs to the federal government and the
states).
Who is Robert
Rector? He's an analyst with a long and storied
history of suggesting that the poorest Americans are
living quite well. Andy Kroll profiled
him for Mother Jones when it was
reported that Rector had been the source of Mitt
Romney's universally debunked claim that Obama had
“gutted” the work requirements of Bill Clinton's
welfare “reforms.”
Rector, wrote
Kroll, is “a man who holds controversial, and in
some cases inaccurate, views of poverty and
economics. Rector has claimed that poverty doesn't
impact children, that you're not really poor if you
have air conditioning or a car, and that the very
idea of welfare lifting Americans out of poverty is
'idiotic.'” In 2011, “he questioned the government's
assertion that more than 30 million people were poor
by pointing to different 'modern amenities' they
owned. The people the government calls poor, he
wrote, 'are not poor in any ordinary sense of the
term,' while the real poor 'are a minority within
the overall poverty population.'”
In calling all
manner of programs “welfare,” Rector's testimony was
intellectually dishonest. But his math was accurate.
Instead of dividing the money spent on these
programs by the number of families living in
poverty, Rector noted that “some means-tested
assistance goes to individuals who are low-income
but not poor.”
The result of
doing the math right is that, rather than spending
$61,320 per year for every family living under the
poverty line, as Senate Republicans claim—and
Daniel Halper and others parrot—the
real number is, according to Rector's own testimony,
“$9,040 for each lower-income American (i.e.,
persons in the lowest-income third of the
population).”
Regardless of
the number, at this point the claim was being made
only by a Heritage Foundation fellow of dubious
distinction. But Rector's testimony before the House
Budget Committee so impressed Jeff Sessions' staff,
that they asked the Congressional Research Service
to prepare a report examining the total cost of
programs that help low-income Americans, either
directly or indirectly.
The report they
got back from CRS—which
identified four more programs than Rector had—gave
added credibility to Rector's original claim. But
the authors were was careful to note that their
analysis didn't look only at “welfare.” And they
noted that it included programs that aren't in fact
means-tested at all. Programs were included,
according to the report, if “they (1) had provisions
that base an individual’s eligibility or priority
for service on a measure (or proxy) of low or
limited income; or (2) target resources in some way
(e.g., through allocation formulas, variable
matching rates) using a measure (or proxy) of low or
limited income.”
The authors
added: “A few programs without an explicit
low-income provision were included because either
their target population is disproportionately poor
or their purpose clearly indicates a presumption
that participants will be low-income.”
The CRS report
looked only at federal spending. Jeff Sessions'
staff added the states' contributions as well as a
big lie—iit seems they decided to divide total
spending on what they call “welfare” by the number
of families in poverty rather than the number of
people who benefit from these programs, in the
process turning $9,000 in spending per household
into $61,000.
The CRS report
is dated October 16. The National Review ran an
item two days later, when Jeff Sessions issued a
press release, and Fox News amplified
the claim two days after that. Both reports
mentioned the total price tag for these
programs—close to $1 trillion—but neither cited the
$168 per day claimed by Sessions' staffers. It was
that framing, featured in the headline of Daniel
Halper's Weekly Standard piece, that
appears to have driven the myth to the larger
conservative media.
The end result
is that a lot of Americans are woefully misinformed
about what we spend on anti-poverty programs, and
what those programs look like. Traditional
welfare—now known as Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families—costs the federal government just $16.5
billion, a fraction of what's now claimed by the
Right. According to the Center
for Budget and Policy Priorities, even when one
uses a very expansive definition of “welfare,” only
“13 percent of the federal budget in 2011, or $466
billion, went to support programs that provide aid
(other than health insurance or Social Security
benefits) to individuals and families facing
hardship.”
So we have
another gap between what is “true” in the
conservative media bubble and the objective facts.
In the real world, we spend about $25 per day on the
needy. But, according to Fox News, the figure is
$168.
Joshua Holland
is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He's the
author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy.
Click for larger image
Banks existed, of course. But they were kept off to one side, and use of the banks was optional
for the people of the United States. It was possible to go through
one's entire life without dealing with a bank if one chose to do so.
Click for larger image
This system not only reserved the choice whether to use the bank to
the people, but it was a stable system, because as debt increased, the
people could voluntarily choose to stop borrowing from the bank! That
was one of the most important freedoms won during the revolution; the
freedom to say "no" to the banks! 
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Then, in 1913, a corrupt Congress and a corrupt President changed
the structure of the nation's economy and stole your freedom to say
"no"! The economic system was reverted to a mirror of that same system
the nation fought a
revolution to be free of. The power to issue money was taken away from
the government and given to the bankers and from that day onward, ALL
money in circulation was created as the result of a loan at interest
from the bankers to the government, to business, and to the people.
There is no exception. Every dollar paid in salary, spent to purchase
food or gas, or paid in taxes, began as an interest bearing loan. There
is no money in circulation in the United States that did not start out
as a loan at interest from the bankers at the privately-owned Federal
Reserve system.
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From that moment on, the freedom of the people to refuse to borrow
from the banks and to refuse to pay interest was stripped away. To
participate in the commerce of the United States at all means being
forced to use money loaned at interest,
to the profit of the bankers and the impoverishment of the public. Your
freedom to say "no" was stolen by Congress in 1913, without your
permission and before you were born. 
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support in the fight against fraudulent taxation. Click 
