Ryan's "Creative War on Poverty" Would Destroy the Poor - NOT Poverty!

Defeated VP candidate Paul Ryan has had a novel brain fart,....errr...plan. He describes it as a "creative war on poverty" designed to vastly reduce the number of Americans on food stamps (46 million, or a "record" according to a lead story in USA Today, Dec. 5, p. 1A).

The piece focuses on one Ohio County (Miami County) which has seen "a sharp increase in poverty among children and the unemployed". More disturbing is that despite an unemployment rate that's among the lowest in the nation (5.8%) a majority of the families are on food stamps. According to these workers, the problem isn't being bums or looking for handouts, but rather not enough good (i.e. living wage) paying jobs that enable a family to get ahead and not merely survive. As one worker quoted in the piece puts it:

"Minimum wage stays the same but the price of food goes up, the price of gas goes up and the electric goes up. How do you pay all your bills with 40 hours a week at $8 an hour?" (The OH minimum wage is actually at $7.70/hr, while the federal level is $7.25/hr. To my way of thinking, with such LOW wage rates, the feds absolutely need to include food stamps just for fairness' sake!)

In answer to the Ohio worker's question: you don't! SO how does Ryan expect to fight poverty in such circumstances? He'd have to ensure price controls on all the rising commodities, from fuel to food, and then MAYBE he can enable a cutback in the access to food stamps. But that's not what he wants! As an old guard Ayn Rand- worshipping libertarian, the last thing Ryan would do is place price controls on anything. That means food and gas prices would continue to go up - leaving very little disposable income for groceries after key bills like mortgage and utilities are also paid, hence driving the need to access food stamps.

As one Ohio pastor (a real one) put it, "without those food stamps and the help of our churches the people starve, especially their kids".

Given Ryan's libertarian instincts this means his only "creative" solution to fighting poverty would be to foursquare eliminate the means of poor people to survive while in poverty! This would be analogous to a draconian dictatorship asserting it will manage a "creative war on overpopulation" but by exterminating one-sixth of the people!  Instead of providing good jobs and remuneration so the people don't have to reproduce so much, this sort of bunch takes the "axe" to the numbers directly!

The other intractable problem noted in the article is the absence of any upward job mobility in the area. That is, the inability of all the low paid workers to find new jobs that pay better. To try to overcome this problem, the workers would have to leave for "greener pastures"- maybe to another state. But to be able to leave, they'd have to first be able to sell their homes, and they can't. NO one wants to buy them! So they are stuck in place with no potential for job enhancement. Even going to school to improve skills requires money for tuition, etc. and they don't have it.

Coupled with this is another problem that neither Paul or his 'pukes mentions much: the offshoring of the GOOD paying service jobs overseas, to reduce labor costs. Approximately 663,000 such jobs have been outsourced to eastern Europe, China and Mexico since 2002 including: information technology, human resources, finance and purchasing orders ('More Service Jobs Go Overseas', USA Today, Dec. 7, p. 1B).  The jobs pay a respectable wage of about $16 an hour - more than double the pathetic $8/hr. of the Ohio workers. In other words, these jobs would have allowed those in the poor areas to have lived dignified lives as opposed to going to food stamps for assistance.

Worse, The Hackett Group, a consulting firm, projects another such 375,000 jobs will be offshored by 2016.  Again, these are from companies "with a least $1 billion in annual revenues" and which represent 75% of the market for offshoring jobs. How can U.S. workers win in such an environment which has engineered a race to the bottom as far as labor costs? The answer is they can't.

Yet Paul Ryan expects us to believe he has a "creative solution" to the war on poverty which now affect nearly 1 in 6 Americans and 21% of all children, nearly 15 million to be exact. (A family of 4 is considered poor if it has an annual income below $22,350. )

Would Paul Ryan, one of the original self-described "Young Guns" on Capitol Hill, take the bread from those 15 million kids in order to win his "war on poverty"? You had better believe it! This is also why Obama and the Dems can't give one inch on the "fiscal cliff" discussions - in terms of spending cuts if the Reeps don't cede REAL increases in tax RATES, as opposed to smoke and mirrors revenue increases via closing unnamed loopholes.

We cannot allow the reptiles to extract painful cuts, or raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67 by letting them give up nominal revenue while the rich still get richer.

The "Myth of Starving Americans" - SAYS WHO?

Well, it's no wonder Mitch Romney can blurt out that "I don't really care about the very poor!" given recycled textual detritus such as appeared in the WSJ on Jan. 30 ('The Myth of Starving Americans', p. A15). And btw, while Romney enjoins us all to "look at my whole sentence" - and to be fair, he did add "they have a safety net" (although one he would like to strip away as I will show in a future blog), there are dozens of ways he might have re-worded his opinion to prevent his Freudian slip being unleashed.

For example, he could have phrased it:

"They either have ample resources or access to a safety net, so I am not overly concerned right now with the very rich or very poor"

More or less putting his rhetorical "exclusions" on the same plausible footing, as opposed to markedly opening with one and the initial words "I don't really care....".

But perhaps the Freudian slip was triggered by the piece in the WSJ by Warren Kozak (who also happens to be the author of a new book ('LeMay') praising the biggest renegade ever to serve as a Joint Chief, Curtis LeMay. The guy who begged JFK to bomb Cuba, thereby inciting a nuclear war, and who compared Kennedy to Neville Chamberlain when he refused!)

Kozak does concede on opening that "a hungry child is the ultimate third rail in the entitlement debate. Few candidates- Democratic or Republican - would even question conventional wisdom on this particular issue because that would make them look indifferent to hungry children and that of course is political death".

As well it should be, so then why does Kozak proceed to look askance at this conventional wisdom? Maybe because he can? This despite the fact that more people are now on food stamps than anytime in history, not because they want to be....but because the financially unsound policies of the BushCo regime - which launched new wars without paying for them, and delivered nearly $3 trillion in tax breaks to the wealthiest, incepted the financial collapse in 2008 along with unwise unregulation of securities and fraudulent bond ratings.

But that is another blog. Or more accurately, the past substance of at least a half dozen blogs I've done already, mainly last year.

Kozak writes:

"The U.S. government spends close to $1 trillion a year providing cash, food, medical care, housing and services to poor and near-poor people"

But HOW much is this, really?

Let's note first that the government's defined poverty line is $12,968 for 2009 for an over-65 couple, and roughly $22,000 for a family of 4. However, neither of these threshold limits has been altered since 1969 - when the value of the dollar was five times greater than in 2009. This means that one can logically argue the poverty levels are lowballed, and more plausibly the poverty line for a family of 4 today would be around $48,000/year. This means up to 70 million households are in poverty. Add in seniors, and you get as many as 80 million households, with perhaps 165 million people affected or more than half the country! This means if anything government benefits are too meagerly distributed.

If there are 80 million households in poverty and needing some kind of assistance, then how far does that $1 trillion go? Performing the math, this comes to about $12,500 per household, but obviously this will vary according to the types and thresholds of benefits. Some households may need both Medicaid for ailing kids and food stamps, others will just need food stamps, no Medicaid. Leave out welfare, and the total comes to only $10, 000 per household. (I leave out welfare because all welfare programs are now predicated on 'welfare to work'- so the person must work a certain number of hours to obtain it or attend school directed toward fruitful employment.) Eliminate unmployment insurance, which should not be considered as part of this "entitlement matrx" because this is part of what companies pay - not all from government - and you bring it down lower. But we will leave it at an even $10,000/ year.

Perhaps $7,500 of that will plausible go for medical assistance, say via Medicaid, and that leaves $2,500. If we regard that as primarily for food, then that works out to about $208 a month. That's for four people! Kozak claims that - based on his $1 trillion figure, "Of that about $111 billion is spent on food in federal and state programs".

But again this isn't exactly breaking the bank! If there are 165 million in need, as I calculate (based on revising the lowballed poverty rates since 1969) then that means about $627 each for food per YEAR! Obviously, Kozak is using the lower poverty numbers, and this would be closer to 50 million people or about 1 in 6 Americans, if one accepts the census figures (which obviously I do not because they are based on the lowballed poverty thresholds!) .

Then, in that case, each receives about $2,220 per year. So of course, a guy like this hack would wonder where the money is going! Indeed, he writes:

"Yet despite this spending stories of rampant hunger persist. With all that money going out, how is that possible?"

Uh, because it's NOT enough, jackass, because you and the feds have lowballed the actual poverty rates! DUH! As I showed, the actual allotment for food, if my revised poverty etimates are correct, translates into a food money deficit per year amounting to $2,220 - $627 = $1,593. Or, if you wish to put it another way, that $111 billion cited by Kozak being spent ought to actually be about 3.5 x higher, or $380.5 b a year! Then if THIS was the amount spent, Kozak wouldn't have to be beseiged by so many "stories of rampant hunger persisting".

Is this really all that much? Consider: we have pissed away - to NO avail, and no profit, in my opinion, roughly $10b per month since the Afghan incursion, invasion began 10 years ago. Do the math! The total of this useless pissing out on a nation that will surely revert to Taliban control once we leave (as we must because we lack the $$ to remain there) comes to $120b a year or $1.2 trillion over the whole time. (I won't even bother to add in the cost of leaving all that equipment behind, which ran to $330b for Iraq. Get that? $330 b in cost just to leave millions of pounds of military materiel behind. That would almost feed all the U.S. hungry for one year!)

But I'm not done! Add in the cost of the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest and you add in another $900b for ten years! Add in the cost of the Iraq war - a war of choice, totally - and you get another $2.2 trillion. Add in all these together and you get: $2.2 trillion + $1.2 trillion + 0.9 trillion = $4.3 trillion! How much is that relative to the measly $380.5 million to feed 165 million famished Americans each year! Do the math on your own to see how far that $380.5 million would stretch if all that wasted money was available!

You ought to arrive at 11.3 YEARS! That is how long we'd be able to feed our hungry citizens on $380.5 billion a year if we hadn't pissed trillions away on two wasted occupations and a decade of tax cuts for fat cats.

Yet Kozak pisses and moans about a measly $111 billion spent on food for one fuckin' year!

Having shot his wad with this nonsense, Kozak isn't above using more spurious stats to try to reinforce his specious case that 26 million American kids aren't really going to bed hungry each night....no ...it's all in their little heads. Or ours!

He claims that two wonks (RObert Rector and Rachel Sheffield) from.....wouldn't you know it? The Heritage Foundation...

"found that according to Census Bureau data for 2009..of the almost 50 million Americans classified as poor, 96% of the parents said their children were never hungry"

First, as I already showed, the "50 million poor" is bogus, and lowballed. As for the parents saying their kids weren't hungry...well, doh! Would you admit on a census questionnaire you weren't able to properly provide for your kids? Give me a break! What do you take people for, stupid? Of course, parents - already shamed - will sugarcoat the information or put a smiley face on it! That doesn't mean their kids aren't hungry or don't go to bed in that state!

He goes on, oblivious to the basics of human psychology:

"Eighty three percent of poor families reported having enough food to eat and 82% of poor adults said they were never hungry at any time in 2009 due to lack of food or money."

And you believe this, nitwit? Because that's what they stated on a government questionnaire? If so, I have three acres of prime oceanfront resort to sell you in Barbados! (For his information and other readers, numerous papers on psychological response questions have been done over the decades to show such surveys can't be trusted, especially when they entail questions regarding whether the respondents are: a) racist, b) have sex x times or less a week, or c) reflect on their incapacities in economic terms.)

People by nature will give false or deceptive responses on these sensitive issues (which let's face it, reflect on their worth in the society's eyes) , because,.....the TRUTH FUCKIN' HURTS! But see, a bozo like Kozak refuses to take this into account because the converse bolsters (or he thinks it does) his phoney case that hungry Americans is a myth.

Not done yet, this miscreant then goes on to bellyache that:

"Today, two out of three lunches served at schools are free or nearly free"

He then implies such kids who eat school lunches, and are all the better for it (Colorado for example is trying to expand it through the No Kid Hungry campaign, which includes an awards program for schools that serve breakfast to more kids) , see e.g.

http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_19864743

are "tax eaters" and not tax payers, to use LBJ's old comparison. He then complains that "where once there were strict guidelines" on what foods could be purchased with food stamps - actually now benefit cards, that no longer applies. He obviously hates the thought of people being able to purchase anything other than cabbage in bulk, large rice sacks, oatmeal, flour, macaroni or milk.

His last solution to this food over-spending?

"If able-bodied, non-elderly recipients of food stamps were made to work the numbers would drop dramatically"

In other words, see those kids gobbling school food in the photos for the D. Post piece? (See link). Make 'em work before they eat! Good, ol' fashioned 'Murican values! No work, no eats! Tough luck, kid!

Great! So if either Newt or Mitt gets in, and especially with a Repuke House and Senate, we can expect a massive return to child labor - with kids mopping floors and cleaning toilets, just to get a square meal a day! Well, one good thing: At least the cheering Gooper-Teepee crowds will now be screaming 'Let 'em work!', as opposed to 'Let 'em die!', say, in the case of the medically uninsured who can't afford to pay for treatments for severe adverse health conditions!

The Top 0.1% Put the 1 Percent to Shame!

Top: The $65,000 all copper tub that's now a favorite buy of the top 0.1%. Below: their favorite dessert - a $25,000 apiece Frrrozen Haute Chocolate. How can they eat this thing every week without choking?

With the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement and the proper and overdue attention to the luxurious lives of the upper 1%, we have cast our eyes upon major defects in our alleged "free market" economic system that has allowed these rascals to profit at the expense of the rest of us. In an earlier blog,

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/10/how-one-percenters-live.html

I examined how these privileged scions of wealth live, most having obtained it via inheritance. I noted how they regularly can go on about their Tiffany's shopping sprees, and lengthy golf vacations to St. Kitts-Nevis, without being harassed by the "lesser" folks or made to feel some guilt for their excesses.

But what of the top 0.1 %? These are even greater reprobates of unearned and unmerited wealth and have no shame at all about flaunting it in the face of the rest of us, including the 14 million kids who lack enough food each day.

First, how have these rapscallions made out like such bandidos? Like all the greatest capitalist robber barons most have grabbed their vast wealth as a result of: 1) becoming expert speculators, either in the commodities futures markets, or via hedge funds, and 2) been blessed to have had to pay only 15% capital gains taxes on their killings, while Joe and Mary Schmoe of the middle class, must often pay at least that much PLUS a payroll tax in the vicinity of 6.2% (though it's been 4.2% the past year). Add in the effect of the Bush tax cuts, and the 0.1% garner an additional (estimated) $1 million a year free and clear- often ending up paying zero tax, effectively, according to tax expert David Cay Johnston (Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the super Rich and cheat Everyone Else).

This would be enough moola to instantly pay off the total college debts of five Harvard grads, and perhaps fifty grads hailing from public universities. But what do the upper 0.1% do with their money? Well, they do further speculation in their (rigged) markets, they donate huge campaign donations to their favorite Republican pols, candidates or they splurge on the latest hip luxury items, services. A rose wine wrap a day, anyone? Jetting to St. Kitts for 18 holes of golf? Easy as pie!

Pictured are two of the indulgences the wealthiest have been choosing lately, that is, buying $65,000 copper tubs to lounge in while they read their favorite Wall Street Journal columns on the op-ed pages, and enjoying a $25,000 "Frrrozen Haute Chocolate" from Manhattan's Serendipity 3. Now, think,.....THINK...of how many poor, underfed American kids the money from the purchase of that single confection could serve in a month!

But do these rich bastards who gorge on these things, often once per week, have any thought for their fellow malnourished Americans? Of course not! In fact, their giving - donation rate is below that of most Middle Class Americans (2% annually).

Second, what can we expect if the Bush tax cuts, for example, are extended even longer term to these parasites? Well, if the Republicans have their way, and they will if they're in control of the executive and legislative branches next year (if insufficient people vote Dem in Nov. 2012) we may expect an almost total consolidation of our political and economic system by these renegades. We aren't talking of a 90% control, but of 100%, a plutocracy!

In this case, we will expect to see at least 30 million unemployed and nearly half that many homeless, wandering the highways and biways, asking for any kind of handout ...for food, or work. Kids will leave college in droves without finishing, because even after two years they'll have compiled a half million or more in debts, due to variable interest rates approved by the polticos subservient to this criminal capital.

It's in our hands to put a crimp in their plans, but only if we vote next year and that means NO on any Repuke!