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Scott Walker And The GOP Are Wrong About The Safety Net

Scott Walker And The GOP Are Wrong About The Safety Net

It’s back and Democrats are going to have to deal with it. I’m talking about the political argument that they want to lure as many people as possible into government dependency.

This is a staple of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s incipient presidential campaign, and he frames it as simple common sense. “Oftentimes when I think about the president and people like Hillary Clinton, I hear people who I think measure success in government by how many people are dependent on the government. By how many people are on food stamps and Medicaid and unemployment,” he said this week at the Florida Economic Growth Summit in Orlando. “I don’t know about all of you, but my belief in America is that we should measure success by just the opposite.”

Walker added: “I don’t remember any of my classmates saying to me ‘Hey, Scott, someday when I grow up, I want to become dependent on the government.’ Nobody signed my yearbook ‘Dear Scott, Good luck becoming dependent on the government.'”

Very funny, and a lot more appealing than Mitt Romney’s assertion that 47 percent of the electorate is dependent on government and will never take responsibility for themselves. The problem with Walker’s formulation, however, is that he’s creating straw politicians. President Obama and Clinton and practically everyone in their party — in fact both parties — talk incessantly about education, job creation, income inequality, and how to increase wages. That doesn’t sound like a yearning for Handout Nation. It sounds like people obsessing over how to make America a country of tubs standing on their own bottoms.

I’m not saying that Democrats haven’t given Republicans ammunition. The 2012 Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia” cartoon slideshow was a parody waiting to happen. From Julia’s enrollment in Head Start as a preschooler to her retirement aided by Medicare and Social Security, the sequence gave off a distinctly Soviet, cradle-to-grave vibe.

As pediatric neurosurgeon-turned GOP candidate Ben Carson put it in his announcement, “We’re not doing people a favor when we pat them on the head and say ‘there there, you poor little thing, we’re going to take care of all your needs. You don’t have to worry about anything.’ You know who else said stuff like that? Socialists.” That was less than a week after a real socialist — Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — announced he was running for the Democratic nomination.

Obama came into office amid the worst recession since the Great Depression. The rolls of the three programs Walker named swelled as people lost jobs, income and health insurance. Job losses climbed to a terrifying 818,000 in January 2009, the month Obama was inaugurated. Another 2.2 million jobs were gone by the end of April. The unemployment rate was at or near 10 percent for eight months. So yes, there were a lot of people relying on government programs, for good reason. The private sector had completely failed them.

Obama’s chief economic message for years has been about sustained job creation and an unemployment rate nearly down to half its recession peak, not high enrollment in safety-net programs. Democrats do try to educate people about benefits for which they may qualify. But the goal is to get them on their feet, not lock them into dependency.

There is one area of government “dependency” that Obama and his party are proud of, and that is health insurance. The Department of Health and Human Services said this week that 10.2 million people bought private health coverage this year under the Affordable Care Act, and 85 percent of them receive federal subsidies to help pay for it. Millions more have been able to enroll in Medicaid as a result of the ACA expansion of the program to people with incomes slightly above the official poverty line. For those who believe health coverage should be universal, the numbers justify a victory lap.

People who receive insurance help, or food stamps or unemployment benefits, do indeed depend on the government — just like farmers, homeowners, corporations, and anyone else who receives subsidies or tax breaks, as well as companies that don’t provide health insurance or living wages. And just to be clear, if they are not children, disabled, or elderly, people who use the safety net often have jobs. Nearly 43 percent of all food-stamp recipients live in a household with earnings, according to the Department of Agriculture. The Kaiser Family Foundation, in a study of states that haven’t adopted the Medicaid expansion, found there are workers with full- or part-time jobs in 66 percent of the families eligible for it.

Jeb Bush has called the safety net “a spider web that traps people in perpetual dependence.” We are going to hear a lot of statements like that in the next 18 months. But that doesn’t make them true.

Follow Jill Lawrence on Twitter @JillDLawrence. To find out more about Jill Lawrence and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

The Poor Get A Moment

The Poor Get A Moment

WASHINGTON — Will we regard poverty as a haunting national problem, or will the focus groups continue to tell politicians of all stripes to talk only about the middle class because mentioning the poor is politically toxic?

Might the condition of low-income Americans galvanize religious people to see alleviating poverty and righting social injustice as moral issues? The habit in political writing when discussing “moral issues” is to refer only to abortion or gay marriage. But what implicates morality more than the way we, as a society and as individuals, treat those who are cut off from the ladders of advancement and the treasures of prosperity?

And can we find a way of thinking constructively about the role of family breakup in setting back the life chances of poor kids while still recognizing that family life itself is being battered by rising economic inequality, the loss of well-paying blue-collar jobs, racism, and mass incarceration?

These are some of the questions I am left with after moderating a discussion about poverty at Georgetown University this week. For all the obvious journalistic reasons, it’s not my habit to write about events in which I participate. But this particular panel was a bit different from the usual policy talkfest.

It included Robert Putnam, the author of Our Kids — a book that should focus our energies on the growing opportunity gap between lower-income and better-off children — and Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, who has been urging his fellow conservatives to “declare peace on the safety net.” It also happened to include the President of the United States.

Others can judge more objectively how the discussion went. What’s obvious is that presidents don’t usually do panels and that the spirit of this one broke from so much of what we’ve grown accustomed to, in its civility and even good humor. Yet I was also reminded how far we have to go before we achieve anything close to consensus about what is to be done to liberate the least among us.

The fact that it took place at all is a tribute to religious leaders (particularly the Catholics and evangelicals involved in organizing the Poverty Summit, as the event sponsoring the panel was called) who are trying to push the alleviation of poverty to the top of the faithful’s agenda. Something is stirring in the religious world. Pope Francis certainly has something to do with this, but there’s also the tug of history. Religious groups were long at the forefront of our nation’s movements for civil rights and economic justice. People of faith are reassuming their rightful place in these struggles.

President Obama clearly wants to push that trend along. He acknowledged that he might be “self-interested” in this: He is closest to religious Christians on social justice questions and furthest away on abortion and same-sex marriage. But he insisted that religious Americans have a “transformative voice” that could alter the nation’s trajectory on poverty.

He also mentioned that social justice concerns have “incredible appeal, including to young people.” The panel took place on a day when the Pew Research Center issued a report showing a remarkable decline of religious affiliation. Among the youngest millennials (those 25 and under), 36 percent are now religiously unaffiliated. A broader religious agenda might bring some of them back.

Yet the session also highlighted the political and intellectual barriers to action. Brooks offered moving words urging his fellow conservatives to treat the poor as “brothers and sisters,” not as “liabilities to manage.” Obama welcomed Brooks’ witness, but noted the reluctance of so many conservatives to spend new public money to open up opportunity for the needy. “There’s been a very specific ideological push not to make those investments,” he said.

The family issue remains neuralgic. Obama spoke powerfully about being “a black man who grew up without a father” and “the cost that I paid for that.” But his words can’t settle the ongoing and often divisive argument over whether family difficulties should be seen primarily as a cause of poverty or as the effect of poverty itself. That the right answer is complicated doesn’t make things any easier.

Still, this doesn’t take away from the small miracle that the concerns of the poor briefly slipped into a political discussion usually focused far more on the doings of billionaire donors. Americans with low incomes can’t get much nourishment from words, and sentiments don’t create jobs. But for a moment, they weren’t invisible.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

Photo: Franco Folini via Flickr

How The Safety Net Cuts Poverty Rates

How The Safety Net Cuts Poverty Rates

By Jake Grovum, Stateline.org (MCT)

WASHINGTON — Without Social Security, the poverty rate among senior citizens in the U.S. would be more than 50 percent; instead, it’s just 14.6 percent. For people of all ages, food stamps cut the poverty rate by about 10 percent, and they reduce poverty among those under 18 by even more than that. And refundable tax credits, many of which help the working poor, reduce the poverty rate among children by more than a quarter.

That’s the power of the safety net, as shown by new U.S. Census Bureau data measuring poverty in America. The federal poverty rate is based solely on income — for 2013, it was $23,624 for a family of four. But the so-called Supplemental Poverty Measure, released this month, adjusts income to account for the value of housing subsidies, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (also known as welfare), Social Security, food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and other programs.

The supplemental measure also factors in the cost of living and out-of-pocket medical costs in different areas of the country. In expensive areas such as Honolulu, Washington, D.C., and large swaths of California, for example, families earning more than $30,000 are considered to be living in poverty.

While it’s difficult to discern how much each program reduced poverty in each state, it is possible to calculate the extent to which people in each state benefit from some of the primary safety net programs.

The U.S. supplemental poverty rate in 2013 was 15.5 percent, the census found, equal to 48.7 million Americans. That rate was higher than the official poverty measure — which was 14.6 percent, or 45.8 million.

For individual states, the rates are an average of rates from 2011, 2012 and 2013. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia were poorer under the supplemental measure than under the official one. California had the largest gap between its supplemental and official poverty rates, followed by Hawaii, New Jersey, Florida, Nevada, Maryland, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Alaska, New York and Illinois.

In 26 states, the poverty rate was lower under the supplemental measure than it was under the official measure. The states with the biggest differences were New Mexico, Mississippi, Kentucky, West Virginia, Montana, Idaho, South Dakota and Oklahoma.

The census analysis illuminates the extent to which individual programs cut the poverty rate, by calculating what the poverty rate would have been without the benefit. For example, without Social Security, the poverty rate would have been nine percentage points higher among all Americans.

National school lunch programs reduced the child poverty rate by one percentage point. Even relatively small programs, such as the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which on average pays about $500 per household, left a dent.

Tax credits are a powerful anti-poverty measure. The most well-known is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income working individuals and couples that totaled more than $65 billion last year. Many states have similar credits that piggyback on the federal one but aren’t included in the federal data.

Mississippi claimed more than $1 billion in EITC dollars. Mississippi taxpayers who received it got an average of $2,817, compared to the national average of $2,300. Vermont recipients had the lowest average payment, at just under $1,900.

The impact that a benefit has on a state’s overall poverty rate largely depends on the number of state residents who receive it. In West Virginia, for example, nearly one in four residents is on Social Security. Last year, West Virginia received a total of $524 million in Social Security payments, or $282 per capita. In Alaska, only one in 10 residents receives Social Security. In that state, Social Security payments totaled $97 million, or $133 per capita.

The benefits of food stamps also vary by state: States with high percentages of their populations enrolled, like Mississippi, saw more than $330 in food stamp payments per capita. In Wyoming, it was less than $100 per capita.

Image: Donkey Hotey via Flickr

Canada Can Be Tough On Immigration

Canada Can Be Tough On Immigration

Two years ago, Jeffrey Niehaus was a popular teacher at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. An American, Niehaus had applied for permanent residency in Canada. But Canada turned him down. The reason? The psychology professor’s 4-year-old son, Kurt, had autism. Treating autism would have been too costly for the government’s health care system.

Americans often think of Canada as a softie nation. But though Canada may be the land of government picking up your medical bills, it’s also the land of rules that must be followed. When it comes to immigration, Canada doesn’t mess around.

“Every single Canadian that I talked to was shocked that that was the decision,” Niehaus told me.

The university hired an immigration lawyer for him. British Columbia provided a letter asserting that covering the Niehauses would be fair exchange for their economic contribution. (In Canada, the provinces run their own health care systems.) A member of Parliament in Ottawa called Niehaus offering her help.

Local reporters wanted to take the story national, but Niehaus said no. The family had options back home in America. “We decided to go ahead and land soft,” he said. “We were really OK.”

Niehaus now teaches at Christopher Newport University in Virginia. And Kurt is getting treatment for autism — though at greater expense to the family than would have been in Victoria.

Canada’s bureaucratic strictness on who gets in and its generous social safety net are not a contradiction but sides of the same coin. As conservative economist Milton Friedman once put it, “you cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”

Niehaus is not unsympathetic to the argument. “I understand that a country that is so dedicated to providing these basic needs to their citizens needs a say on who those citizens are,” Niehaus said. He does feel, however, that Canada’s rigid formula failed to consider that the economic value he and his wife would have brought to the country well exceeded the cost of treating their son.

Canada applies stern accounting to the wealthy on who gains entry, as well. For example, it recently suspended a program that issued special visas to rich foreign investors.

These were hardly your huddled masses. Applicants had to show a net worth of $1.6 million (Canadian) and supply a five-year interest-free loan to Canada of several hundred thousand.

Why did Canada halt the program? The government believed that immigrant investors tended to pay less in taxes — that is, they cheated on taxes — than did other immigrants, and they didn’t integrate as well. There was also a feeling that the value of permanent residency in Canada had been priced too low.

More than a thousand applicants — mostly from mainland China but also from Turkey, South Africa, India and Britain — are suing Canada for not having processed their applications in time to avoid the program’s cutoff.

Way down the income scale is the case of Michael Mvogo. The United Nations human rights monitor has rebuked Canada for keeping the native of Cameroon in jail for eight years. Found in a Toronto homeless shelter, Mvogo had arrived in Canada on a fake U.S. passport. Canada said that it has detained him for so long because his “true identity” has yet to be determined. There was no thought of freeing him, just of arranging for his deportation.

In the United States, warriors for tightening immigration and weakening the social safety net are often one and the same. But here’s what they don’t get: The more economic security a country gives its people, the more assurance it needs that the newcomers will become exemplary taxpayers.

And that’s why Canada’s immigration program is largely a model of law and order.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: tuchodi via Flickr

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