Found here. My comments in bold.
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It's hard to know where to start with this article. The author invents a preferred president (ostensibly Hillary, but his president bears no resemblance to Hillary) who cares so much about the poor, who so perfectly toes the line and flawlessly spouts leftist rhetoric, who apparently has little regard for constitutional limits to her power, and is blissfully unaware that government is already doing all of this.
This is the president of the author's dreams, a wistful pipe dream about how an elected official needs to properly press the author's emotional buttons. Hillary is to be the feeder of the masses, the royalty who deigns to dirty herself by hugging poor children and spooning out mashed potatoes in the soup kitchen because she's so compassionate, the Deliverer into the promised land.
Oh, if only we could have this president! Poverty would no longer exist! There would be no need, no hate, no crime. It's within our grasp to have utopia, if only Hillary were president!
For too long we have been failing to fight together for what we know will work to ensure that everyone has a shot at the American Dream.
This post originally appeared at The Nation.
In my dream, the next president is an antipoverty president because she knows in her bones that the way we think about poverty in America is wrong, the way we treat people in poverty is wrong, and therefore what we do about poverty is more off the mark than need be. (That is, 40 years of the Great Society has failed, and we need to do something different, right? Not.)
My president declares herself the educator in chief on poverty, and uses the bully pulpit to teach Americans. She tells the stories of struggling people and their experiences, and regularly takes us to communities that are used to being dismissed, demonized and disempowered. (Note the condescension. We Americans need to be taught about poverty. We are so ignorant and uncaring that we need this compassionate president to hammer us with sob stories. In fact, it's our fault that communities are being "dismissed, demonized and disempowered," because that's what our ignorance causes us to do.
For too long we have been failing to fight together for what we know will work to ensure that everyone has a shot at the American Dream.
This post originally appeared at The Nation.
In my dream, the next president is an antipoverty president because she knows in her bones that the way we think about poverty in America is wrong, the way we treat people in poverty is wrong, and therefore what we do about poverty is more off the mark than need be. (That is, 40 years of the Great Society has failed, and we need to do something different, right? Not.)
My president declares herself the educator in chief on poverty, and uses the bully pulpit to teach Americans. She tells the stories of struggling people and their experiences, and regularly takes us to communities that are used to being dismissed, demonized and disempowered. (Note the condescension. We Americans need to be taught about poverty. We are so ignorant and uncaring that we need this compassionate president to hammer us with sob stories. In fact, it's our fault that communities are being "dismissed, demonized and disempowered," because that's what our ignorance causes us to do.
This of course is the exact opposite of what his happening. Welfare programs have relegated millions of people to the economic ghetto of government dependency, left with no hope, no self-worth, and no opportunities. A government check is all that constitutes their lives, dangled in front of them to hopefully distract them from the reality of their situations.
They are "dismissed, demonized and disempowered" by the very system that purports to meet their meager needs. It is a plantation created, installed, and perpetrated by government.)
My president shows Americans that people in poverty are not who we have been led to believe they are — some fixed group that has lost its initiative; that, in fact, more than half of us will experience at least one year of poverty or near poverty during our working years. She recognizes that while generational poverty is important, it is only a small part of poverty; that over a three-year period, only 3.5 percent of people were in poverty for the entire 36 months, while the national poverty rate ranged between 15 and 16 percent. (The author shifts from his dream president to myth-busting by minimizing persistent poverty and amplifying temporary situational poverty. However, it is the author himself who perpetrates myths. In fact, in Baltimore, "two-thirds of African-American families will start off in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods and still be in this same set of neighborhoods a generation later, compared to only 40 percent of white families." Even the leftist Huffington Post disagrees with the author.)
She teaches that most of us fall into poverty because of universal experiences — like the birth of a child, an unexpected illness, job loss or reduced work hours — which is why we have a safety net that is there for all of us; and though it is much maligned, it is highly effective. (Note the clever phraseology, "fall into." That is, people who weren't poor and then find themselves in poverty. This is a completely different topic than generational poverty, a bait and switch to make it seem like most poor people weren't poor before.)
My president explains that without the safety net our poverty rate would be nearly twice as high today — approaching 30 percent. (Whaa? How could that possibly be known? We don't have a control group to test what the real poverty rate would be absent the forced impoverishment of government handouts.
My president shows Americans that people in poverty are not who we have been led to believe they are — some fixed group that has lost its initiative; that, in fact, more than half of us will experience at least one year of poverty or near poverty during our working years. She recognizes that while generational poverty is important, it is only a small part of poverty; that over a three-year period, only 3.5 percent of people were in poverty for the entire 36 months, while the national poverty rate ranged between 15 and 16 percent. (The author shifts from his dream president to myth-busting by minimizing persistent poverty and amplifying temporary situational poverty. However, it is the author himself who perpetrates myths. In fact, in Baltimore, "two-thirds of African-American families will start off in the nation’s poorest neighborhoods and still be in this same set of neighborhoods a generation later, compared to only 40 percent of white families." Even the leftist Huffington Post disagrees with the author.)
She teaches that most of us fall into poverty because of universal experiences — like the birth of a child, an unexpected illness, job loss or reduced work hours — which is why we have a safety net that is there for all of us; and though it is much maligned, it is highly effective. (Note the clever phraseology, "fall into." That is, people who weren't poor and then find themselves in poverty. This is a completely different topic than generational poverty, a bait and switch to make it seem like most poor people weren't poor before.)
My president explains that without the safety net our poverty rate would be nearly twice as high today — approaching 30 percent. (Whaa? How could that possibly be known? We don't have a control group to test what the real poverty rate would be absent the forced impoverishment of government handouts.
However, we can look at the history. Here is the historical poverty rate for the last 50 years.
Note that the poverty rate was in steep decline prior to LBJ's Great Society programs. Note also that subsequent to the beginning of the war on poverty there was a slight continuation of the downward trend for a few years, and has been roughly level at around 12% ever since.
We can conclude that welfare programs have had little if any effect on poverty rates.)
She states clearly that cutting poverty in half is not “losing a War on Poverty” — cutting poverty in half means that we are half way to where we want to be. (She will also suggest that we stop using that tired, dated metaphor.) (I read this several times, and it still doesn't make sense. Who has said that cutting poverty in half is losing a war on poverty? And why is that losing the war on poverty? Finally, when has poverty been cut in half?)
My president tackles head-on the foolish notion that the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant — our cash assistance program — should serve as a model for our safety net. She acknowledges that whatever the intentions of those who created the program, it has not done what it was supposed to do — unless what it was supposed to do was make assistance nearly impossible to come by, erode any national standard of basic economic decency, and drive people into deeper poverty. (The author once again veers off course, apparently to criticize this program.)
She explains to us that when TANF was created in 1996, for every 100 families with children living in poverty, 68 were able to receive cash assistance; now that number is down to just 23. In 12 states, 10 or fewer families are helped for every 100 in poverty. My president warns us that when we hear talk of block-granting Medicaid, food stamps or housing assistance, what we are talking about is less health care, less food, less housing and lower standards for assisting vulnerable people. (On and on and on...)
Instead of embracing a broken program like TANF, my president embraces the evidence about what works and shares it with the American people. She teaches, for example, that women who had access to food stamps early in life fared better as adults than their peers who didn’t — that they had better health outcomes and increased economic self-sufficiency, including less welfare participation. She notes, too, that boosting a struggling family’s income when children are young is associated with greater education performance and increased earnings when those children reach adulthood. (Will the author ever get back to his fantasy president?)
My president reminds us that we need to use such evidence to keep moving forward in our antipoverty efforts, and to ensure that we don’t turn back to recent and far worse times. ("Keep moving forward" means do more and more of the same things that got us to this present situation.)
She tells us to consider the words of Peter Edelman, who traveled down to Mississippi in 1967 with then-Sen. Bobby Kennedy, and said, “We saw children who were tangibly, severely malnourished — bloated bellies, running sores that wouldn’t heal. It was this incredibly awful, powerful experience that’s with me all the time.” (I'm willing to bet that Peter Edelman and Bobby Kennedy didn't get out their checkbooks and feed those people).
That was what America looked like before we expanded the food-stamp program to take on hunger, she reminds us. (Wait a minute. that was 1967, nearly three years after the installation of the food stamp program!)
My president constantly engages with the grassroots and the nascent antipoverty movement to build support for action — just as occurred with the passage of the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act and, more recently, the Affordable Care Act. (That is, she is an agitator, a sower of discontent, a facilitator of the overthrow of the bourgeois.)
My president tackles head-on the foolish notion that the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant — our cash assistance program — should serve as a model for our safety net. She acknowledges that whatever the intentions of those who created the program, it has not done what it was supposed to do — unless what it was supposed to do was make assistance nearly impossible to come by, erode any national standard of basic economic decency, and drive people into deeper poverty. (The author once again veers off course, apparently to criticize this program.)
She explains to us that when TANF was created in 1996, for every 100 families with children living in poverty, 68 were able to receive cash assistance; now that number is down to just 23. In 12 states, 10 or fewer families are helped for every 100 in poverty. My president warns us that when we hear talk of block-granting Medicaid, food stamps or housing assistance, what we are talking about is less health care, less food, less housing and lower standards for assisting vulnerable people. (On and on and on...)
Instead of embracing a broken program like TANF, my president embraces the evidence about what works and shares it with the American people. She teaches, for example, that women who had access to food stamps early in life fared better as adults than their peers who didn’t — that they had better health outcomes and increased economic self-sufficiency, including less welfare participation. She notes, too, that boosting a struggling family’s income when children are young is associated with greater education performance and increased earnings when those children reach adulthood. (Will the author ever get back to his fantasy president?)
My president reminds us that we need to use such evidence to keep moving forward in our antipoverty efforts, and to ensure that we don’t turn back to recent and far worse times. ("Keep moving forward" means do more and more of the same things that got us to this present situation.)
She tells us to consider the words of Peter Edelman, who traveled down to Mississippi in 1967 with then-Sen. Bobby Kennedy, and said, “We saw children who were tangibly, severely malnourished — bloated bellies, running sores that wouldn’t heal. It was this incredibly awful, powerful experience that’s with me all the time.” (I'm willing to bet that Peter Edelman and Bobby Kennedy didn't get out their checkbooks and feed those people).
That was what America looked like before we expanded the food-stamp program to take on hunger, she reminds us. (Wait a minute. that was 1967, nearly three years after the installation of the food stamp program!)
My president constantly engages with the grassroots and the nascent antipoverty movement to build support for action — just as occurred with the passage of the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act and, more recently, the Affordable Care Act. (That is, she is an agitator, a sower of discontent, a facilitator of the overthrow of the bourgeois.)
My president uses all of these tactics — visits to struggling communities and people’s own stories, evidence of what works and doesn’t work, and her own courage and determination — to embark on a new antipoverty/pro-opportunity agenda. It’s an agenda that, among other things, includes: a bold jobs program to help rebuild our neighborhoods, schools and infrastructure; raising the minimum wage so that it can once again lift a family of three out of poverty just as it could in the late 1960s; closing the gender pay gap, which would cut poverty in half for working women and their families; paid leave and affordable childcare, so that people can work and take care of their families and don’t have to choose between them; immigration reform, so that our most vulnerable workers aren’t exploited; and a commission to explore reparations for African Americans and educate the public about this issue. (A laundry list of leftist causes...)
For too long we have been listening to lies, not recognizing our progress and failing to fight together for what we know will work to ensure that everyone has a shot at the American Dream.
My president puts an end to that madness and begins a new day. (Hmm, that sounds ominous. How does his president put an end to the madness? Stifle dissent? Speech codes? Exclusion? Browbeating those who disagree? Using the tax code as a bludgeon? Internment camps?)
For too long we have been listening to lies, not recognizing our progress and failing to fight together for what we know will work to ensure that everyone has a shot at the American Dream.
My president puts an end to that madness and begins a new day. (Hmm, that sounds ominous. How does his president put an end to the madness? Stifle dissent? Speech codes? Exclusion? Browbeating those who disagree? Using the tax code as a bludgeon? Internment camps?)
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