Why Do Republicans Believe Spending Dedicated To Helping People Is Wrong?

According to new information (reported by VOX) anti-poverty spending does far more good than we’ve been told. Why do Republicans hate helping the poor? Maybe it’s their way of looking at things. If you measure everything in dollar terms, obligation is bad, therefore irresponsibility is good; spending is bad, therefore not spending is good.

Republicans, believing what corporate lobbyists tell them, assess problems in dollar terms too. If you spend a lot of money on a problem it’s a big problem. If you spend no money on a problem it’s not a problem at all. They choose the second approach. Problems which no money is spent on don’t exist. Poor and sick people die more quickly, quietly and (above all) more cheaply if you limit their access to healthcare. If you can use their health problems to extract maximum profits out of them that’s not a problem either, that’s a good thing. But obligation to heal people is expensive and therefore a problem.

Food benefits to poor people are a relatively small part of government spending but if you don’t know any poor people it seems like an easy item to cut when you’re trying to maximize tax benefits to your wealthy contributors and the people you golf with. From where the average Republican lives you hardly notice children going hungry. If it causes them to do poorly in school you can tell yourself it’s their moral failure. If they have to work three minimum wage jobs to feed their kids you can say that is a measure of high morality. By refusing to give them a food subsidy you are doing them a favor by making them better people. They're setting a better example for the children they are never home to see or interact with.

The effectiveness of anti-poverty spending isn’t measured in the same way on the Republican side. It’s not effective if it helps poor people because the good done by spending is not measured by the Republican accountant unless that money is spent in an upward direction. Money spent on people down the income scale is measured as a negative, the way accountants measure employee pay and benefits. The good we do in life almost always subtracts from profits.


Meanwhile, in Kansas, the capitalist utopia, where corporate tax cuts bloom like sunflowers and there are no public needs because there is no money to spend on public needs… a governor is hurting. Poor pitiful him. (The whole sad story is in the Kansas City Star.)

Brownback isn't the only example of Republican nuttiness. There's Dan Burton, former Republican senator from Indiana, now a lobbyist for bogus science and cult worship. (Reported in Forbes.)


The Republican Right seems to be certifiably insane. It believes the best way to fiscal responsibility is to cut taxes. The best way to make a fair society is to make sure all tax liability falls on people who work 9-5 jobs. And the best way to handle healthcare is to make sure it’s unaffordable for sick people and poor people so they die more quickly, cheaply and quietly.

And the best medicine apparently isn’t the kind pioneered by Pasteur and Salk and the other lifesaving scientists who delivered us from mass epidemics. Republicans used to be a practical and sensible lot. A bit stodgy and stingy but sound. Now they are represented by fruitcakes and sociopaths and hypocrites. A sad end to the once progressive party of Lincoln and T.R.

The Late Great Middle Class

For the past generation the Middle Class has been stuck or declining while tip top incomes and accumulated wealth have grown enormously. Taxes that previous Republicans thought fair have been labeled "Communist" and "class warfare".

Taxing the rich isn't Communist. Nor is it Communist to pay working people decently; it's practical. Better paid employees pay the taxes that build the roads but they also make better consumers, which makes a stronger economy. A topheavy economy, like the one the Republicans have built, is unstable and more likely to collapse. Here is an excellent report from the BBC website.

Business insiders are noticing what's happening to the middle class, and they're worried even if the very rich don't care. They know you can't run an economy on jewelry and yacht purchases.

As noted in The Economist (hardly a leftist magazine), this ongoing recession, caused by the recklessness of the largest investors and financial institutions, is causing the impoverishment of the middle class, but is also discarding an entire generation of young people. New graduates from college may never gain their footing, careerwise and incomewise.

And there's this, from Forbes, on Rick Perry's odd rant that the middle class doesn't pay its share of taxes.

It isn't only the "liberal" media that's acknowledging how our tax structure tilts to benefit the upper classes. (And how it doesn't create jobs.) Responsible conservative journals are writing about it too. Our economy is unfairly rigged. Besides being unfair, it's also less productive and impractical.

What's Happening In Wisconsin?

I've been following this story in The Nation, but also in Forbes, which isn't exactly a leftist Maoist Commie rag.

If you remember the 80,000 African American voters Kathleen Harris conveniently removed from the Florida voter rolls in 2000, helping deliver the White House to George W. Bush... it's happening again. This time it's Wisconsin. It's all part of the long term Republican plan to cut non Republicans, young people, old people, working people, brown people, new citizens and others out of elections.

They've already figured out how to hide vote tallies on personal laptops for easier manipulation.

And it's in the works in Florida, Ohio, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, Louisiana and elsewhere. First they make democratic government not work, then they kill it.

When a highly respected historian and UW professor got wind of their tactics and their aims, they came down on him hard. It's easier to do that if most people are too afraid or distracted to complain about what is happening. So complain. Worry. Send letters. Protest. Educate your friends.