Thursday, October 20, 2005
The New War on the Poor
http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20051019/the_new_war_on_the_poor.php
by Paul Waldman
October 19, 2005
Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. His next book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, will be released in the spring by John Wiley & Sons.
Now that President Bush’s plan for partial privatization of Social Security has been spat out of the public’s mouth in disgust and shelved indefinitely, the left has a rare victory it can savor. And one coalition, consisting in part of those who formed Americans United to Protect Social Security, is looking to duplicate that success on a new issue: the conservative attempt to use the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for a new war on the poor. A group of progressive organizations has formed the Emergency Campaign for American Priorities , a “grassroots, grass-tops, public relations and lobbying campaign to convince Congress to stop a plan backed by President Bush and the Republican congressional leadership that would drastically cut programs that primarily benefit the poor and middle class to finance tax cuts that benefit only the wealthiest among us.”
Will they succeed? Can progressives without any institutional power beat back yet another retrograde Republican plan? The answer is a qualified yes, but it will be an uphill battle.
As many have begun to notice, while President Bush was speaking nice words about the effects of racism and poverty on those who became Katrina’s victims, Republicans in the administration and Congress were preparing to use the tragedy as an opportunity to pursue the same agenda they had in mind all along. With an executive order, Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates that government contractors pay the “prevailing wage” in the area of operation to their workers, thereby enabling contractors to slash the wages of workers helping to rebuild the Gulf Coast. In order to pay for the reconstruction, Republicans in Congress have proposed cutting programs like Medicaid that directly serve the poor. Some have even suggested cutting taxes for the wealthy, because—well, because that seems to be the Republican solution to pretty much any problem.
As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told The New York Times: “We've gone from a situation in which we might have a long-overdue debate on deep poverty to the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that low-income people will be asked to bear the costs. I would find it unimaginable if it wasn't actually happening.”
But 11 years into the Republican Revolution, should any of us be surprised?
Even as Katrina recedes from the front pages, the opportunity for progressives to pose to the public the kinds of fundamental questions that define the ideological divide in America has not been lost. What sorts of security do we expect from our government? Who is it that government supposed to serve? What are our moral obligations to the vulnerable amongst us? What does our vision of the good society look like? If progressives can generate discussion on these questions, they will be able to put conservatives back even farther on their heels.
This battle is fundamentally different from the Social Security fight in a number of ways. For starters, there is not a single bill or policy proposal progressives are opposing, but a whole host of moves coming from the executive branch and Congress.
Secondly, the argument progressives were making on Social Security—that Republicans wanted to take away something the public values highly—was both simple and extraordinarily powerful. People are extremely loss-averse, and Social Security may be the single most popular program the federal government administers.
So the argument about what the Republicans are up to needs to be made in a way that links the current issues to the larger ideological divide between progressives and conservatives. The cronyism and corruption that courses through this administration is not simply an accident or the acts of a few “bad apples”—it is the direct consequence of the conservative creed. For decades, conservatives have been telling us that government can’t do anything right, and when they got complete power, they set out to prove themselves right. Of course they installed incompetents like Mike Brown in crucial positions, because they just don’t care whether government serves the people. Of course every event, positive or negative, has been an excuse to cut taxes on the wealthy, because that’s what they believe in above all else. Of course Tom DeLay and Karl Rove are under investigation for abuse of power, because power is what government is all about for them.
It is critical that as ECAP and others make these arguments and beat back Republican efforts to strike at the most vulnerable, they do so in terms that are persuasive to all Americans. “We must help the poor,” for all its moral rightness, is not the most politically effective argument one can make. The sad fact is that among all the things the federal government does, direct aid to the poor (welfare, food stamps, etc.) is among the least popular. That doesn’t mean the public wants to dismantle those programs; their feelings run more toward grudging acceptance than outright hostility. But it does mean that arguments about poverty must flow from larger progressive principles that apply across classes. Cutting Medicaid is wrong because it deprives Americans of security. Pushing for lower wages is wrong because it deprives hardworking people of opportunity.
Progressives need to pick out a small number of the policies the Republicans are pursuing and bring them to the front of the rhetorical line. One perfect candidate is the suspension of Davis-Bacon. People believe that an honest day’s work deserves an honest day’s pay. And it isn’t as though there will be a dearth of contractors willing to come to the Gulf Coast and feed at the enormous federal trough. Changing the rules so that the contractors can charge poverty wages and increase their profits even more, giving the residents of the Gulf Coast who suffered so much another slap in the face? How can that possibly be defended?
The answer is, it can’t, which is why progressives should make the Republicans try. Just as they did on Social Security, progressives will be successful if they force members of Congress to defend something their constituents are against. The turnaround in Republican rhetoric was remarkable: After most every Republican had been advocating some form of Social Security privatization for years, when the issue actually came to the fore and members had to lay their markers down in a public way, Republican after Republican jumped off Bush’s sinking privatization ship.
But Bush’s Social Security scheme depended on public persuasion, something that isn’t true of executive orders and the budget reconciliation process, where much of the new war on the poor will be waged. Progressives need to realize that Republicans are probably going to accomplish at least some of what they’re trying to do. So they must be made to pay a price. Sometimes you can win by losing—although it’s even better to win by winning, which is what happened with Social Security. Not only did the president’s plan fail, but the debate sharpened distinctions between progressives and conservatives, and Democrats, for a change, actually seemed to be standing firm on a fundamental principle. In the case of the post-Katrina debate, since progressives don’t have any institutional levers at their command, they need to tell a story about what the Republicans are up to that advances the larger progressive cause.
The lesson of recent events is that when the American people get a good, long look at the content and consequences of the conservative agenda, they want no part of it. It is only when that agenda can be enacted stealthily that it is able to move forward. So progressives need to highlight on every front just what it is that the Republicans in Congress and the White House are trying to do. If they can do that, they’ll succeed.
by Paul Waldman
October 19, 2005
Paul Waldman is a senior fellow at Media Matters for America. His next book, Being Right is Not Enough: What Progressives Can Learn From Conservative Success, will be released in the spring by John Wiley & Sons.
Now that President Bush’s plan for partial privatization of Social Security has been spat out of the public’s mouth in disgust and shelved indefinitely, the left has a rare victory it can savor. And one coalition, consisting in part of those who formed Americans United to Protect Social Security, is looking to duplicate that success on a new issue: the conservative attempt to use the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for a new war on the poor. A group of progressive organizations has formed the Emergency Campaign for American Priorities , a “grassroots, grass-tops, public relations and lobbying campaign to convince Congress to stop a plan backed by President Bush and the Republican congressional leadership that would drastically cut programs that primarily benefit the poor and middle class to finance tax cuts that benefit only the wealthiest among us.”
Will they succeed? Can progressives without any institutional power beat back yet another retrograde Republican plan? The answer is a qualified yes, but it will be an uphill battle.
As many have begun to notice, while President Bush was speaking nice words about the effects of racism and poverty on those who became Katrina’s victims, Republicans in the administration and Congress were preparing to use the tragedy as an opportunity to pursue the same agenda they had in mind all along. With an executive order, Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates that government contractors pay the “prevailing wage” in the area of operation to their workers, thereby enabling contractors to slash the wages of workers helping to rebuild the Gulf Coast. In order to pay for the reconstruction, Republicans in Congress have proposed cutting programs like Medicaid that directly serve the poor. Some have even suggested cutting taxes for the wealthy, because—well, because that seems to be the Republican solution to pretty much any problem.
As Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told The New York Times: “We've gone from a situation in which we might have a long-overdue debate on deep poverty to the possibility, perhaps even the likelihood, that low-income people will be asked to bear the costs. I would find it unimaginable if it wasn't actually happening.”
But 11 years into the Republican Revolution, should any of us be surprised?
Even as Katrina recedes from the front pages, the opportunity for progressives to pose to the public the kinds of fundamental questions that define the ideological divide in America has not been lost. What sorts of security do we expect from our government? Who is it that government supposed to serve? What are our moral obligations to the vulnerable amongst us? What does our vision of the good society look like? If progressives can generate discussion on these questions, they will be able to put conservatives back even farther on their heels.
This battle is fundamentally different from the Social Security fight in a number of ways. For starters, there is not a single bill or policy proposal progressives are opposing, but a whole host of moves coming from the executive branch and Congress.
Secondly, the argument progressives were making on Social Security—that Republicans wanted to take away something the public values highly—was both simple and extraordinarily powerful. People are extremely loss-averse, and Social Security may be the single most popular program the federal government administers.
So the argument about what the Republicans are up to needs to be made in a way that links the current issues to the larger ideological divide between progressives and conservatives. The cronyism and corruption that courses through this administration is not simply an accident or the acts of a few “bad apples”—it is the direct consequence of the conservative creed. For decades, conservatives have been telling us that government can’t do anything right, and when they got complete power, they set out to prove themselves right. Of course they installed incompetents like Mike Brown in crucial positions, because they just don’t care whether government serves the people. Of course every event, positive or negative, has been an excuse to cut taxes on the wealthy, because that’s what they believe in above all else. Of course Tom DeLay and Karl Rove are under investigation for abuse of power, because power is what government is all about for them.
It is critical that as ECAP and others make these arguments and beat back Republican efforts to strike at the most vulnerable, they do so in terms that are persuasive to all Americans. “We must help the poor,” for all its moral rightness, is not the most politically effective argument one can make. The sad fact is that among all the things the federal government does, direct aid to the poor (welfare, food stamps, etc.) is among the least popular. That doesn’t mean the public wants to dismantle those programs; their feelings run more toward grudging acceptance than outright hostility. But it does mean that arguments about poverty must flow from larger progressive principles that apply across classes. Cutting Medicaid is wrong because it deprives Americans of security. Pushing for lower wages is wrong because it deprives hardworking people of opportunity.
Progressives need to pick out a small number of the policies the Republicans are pursuing and bring them to the front of the rhetorical line. One perfect candidate is the suspension of Davis-Bacon. People believe that an honest day’s work deserves an honest day’s pay. And it isn’t as though there will be a dearth of contractors willing to come to the Gulf Coast and feed at the enormous federal trough. Changing the rules so that the contractors can charge poverty wages and increase their profits even more, giving the residents of the Gulf Coast who suffered so much another slap in the face? How can that possibly be defended?
The answer is, it can’t, which is why progressives should make the Republicans try. Just as they did on Social Security, progressives will be successful if they force members of Congress to defend something their constituents are against. The turnaround in Republican rhetoric was remarkable: After most every Republican had been advocating some form of Social Security privatization for years, when the issue actually came to the fore and members had to lay their markers down in a public way, Republican after Republican jumped off Bush’s sinking privatization ship.
But Bush’s Social Security scheme depended on public persuasion, something that isn’t true of executive orders and the budget reconciliation process, where much of the new war on the poor will be waged. Progressives need to realize that Republicans are probably going to accomplish at least some of what they’re trying to do. So they must be made to pay a price. Sometimes you can win by losing—although it’s even better to win by winning, which is what happened with Social Security. Not only did the president’s plan fail, but the debate sharpened distinctions between progressives and conservatives, and Democrats, for a change, actually seemed to be standing firm on a fundamental principle. In the case of the post-Katrina debate, since progressives don’t have any institutional levers at their command, they need to tell a story about what the Republicans are up to that advances the larger progressive cause.
The lesson of recent events is that when the American people get a good, long look at the content and consequences of the conservative agenda, they want no part of it. It is only when that agenda can be enacted stealthily that it is able to move forward. So progressives need to highlight on every front just what it is that the Republicans in Congress and the White House are trying to do. If they can do that, they’ll succeed.
