Tag: poverty

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Heartless Merciless Bastards

The penalties also include a lifetime ban on receiving welfare or food stamps for those convicted of drug felonies, prohibitions against getting certain jobs in plumbing, education and other fields, and the loss of the right to vote, for life in some states. New York Times, December 28, 2002

In the 1990’s, the Christian government of the United States put its heart into getting “tough on crime”, because they loved everyone. One of the things they did was pass a law that deprives convicted criminals of access to social programs intended to help people trapped in the cycle of poverty and social dysfunction.

Well, who are they intended to help? I don’t know. The U.S. government often acts as if it should be a crime to be poor, period. But let’s think about this. Most robberies are committed by people who need money. Most people who need money are poor. If a poor person commits a crime, steals money, because, after all, they have none, then let’s make sure they are always poor.

Not that welfare amounts to anything that could be interpreted as helping anyone get out of poverty in the first place, of course. But the logic is clear. The way to get rid of poverty is not by sharing the fabulous wealth most of us possess, or by making it easier for the poor to access education and social services, but by making your life on earth as hellish as possible, and one of the things we can do to ensure that is to make sure that you will never get any help again if you steal once.

States can opt out of the lifetime ban on welfare, but only two, New York and Connecticut, have.

The law is the brainchild of former Senator Phil Gramm, now vice chairman of UBS Warbuck, the investment bank. Well, we knew he wasn’t going to join Habitat for Humanity after his little lucrative stay in the Senate. It’s payback time for Mr. Gramm. After years of passing laws that are monumentally beneficial to the rich and to corporate interests, the corporate interests have put him more directly on their payroll. And it’s probably cheaper for them than it was when they had to contribute to his election campaigns instead to keep him in servitude.

In many states, convicted felons are barred from jobs like plumbing, teaching, health care, or security. I’m not making this up. In Pennsylvania, theft of two library books is sufficient to ban you for life from working in a nursing home. A man who was convicted of possession of marijuana (and received probation) when he was 18 recently discovered that, after 30 years of working in the health care field, he could not get a new job in the same field because of that previous conviction.

This is because our leaders love Jesus.

“The consequences affect millions of Americans. Thirteen million felons who are in prison or have done their time live in the United States, according to an estimate by Christopher Uggen, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. That is almost 7 percent of the adult population.”

[2011-03: that figure is now 10%]

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Cutting Taxes

I just read that there is an election in Texas, and all the
candidates are promising to reduce the size of government
and cut taxes.

Here in Ontario, Mike Harris, of the Progressive Conservatives (wouldn’t that name sit nicely on some of those Neanderthal Texans!), is also promising to cut taxes.

This puzzles me. It seems to me that we’ve been cutting
taxes and reducing the size of government since the Lyndon Johnson Administration. The Viet Nam War was the most expensive undertaking by the U.S. government at that time. I can’t remember the last time I heard a candidate promise to “increase taxes and make the government bigger”. But if everybody has been cutting taxes and reducing the size of government, it seems to me that there shouldn’t be very much of either left by now. Just two guys in a rented office in Washington, and a driver’s license bureau in Peoria.

Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter in 1979, promising to cut taxes. He criticized the Democrats as irresponsible “tax and spend” liberals. In 1979, the U.S. had a national budget deficit of about $45 Billion. Reagan won and cut taxes. He cut spending on a few things but increased spending on the military. When he left office in 1988, the U.S. national deficit was $500 Billion.

That’s the trouble with conservatives. When the deficits in most western countries were really high, they argued that governments could no longer afford to spend a lot of money on social programs and education and health care. People would have to make sacrifices for the good of the country. Workers would have to settle for smaller wages and less benefits. But then they went right out and squandered an unbelievable fortune on idiotic, ill-conceived, outrageously over-priced military hardware like the B-2 Stealth Bomber. (Remember– these are the companies that charged the Pentagon almost $1000 for a common pair of pliers, and $700 for a hammer). And the richest business and corporate leaders continued to give themselves mammoth increases in pay and benefits, while demanding that the government dump single mothers off welfare.

Is it really so surprising that “liberals” like Bill Clinton and Jean Chretien are finally eliminating those horrendous deficits? But even Clinton tends to give in to the military, which, in spite of the fact that America doesn’t have a single powerful enemy in the world, continues to spend money in the most wasteful way imaginable: on military technologies that are obsolete before they even hit production.

Think about this– the U.S. military budget reached a size that could truly be termed “colossal” at a time when most Americans believed that the Soviet Bloc was ten times as large and powerful as it is now. As it turns out, the Soviet Bloc was never anything near the military threat the Pentagon said it was. Yet the U.S. continues to spend even more today on the military than it did in the 60’s, 70’s, or 80’s. A lot of thoughtful people think that this whole Yugoslavian adventure is primarily a desperate attempt by the military to justify sustained expenditures on new toys.

One last thing about tax cuts. Conservatives like Mike Harris love to rave about how they are giving the same tax cut to everybody, rich or poor, white or black, male or female, gay or heterosexual. That’s right. Let’s see. Let’s say it’s a 4% tax reduction.

If you make $50,000 a year and pay $8,000 in taxes, Mike Harris is going to give you a hefty $320 back! Whoooeee! Don’t spend it all at once! You may want to save it for appointments with your acupuncturist!

Now, if you make $500,000 a year, and pay $100,000 in taxes, then your tax break amounts to…. hold on to your hat! $4000! That’s right. Even though you make way more money than the poor schmuck making $50,000, the province of Ontario is going to give you ten times as much money back! Sort of Robin Hood in reverse. Especially when you consider that to get that $4000, Mike Harris had to borrow $24 billion, which is now added to the province’s dept. Actually, he also got some of the money by reducing services at hospitals and schools, that benefit everybody regardless of income.

Lest you think I’m just another of those “tax and spend” liberals, let me assure you that I hate paying taxes as much as the next guy. It just peeves me off when the government borrows money from all of us to give a big tax break to a few. Let’s at least eliminate the deficit before giving out any big fat tax breaks, and lets make sure we have adequate housing, medical care, and social services too.

Do you like walking past the panhandlers in downtown Toronto? Me neither. Harris’ solution is to truck them out of down. My solution is to rearrange priorities. Second BMW for a wealthy Ontario family? Second. Affordable housing for poor people in Toronto? First. Done.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it to my dying day: even the rich benefit from a stable, safe society, and you can only have a stable, safe society if you ensure that wealth is distributed fairly among as many people as possible.