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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (181240)	2/4/2012 10:45:20 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542154

My husband and I spent our years in poverty in college. Almost everything we made, working out two pitiful jobs, went to rent (orange county wasn't cheap) and we needed to live close to the college so we could walk. I remember running out of food at the end of the month, and eating popcorn, or mac-n-cheese for days, until it ran out. And we couldn't get foodstamps- I can't remember why, but we didn't qualify. I am glad my own children were able to go through college more comfortably- and it's not like they needed to suffer to do well. My oldest has done very well indeed, and she didn't have to starve while doing it. As a member of the upper end of the household income scale, I'd never say we "struggled" to put the kids through college. Sure, my daughter's tuition at UC Davis took all of my part time salary, and half my full time salary- gross, not net- but my husband's salary could have supported us, so I can't call that struggling. Sure, we chose to pay for college instead of taking wild ass vacations- but choosing between the luxury of college, and the luxury of other things, is hardly "struggling". I teach a lot of students who come from very poor homes. While we make sure they aren't starving- as the schools do feed kids- the safety nets are not luxurious. And all this class warfare rhetoric coming from the right just makes me realize how out of touch and angry they are with poor Americans- whom they blame for being poor. And a lot of the time those poor Americans are working much harder than anyone else. I know students who have parents working 2 and even 3 jobs- to keep their families afloat- are middle class Americans doing that? Not for the most part. Class warfare, imo, is blaming poor people for being poor, and then targeting them for pain, just because they don't have the money to contribute to political campaigns. A moral society would make sure that suffering is minimized, and that people have a real chance of getting out of poverty- which involves not only imagining they have the opportunity to get out, but actually investing in ways to get them out. While I do not feel the Democrats have invested as much in getting the poor out of poverty as they should have, they've done a hellofalot more than the wingnuts. We need job training- in high schools, in urban areas, and elsewhere. And imo a CCC type organization would not be amiss, for those who want to work, and even those who don't- to train them to work, and to keep them working and in the habit of work, because work is a habit.

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (181240)	2/4/2012 1:18:58 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542154

The second assumption is that the very poor people are doing pretty well. You can see this on evidence any time any news story about social welfare appears, whereupon one is deluged with commenters about people on food stamps driving Jaguars and how unfair it is that some people get to live with these awesome safety nets while others have to work for a living. The Jaguar thing is a bit odd, traditionally it's a Cadillac. I know Cadillac has fallen in iconic stature with the rest GM, but Jaguar ain't what it used to be either. It was bought and regurgitated by Ford, and is now owned by, of all companies, Tata Motors of India. Tata is best known here for the Tata Nano, which was supposed to sell for 100k rupees in India, about $2k at the time, but has slipped up to about $3k currently. Anyway, the welfare Cadillac is of historic interest, celebrated in song by one Guy Drake in 1970. youtube.com This song apparently hit iconic stature when Nixon asked Johnny Cash to play it at the White House, but Cash supposedly hated it. Good for Johnny. And an appropriate anthem for Nixon's Southern Strategy, which lives on to today. The myth didn't reach its height until Reagan pounded it into the ground, though. From wikipedia: The term "welfare queen" is most often associated with Ronald Reagan who brought the idea to a national audience. During his 1976 presidential campaign, Reagan would tell the story of a woman from Chicago's South Side who was arrested for welfare fraud: "She has eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000."[4] en.wikipedia.org The wikipedia article explores the source of that one. There were, of course, actually cases of welfare fraud, but Reagan's story seems to have been at best an exaggerated composite. Sadly, today's Republican party has moved well beyond Reagan , who would in policy terms be considered at best a RINO by current standards. Now the exaggerated fraud tales have moved on to the voting front, and conservatives have the Limbaugh/Murdoch/Koch Bro axis at their disposal to pound all their myths into the ground. It's going to be an ugly year.