What would
it take to convert today’s GOP from its “Bah, humbug” campaign against the
poor? What could change politicians willing to let food-stamp help for households
of four with children, the aged and disabled shrink from a maximum of $668 a month
to $432 over a year, leaving them an average of $1.40 per meal or 35 cents each?
Callous
is not enough to explain it. Republican governor John Kasich of Ohio declares, “I’m
concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor. That, if you’re
poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.”
The
answer, suggests Paul Krugman, involves more than the credo of Paul Ryan’s
former idol Ayn Rand, decrying the underprivileged as “looters and moochers” who
sap the rewards of those who make money and are, by definition, worthy of all
they can get.
Krugman
cites research showing Republicans “’very conscious of being white in a country
that is increasingly minority’--and seeing the social safety net both as
something that helps Those People, not people like themselves, and binds the
rising nonwhite population to the Democratic Party. And, yes, the Medicaid
expansion many states are rejecting would disproportionately have helped poor
blacks.”
Adding
racial fears to Baby Boomer sense of over-entitlement begins to fill out the
picture of those who, as in Dickens’ Victorian days, would pass “Poor Laws”
requiring those displaced by the Industrial Revolution to work on treadmills as
punishment for receiving welfare.
As
Ryan and his Tea Party cohort work hard to decimate food stamps for America’s
Tiny Tims and their families, Dickens must be up in pop heaven plotting a
sequel to “A Christmas Carol” in which a handful of American Scrooges outdo his
greatest creation in stupidity and meanness.
If
only they could be struck by a vision of their Christmas Future...
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