NY Times Claims Cash For Poor People Is "Unpopular"

The Gray Lady might be ostentatiously clutching her pearls over Donald Trump's anti-social treatment of migrants and refugee children, but that doesn't mean its sympathy for the downtrodden is universal.

On the contrary. In a well-buried (Page A17) article outlining Trump's latest plans to demonize and punish the poor by labeling nearly all social safety net and entitlement programs with the dog-whistle "welfare," the Times explains:

The plan, which will most likely face significant opposition in Congress from Democrats and some Republicans, includes relocating many social safety net programs into a new megadepartment, which would replace the Department of Health and Human Services and possibly include the word “welfare” in its title.

Mr. Trump and his budget director, Mick Mulvaney, the architect of the plan, have sought to redefine as welfare subsistence benefit programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and housing aid. It is part of a rebranding effort, championed by conservative think tanks and House Republicans, to link them to unpopular direct-cash assistance programs that have traditionally been called welfare. (my bold.)

Unpopular with whom? The Times doesn't say. But the implication is that everybody - the dwindling number of people receiving the paltry stipends and people who heartily resent those receiving paltry stipends - are just as disgusted as the conservative politicians and the real welfare kings and queens of America: the billionaires and the corporations.

 Nor does the newspaper explain that, thanks to Bill Clinton's cruel "reform" of welfare in 1996 and the discontinuation of long-term direct cash aid to the poor, giving money directly to families is nothing but a misty memory of the New Deal anyway.

FDR's Aid to Families With Dependent Children was replaced with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) block grants. Since this program limits cash aid to two years and imposes job requirements upon poor mothers with few or no child care subsidies, perhaps the Times meant to say that it's the mechanics of this meager substitute, which has actually plunged millions of people into extreme poverty since its inception, that is so unpopular with beneficiaries. The hoops that must be jumped through and the paperwork that is commonly lost before those temporary checks ever come trickling in is a feature, not a bug, of TANF. The mental aggravation and shame it engenders might actually be called an "unpopular" impediment to those thinking of applying for help.

As reported by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, in fact, less than one-fourth of all qualifying poor people eligible for TANF ever get benefits. This is down from the 68% of eligible people who signed up for aid in 1997.

Decreased access to TANF benefits has left the poorest families without resources needed to meet their basic needs.  TANF’s predecessor, AFDC, played a significant role in reaching families, particularly those with children and those in deep poverty.  TANF has failed to maintain that standard.  TANF benefits are not sufficient to lift families out of poverty in any state,^[9] and TANF does far less than AFDC did to lift families out of deep poverty.  While AFDC lifted more than 2.5 million children out of deep poverty in 1995, TANF lifted only 420,000 children out of deep poverty in 2014. (See Figure 4.)  In 1995, only three states had more families living in deep poverty than receiving AFDC.  By 2016, the vast majority of states had more families living in deep poverty than receiving TANF.  
Under TANF, the poorest families have become worse off.  In the decade after TANF’s creation, average incomes fell by 18 percent among the poorest children in single-mother families, reflecting a large drop in the receipt of cash assistance.  These families recouped some of these losses after 2005 due to expansions of SNAP, while their average income from TANF benefits continued to decline during the Great Recession.  Still, between 2005 and 2012, these single-mother families lost further ground.

Figure 4

Meanwhile, the Times article continues, the consolidation of the remaining New Deal and Great Society programs into one super-agency under the authoritarian directorship of one bureaucrat will make them that much easier to cut, if not abolish outright.

“They have been using the word welfare because it is pejorative,” said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. “The programs you can call welfare are actually very small in comparison to SNAP, which is an income support necessary to help families, workers and millions of kids.”

I think, especially in light of the recent border atrocities, we all should realize by now the value that our political system places on families and children. While the Republicans are viciously punishing people, the Democrats feebly promise to "invest" in them as long as they stay in school, work hard, and play by all the cutthroat rules of the relay race we call Life.

In other words, neoliberal capitalism kills, and it kills absolutely. 

Rebranding programs which help children, the unemployed, the disabled and the elderly along with millions of working poor people struggling to get by on stagnant wages as "welfare" would presumably be greeted with wide public support, by both liberals and conservatives, educated and uneducated alike. This is because most polling is slanted toward the interests of the rich.

For example, one recent Los Angeles Times survey about public attitudes toward government aid to the poor was conducted with funding from the arch-conservative American Enterprise Institute. Is it any surprise that respondents answered the questions in the manner most pleasing to the oligarchs paying for the "research?" For example, most of the thousand or so people contacted agreed that government "welfare" has failed to bring people out of poverty.

Ominously, therefore, slapping the welfare label on workers who qualify for Medicaid and food stamps, despite earning above the official ridiculous $24,000 cutoff of the poverty line for a family of four, might make it easier to demonize whole new swaths and new generations of struggling Americans living paycheck to paycheck.

Extra cash money for the poor and near-poor? According to the Times, this is such an unpopular concept that it doesn't even bear discussion, let alone pride of place on the front page alongside Trump's much more important, outrage-engendering tweets and his exciting fascist rallies.

 Nor has there been any prominent coverage of this weekend's Poor People's Campaign march on Washington for social and economic justice and an end to endless wars and militarism. Maybe that is because the corporate sponsors of our corporate media don't consider tens or hundreds of thousands of poor people taking matters into their own hands and taking to the streets to be all that "popular," either. The last thing they want is for too many voters to start adding the word "poor" to the prescribed list of political identities.

They'd prefer you just identified as a person who aspires to join the ephemeral middle class and whose only civic duty is to vote every two or four years.