Posted on 03/14/2014 8:21:41 AM PDT by Loud Mime
Yesterday, Paul Ryan spoke at length on a conservative radio talk show about the role of work in raising people out of poverty. Asked what the Republican plan was to end poverty, he replied:
In a nutshell, work works. Its all about getting people to work. And when you were one of the leaders of welfare reform in the 1990s, we got excoriated for saying that as a condition of welfare, people should go to work and it should be a bridge not a permanent system. And it worked very well, but there were dozens of other welfare programs that didnt get reformed that have sort of overtaken events and have now made it harder for people to get into work. We call it a poverty trap .
Thats the tailspin that were looking at in our communities. You know your buddies Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard, those guys have written books on this, which is we have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of hard work so theres a cultural problem that has to be dealt with. Everyone has got to get involved.
And the usual reaction comes in 3, 2, 1
My colleague Congresswoman Ryans comments about inner city poverty are a thinly veiled racial attack and cannot be tolerated. Lets be clear, when Mr. Ryan says inner city, when he says, culture, these are simply code words for what he really means: black.
Thats from Representative Barbara Lee. We hear something similar from Al Sharpton, who calls it a dog whistle, a message that is supposed to be inaudible to everyone else, heard only by Ryans secret racist audience. So how comes Sharpton and Lee are the only ones who can hear the whistle?
This is why we cant have nice things.
Or rather, this is why we cant have a civil and intelligent discussion about poverty or welfare reform. Or any discussion at all. Because every time someone on the right opens his mouth, he is immediately denounced as a secret bigot speaking in racial code.
This is an obvious act of psychological projection, because it is the left that has long since converted all discussion of economic policy and the welfare state into mere place-holders for racial politics. They are the real code-talkers, and the motive is obvious: precisely to shut down discussion of these issues, leaving the unreformed status quo in place.
While this may serve an obvious political end, it certainly does no favors to the poor to rule honest discussion of their plight to be out off limits. In fact, it validates Ryans argument that those who want to reform welfare are actually more compassionate than the average progressive, whose compassion begins and ends with voting for a politician who promises to throw other peoples money at the problem. As Ryan puts it, if youre driving from the suburbs to the sports arena downtown by these blighted neighborhoods, you cant just say: Im paying my taxes and government is going to fix that.
And the chart cited by Al Sharpton, that noted policy wonk, to refute Ryan actually confirms his point. Sharpton claims that the welfare state has reduced the poverty rate from 26% to 16%, but if you look at the fine print, it reads: factoring in safety net, i.e., welfare payments. As I have pointed out elsewhere, this means that many of those who have been helped by the War on Poverty are still unable to provide for themselves. The welfare state has not cured poverty, it is merely ameliorating the symptoms. Which is precisely what Ryan was talking about when he said that the welfare state is a poverty management system.
All of this is an excellent example of my point about how narrative thinking has taken over the left. This is the underlying reason we cant have a conversation about poverty and the welfare state. There seems to be no point in citing facts, data, or arguments about poverty and its causes. Its a language the left cant bring themselves to understand. Instead, they prefer to think in terms of images and metaphors, like the bridge at Selma.
Needless to say, these are self-flattering metaphors, in which theyre all Martin Luther King, Jr., and their opponents are all Bull Connor.
This is the real code spoken by the left, and its why they wont allow a real conversation about welfare (and a great many other things) with those whose code is facts, reason, and the ordinary usage of the English language.
Bump.
The rats’ 80 year jihad to divide America, to foment more and more divisions among us is bearing its bitter fruit. As the Framers knew, a republic requires a certain level of shared traditions and values. Destroy that commonality and the republic will descend into anarchy. Once the people with property to defend demand the government “do something,” will be the day Obama drops the presidential mask and reveals the totalitarian he is.
Here is how Jefferson described what worked well in 1782: Jefferson On Welfare.
Let's get the Federal Government out of this!
William Flax
“My colleague Congresswoman Ryans comments about inner city poverty are a thinly veiled racial attack and cannot be tolerated. Lets be clear, when Mr. Ryan says inner city, when he says, culture, these are simply code words for what he really means: black.”
OK, I guess the shoe fits. If the criticism somehow especially applies to one group, then that group needs to consider the criticism. Now, what are you going to do about the dysfunctional “black” culture, Miss Lee?
screw Paul Ryan he is an amnesty pimp
The poverty rate in 1950 was 30%. In 1965 it was 15%. After 49 years’ and the Great Society transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth, it is still, for all intents and purposes, 15%.
From a David Horowitz column:
In 1969, the year that publishers reissued Alinskys first book, Reveille for Radicals, a Wellesley undergraduate named Hillary Rodham submitted a 92-page research project on Alinsky for her senior thesis. In her conclusion Clinton compared Alinsky to Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King, as someone who was considered dangerous not because he was a self-declared enemy of the American system, but because he embraced the most radical of political faiths -- democracy.In any discussion with a Leftist activist, things will never resolve, because the activist will never admit his real agenda, and never concede anything which might hinder his agenda, which is getting more power and money.The title of Clintons thesis was There Is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model. In this title she had identified the single most important Alinsky contribution to the radical cause his embrace of political nihilism. An SDS radical once wrote, The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. In other words, the cause of a political action whether civil rights or womens rights is never the real cause; women, blacks and other victims are only instruments in the larger cause, which is power. Battles over rights and other issues, according to Alinsky, should never be seen as more than occasions to advance the real agenda, which is the accumulation of power and resources in radical hands. Power is the all-consuming goal of Alinskys politics.
This focus on power was illustrated by an anecdote recounted in a New Republic article that appeared during Obamas presidential campaign: When Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one-word answer: You want to organize for power! In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote: From the moment an organizer enters a community, he lives, dreams, eats, breathes, sleeps only one thing, and that is to build the mass power base of what he calls the army. The issue is never the issue. The issue is always building the army. The issue is always the revolution
Guided by these principles, Alinskys disciples are misperceived as idealists; in fact, they are practiced Machiavellians. Their focus is invariably on means rather than ends. As a result they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies or theoretical dogmatisms in the way their still admired Marxist forebears were. Within the framework of their revolutionary agendas, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is power
You would have more luck getting a defense attorney to concede in court that his client is a scumbag who should be executed.
"The poor we will always have with us".
We are not all the same. There will always be people who are not productive enough to be worth paying enough to give them a middle-class standard of living, particularly since the definition of "poor" has always been a moving target.
In the US, how many people are really poor by the standards of rural India?
The government has taken over the areas that were once the domain of churches and other ethics based organizations.
They are offering superior benefits and NO demands of ethical behavior. Instead, they promote un-ethical behavior.
thanks for the link!
I’m going to find the original Jefferson piece.
Absolutely! We are subsidizing the corruption of the population. And this goes not only to undermining the work ethic; undermining personal responsibility.
We are also teaching those who fail and go on the dole to hate those who succeed. This shows up daily, particularly in urban America, where you have the maximum degree of "diversity" & "Multi-culturalism." Anyone would have to be blind not to see what is happening.
William Flax
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