Posted on 05/25/2015 9:16:09 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
[full title] GOP’s demonic new crusade: Right-wing zealots look for even crueler ways to treat the poor like garbage
Happy Memorial Day! But if you’re in Wisconsin, and relying on food stamps, remember that Republicans don’t want you to have ketchup on your hamburger. They’d probably rather you didn’t have a hamburger at all, but Wisconsin farmers and ranchers have clout, and so proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program made room for Wisconsin products. But they still don’t want you to have “crab, lobster, shrimp, or any other shellfish.” Or ketchup. Or spaghetti sauce. Really.
For now, that’s all grandstanding. SNAP is a federal program, and the Obama administration hasn’t allowed states to restrict food purchases that way. But that hasn’t stopped GOP legislators from trying. Maine and Missouri want to ban SNAP “junk food” purchases. Wisconsin and 16 other states are also trying to drug test recipients.
And Wisconsin has nothing on Brownbackistan, I mean Kansas. The state has already outlawed the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program debit cards at a range of businesses, including movie theaters, college sports games (?) and cruise ships. (There goes the welfare cruise ship business!) Kansas TANF recipients also are unable to withdraw more than $25 a day from their accounts. That means to withdraw $100, they’ll pay five bank fees (since ATMs only dispense $20s). Banks win, the poor lose.
All this is happening against the backdrop of GOP policy failure. We’ve had a 30-plus year experiment in Republican approaches to the problems of poverty and declining economic opportunity – and it’s turned out abysmally. Ronald Reagan convinced a lot of people that “we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,” so Democrats came together with Republicans and slashed the largest welfare program for families with children, first in the states, then federally. Bill Clinton signed the federal bill into law, thinking he could get the issue of the lazy poor behind him, and then concentrate on the supports low-wage workers might need to climb.
Of course, Clinton never completed that part of his agenda; he got distracted by the GOP witch hunt known as impeachment. Republicans still didn’t want to make friends even after Clinton gave them punitive welfare reform; go figure.
Then George W. Bush became president, and we got a lesson in the way tax cuts create jobs – as in, they don’t. In eight years of the Clinton administration, which raised top tax rates, 23 million jobs were created, compared with 3 million in the eight low-tax Bush years.
It might be time to try a whole new approach to fighting poverty – raising the minimum wage; strengthening workers’ ability to bargain; investing in infrastructure to shore up our roads, bridges and rail system but also to create jobs; expanding access to college. Instead, red state GOP legislators are pushing ever crueler ways to treat the poor like garbage.
Sam Brownback’s Kansas is becoming an ever more awful dystopia. It’s an absolute laboratory for tax-cutting, welfare-slashing schemes, and it’s circling the drain economically. Scott Walker is an amateur compared to Brownback, but he’s working hard to make sure Wisconsin ties Kansas for the most dysfunctional economy.
The Wisconsin GOP’s bogus health claims for the SNAP cuts are belied, the Huffington Post observes, by the fact that the amended law now allows the purchase of any and all dairy products, thanks to the power of the state’s dairy lobby. Theoretically, a SNAP recipient could spent the whole month’s allotment on “Dippin’ Dots,” one legislator notes. “The ‘ice cream of the future’ is now on the list of what’s acceptable to pay for, but a bottle of ketchup is not,” he noted.
But of course this isn’t about the keeping the poor healthy; it’s about punishing them. The fact that the cuts almost certainly won’t be enacted makes them more cynical, in a way. This is how you tell the Kochs, and scared white people, that the slackers and moochers are being punished. It accomplishes nothing, but it’s good politically. That’s still the core premise of Republican politics, and it will remain so through the 2016 election, at least.
Back in the 1970’s Nixon was ‘right wing’ and ‘extreme’ in the minds of the Left even as he cut deals with Communists in the Soviet Union and China plus the fake ‘peace agreement’ in Vietnam.
Nixon didn’t reverse the welfare state (”The Great Society”) enacted by Democrat Lyndon Johnson and signed off on the EPA and OSHA.
Tweaking welfare programs is what I see here, not their elimination with the Left overdramatizing the tweaking into some extreme act that it is not.
Political propaganda and the facts always differ, the propaganda machine that supports the Democrats calls tweaking welfare ‘right-wing’ and the propaganda machine that supports the Republicans tries to use the extreme propaganda of the Democrats as proof of their conservatism.
I’m not biting and liking someone or their policies because the Left demonizes them. They did this when Nixon was president and for the most part it was overkill. Nixon was not conservative, just portrayed as one.
You cant blame us that our ideas have never been put into actin. But, on the oth4er hand all of our political capitol went for the country club and big business types to be pigs at the trough. It is our fault for letting that happen.
More of the slow march to civil war.
Hey Joan!
It is you Libs who maintain your voters in oppressive poverty rather than lifting them up with meaningful jobs, where they may find private sector opportunity and escape the clutches of the left.
Oh it's just a cut 'n paste. Walsh is an old Bolshevik, been writing this crap for decades. She said the same things in the 1970's.
She conveniently forgets that the jobs in the Clinton years happened after the GOP Congress cut taxes in 1995 and the Fed responded with lower rates, which finally broke loose the housing market. The Rapist had nothing to do with it, he was just forced to go along.
*Yawn* same old crap from her and Barbara Ehrenreich. Tens of millions of Third World desperately poor imported into the U.S. and she blames their poverty on the Evil Rich Whitey's.
Just crap.
“If you want more of something, subsidize it” - Ronald Reagan
Officers pose as potential food stamp buyers, arrest 2
http://wishtv.com/2015/05/23/officers-pose-as-potential-food-stamp-buyers-arrest-2/
JACKSON COUNTY, Ind. (WISH) — The Jackson County Sheriff’s Department arrested two Seymour residents within 20 minutes of receiving word of welfare fraud Friday.
The sheriff’s office was alerted that someone was using text messages to spread the word that food stamps were for sale for 50 cents on the dollar.
Posing as potential buyers, officers contacted the person selling the food stamp benefits. Officer Scott Davis, who has a background investigating welfare fraud, arranged to meet one of the suspects.
Police met up up with a woman and her boyfriend who were selling $150 worth of food stamps for $75.
Misty F. Woods, 34, and Joshua Turner, 33, were charged with aiding, inducing or causing welfare fraud, a class A misdemeanor.
Fentanyl patches were found on Woods.
Documents on Turner indicated he had received the food stamps five days earlier.
A little advice. Whenever you see the name "Salon", you need to remain cognizant of the fact that they are insane rabid idiots, on which much time should not be wasted.
They are literally crack pot loons, and the less traffic driven to their site, the better for the world.
You are correct and their outrageous headlines are getting longer and longer.
“This commie moron conveniently forgot BJ Clinton was riding the dot-com bubble that burst leaving Bush his recession.”
I believe that the 1990’s was the best decade this country had in 50 years, and who knows (if ever) things will be like that again. I feel sorry for the generation who grew up in that decade because it’s going to be hard for times in the future to measure up against that. It wasn’t Clinton so much as it was a technological explosion (the Internet among OTHER things). But other that the...you know what...Clinton was actually a fairly good centrist president.
Replace “Right-Wingers” with “Jews” and you’d have the Volkischer Beobachter.
Just as we have done in the past, we dismiss this kind of hyperbolic BS memeage as so stupid, that no one will believe it.
And yet, Barack Obama got elected, TWICE, using this exact kind of garbage.
Just to note Salon’s traffic and coverage, doesn’t include mobile:
Engagement
On Desktop, in April, 2015
estimated visits 18.2M
Time on site 00:05:19
Page views 2.30
Bounce rate 74.22%
And Free Republic, for the same period:
Engagement On Desktop, in April, 2015
estimated visits 3M
Time on site 00:05:27
Page views 3.08
Bounce rate 62.67%
I’m sure someone else can interpret these stats better than I can, but it sure seems as Salon is useful at spreading a meme.
Sorry, forgot to include the links:
http://www.similarweb.com/website/freerepublic.com
http://www.similarweb.com/website/salon.com
You’re right.
Joan Walsh projecting again.
For the most part, it’s the poor who treat themselves like garbage, that’s why they’re poor.
Not likely. They almost never do.
Thanks ... thought it was just me. lol ...
I read the entire stream-of-consciousness hyperventilation and couldn't figure out what in heck the author was rambling on about.
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