"The Right's Case of Affluenza"

[applegrove]

The Right's Case of Affluenza

By Jamelle Bouie at the Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/12/19/do-republicans-hate-poor-people.html

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In September, House Republicans passed a plan to slash food stamps by $40 billion over the next ten years, knifing the program and pushing millions of families into food insecurity. The charitable explanation is that this was a misguided attempt at deficit reduction. But then consider this: At the same time they cut food stamps, Republicans also passed agricultural subsidies, a virtual giveaway to large firms and wealthy farmers. If that wasn’t enough, there was also a brief push to require drug tests for welfare recipients, despite the lower incidence of substance abuse among people who receive benefits.

Likewise, Republicans have no desire to extend emergency unemployment insurance, even as the jobless continue to rely on it, a product of our lackluster response to the Great Recession. As Kentucky Senator Rand Paul explained, “When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you’re causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy.”

This wouldn’t be so bad if Republicans were also concerned with short-term economic performance, but they aren’t. For every conservative intellectual who is friendly to counter-cyclical economic policy, there are many more GOP lawmakers who want tight money and spending cuts in an economy starved for demand.

And we can’t forget Republican opposition to one of the largest anti-poverty measures in years—the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act, which comes almost fully funded by the federal government. Twenty states—all with GOP governors—have rejected the expansion, denying health insurance to 4.8 million low-income Americans for no real reason at all.



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