Trump Launches Aggressive Poverty Disinformation Campaign

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/article/trump-launches-aggressive-poverty-disinformation-campaign

Trump Launches Aggressive Poverty Disinformation Campaign
Saurav Sarkar & Aaron Noffke
September 10, 2018
The middle class is starting to look poor, but the president’s Council of Economic Advisers now argues that not even the poor are poor—all the better to cut programs that serve both groups.


Just how many Americans are poor? The Trump administration wants you to believe that just 3 percent of the U.S. population is poor. The Council of Economic Advisers made that claim in a little-noticed report published earlier this summer, as part of a coordinated effort to justify harsh new restrictions on government assistance programs.

This bad-faith estimate emerged more from a desire to hurt the poor than to engage in honest policymaking on the issue of poverty. In March, the Congressional Budget Office found that nearly half of social safety net payments are going to people that the federal government once considered "middle class."

Think about that: At a time when even the middle class is starting to look poor, the administration argues that not even the poor are poor so that federal officials can move to cut programs that both groups now rely on to stay afloat.

So what's behind this numbers game?

snip//

Defining poverty in narrow terms—whether through the OPM, the SPM, or through Trump’s farcical claim—sends this message: Debilitating economic conditions are perfectly acceptable to the broader society.

So why did Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers put out a bogus statistical measure on poverty that undercounts poor people in the United States? Simply put, the report was designed to help to stigmatize the poor and low-income people; to attack the programs that barely keep them afloat today, and to provide a glossy academic cover for the entire disturbing exercise.

Americans should not pretend poverty doesn’t exist. Instead, people need to demand that the federal government expand programs that have make inroads against poverty such as Social Security, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and SNAP benefits—while creating new programs to reduce household debt; promote wage growth, and to guarantee basic rights of economic well being.

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. Harming, killing the poor is a fantasy wet dream Ryan and others like him have had forever.

I think rump will harm or kill poor people if his base wants him to but he has no strong feelings either way, as long as he pays ZERO taxes and we pay for his golf games, he is happy.

But if need be rump will of course do what he can to kill as many poor as he can.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

2. Wealth & Income Inequality is a huge social problem that RubleCon-Trump Party make worse.

The current historically high levels do not last long. Either there will be

* historic wealth crash as in 1929

or

* revolution as in 1917

or

* peaceful increases in minimum wage, social assistance, and taxes on the rich.

Take your choice, folks. Many progressive plutocrats would choose the third alternative.

[Turbineguy]

3. Help!

I'm suffering from "massive wage growth"!

[sinkingfeeling]

4. This is destroying our trust in government to the point of ending the USA.

[Doreen]

5. I hate to say this but

I blame the middle class for some of this. Maybe I should say what "used" to be the middle class. In the past they would not protect the poor and voted against helping them. Little did they know they were hurting themselves by not protecting those "lower" than them. How would it go? "I saw them attacking and hurting the poor but I was not poor so I did nothing?" The middle class were mean and spiteful to the poor and now they are poor for the same reasons the ones they would not help are. What goes around comes around.

[babylonsister]

6. Can you elaborate on how the middle class

didn't protect the poor? Besides being a broad brush, I don't understand that statement? I consider myself middle-class, at least I used to be. How were we mean and spiteful? Was it the way we voted?

[Doreen]

9. I must make it clear that I know it was not all of the middle class.

I go by what I saw and heard the middle class do and say all of these years about the poor. Who knows maybe it was just the middle class in my red county but I remember those who were middle class here blaming everything on the poor. They called us lazy and burdens and deserved nothing as we earned nothing and only sat on our fat asses and put our hands out. Sometimes in life our opinions and feelings are not based on written fact but what happens to us or/and what we see and hear in person.

[ck4829]

7. All economic classes are social constructs, but the middle class is that distilled

People sometimes get confused about the concept of "social construct". For example, race is also a social construct, which people then go on to say "So you think race isn't real?" Which one can reply with "No, race is real because it is a social construct"

With class, this can be repeated. Except I think the middle class isn't even all that real to begin with.

It serves to benefit the upper class...

Middle Class: You conform and act like the upper class without getting upper class rights, privileges, goods, and services. You define yourself as not-lower, not-working class as a point of pride to further stigmatize the lower class. You divide the lower class. You act as the buffer so that the lower classes have less recourse when they get screwed over. You serve as a distraction, don't look at all the ways you can be in poverty, look at the one way you can make it instead! You act as the enforcer for the upper class. You are the target for lower class anger, you are a human shield.

And what do you get?

A little more distance in terms of paychecks away from financial ruin.

We need to abolish the idea of middle class.

[Achilleaze]

8. republican lies are dangerous for America

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