First Class Versus Steerage

George Packer:

If that sounds too harsh, consider what Jason DeParle of the Times reported two days ago. Even as the recession drove millions of Americans deeper into poverty, many of them, mainly single mothers, continue to be dropped from the welfare rolls under the welfare reform laws of the nineteen-nineties. DeParle, the leading journalistic expert on the subject, did not try to hide his indignation: “They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners—all with children in tow.”

That’s a picture only a social Darwinist could describe as “an unprecedented success”—which is the phrase Congressman Paul Ryan, who authored the Republican budget plan, uses to describe welfare reform. That program was bipartisan, and widely popular. But today only leaders of the Republican Party, like Ryan and Mitt Romney, believe it’s working so well that the model should be extended to other government programs, including food stamps and Medicaid.

In a less widely quoted passage from his speech, Obama called the Republican budget “antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it.” This was less solid than “social Darwinism.” For in truth, there was a time in American history—it lasted roughly from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression—when opportunity and upward mobility were choked off by the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands. Ryan, Romney, and the Republican Party want to return to the age of the Titanic, before child-labor laws and laws protecting the right to join unions and the graduated income tax and social insurance, when those in first class survived at much higher rates than the unfortunate souls down in steerage.

Republicans are kind of like banks. If you have enough money you don't need a loan, banks are willing to bend over backwards for your business. But if you really need that loan, banks want nothing to do with you.  Fees are the same way.  If you're late on a credit card payment but have a large savings account balance, don't worry about that late fee, we'll take that right off.  Try getting rid of that fee if you have less than a thousand bucks in your savings.   So it goes with Republicans and welfare. Corporate welfare, fine and dandy. Welfare for the poor, fuggedaboutit.