Tennessee lawmakers have elevated hatred for government and disgust for poor people to an art form.
April 10, 2013 |
The following article is part of AlterNet's ongoing series on poverty, Hard Times, USA.
If
you're worried about where America is heading, look no further than
Tennessee. Its lush mountains and verdant rolling countryside belie a
mean-spirited public policy that only makes sense if you believe deeply
in the anti-collectivist, anti-altruist philosophy of Ayn Rand. It's
what you get when you combine hatred for government with disgust for
poor people.
Tennessee starves what little government it has,
ranking dead last in per capita tax revenue. To fund its minimalist
public sector, it makes sure that low-income residents pay as much as
possible through heavily regressive sales taxes, which rank 10th highest
among all states as a percent of total tax revenues. (For more detailed
data see
here.)
As
you would expect, this translates into hard times for its public school
systems, which rank 48th in school revenues per student and 45th in
teacher salaries. The failure to invest in education also corresponds
with poverty: the state has the 40th worst poverty rate (15%) and the
13th highest state
percentage of poor children (26%).
Employment opportunities also
are extremely poor for the poor. Only 25% have full-time jobs, 45% are
employed part-time, and a whopping 30% have no jobs at all.
So
what do you do with all those low-income folks who don't have decent
jobs? You put a good number of them in jail. In fact, only Louisiana,
Georgia and New Mexico have
higher jail incarceration rates.
From
the perspective of Tennessee legislators, it's all about providing the
proper incentives to motivate the poor. For starters, you make sure that
no one could possible live on welfare payments (TANF: Temporary
Assistance to Needy Families). Although President Clinton's welfare
reform program curtailed how long a family can receive welfare (60
months) and dramatically increased the work requirements, Tennessee set
the
maximum family welfare payment at
only $185 per month. (That's how much a top hedge fund manager makes in
under one second.) As a result, the Volunteer State ranks 49th in TANF,
just above Mississippi ($170).
Kick 'em when they're down or tough love?
In
the Randian universe, it's not enough to starve public education and
the poor. You also must blame the poor both for their poverty and for
the crumbling educational system. If a poor child is failing it must be
the fault of low-income parents. So how do you drive the point home? You
take away their welfare checks if their kids don't do well in school,
which is precisely what the Tennessee House and Senate are about to do.
The
KnoxvilleNews.com reports:
The bill is sponsored by Sen. Stacey Campfield,
R-Knoxville, and Rep. Vance Dennis, R-Savannah. It calls for a 30
percent reduction in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits to
parents whose children are not making satisfactory progress in school.
More
amazing still, the bill originally applied to all children of TANF
parents, even if they were severely disabled. Realizing that they had
gone too far, the bill was amended so that, "it would not apply when a
child has a handicap or learning disability or when the parent takes
steps to try improving the youngster’s school performance — such as
signing up for a parenting class, arranging a tutoring program or
attending a parent-teacher conference." (Imagine the uproar if those
provision were applied to upper-income parents, assuming any still use
the public school system.)
Dennis told the House Health
Subcommittee the measure now only applies to “parents who do nothing.”
He described the measure as “a carrot and stick approach.”
Obviously, this
is insane, right? Not if you've already started down the road of
whipping the poor into shape. The proposed draconian cuts are just an
extension of previous policies that already made welfare contingent on
school attendance. As Travis Waldron
reports in ThinkProgress:
When
Campfield introduced the legislation in January, he said parents have
“gotten away with doing absolutely nothing to help their children” in
school. “That’s child abuse to me,”
he added. Tennessee already ties welfare to education by mandating a
20 percent cut in benefits if students do not meet attendance standards,
but this change would place the burden of maintaining benefits squarely
on children, who would face costing their family much-needed assistance
if they don’t keep up in school.
By the way, the Tennessee legislature is
lily-white:
One percent is Latino, 6% AfricanAmerican and 91% Caucasian. But the
complexion of poverty is darker. Nearly 80 percent of Tennessee's poor
children are black and brown.
Attacking the poor as the answer to the Wall Street crash?
These
attacks on the poor, rather than on poverty, are not peculiar to
Tennessee. In fact, similar concepts circulate among political and
policy elites in Washington. For Ayn Rand acolytes, Wall Street's
reckless, greedy casinos couldn't possibly be the real reason the
economy crashed. After all, the rich get rich because they are terrific
at what they do. We should reward these creators, not blame them for
their foresight, their ingenuity and their obvious success. The blame
instead should fall on the poor -- the takers -- and on the collectivist
government liberals who cater to them. Didn't the government force
banks to put unqualified poor people in homes they couldn't afford? (It
doesn't matter that the data shows that low-income buyers who gained
loans through the Community Readjustment Act didn't default in higher
numbers than anyone else. The idea of blaming the poor has power.)
Blaming low-income
people for chronic unemployment is the next move. As the rate stays
stubbornly high (precisely because all Republicans and even a few
Democrats don't want the government in the business of job creation) we
hear talk of "structural" unemployment. That's code for the jobs would
be there if only the workers were qualified. But you know, those
lower-income workers just don't have the skills and work habits to
compete in our globalized economy. Even older middle-class workers are
hopelessly out of date. So there's really nothing government can do
about it.
The final twist is to claim that the richest country in
human history doesn't have the means to eradicate poverty. Instead, we
are told, rising debt is forcing us to tighten our belts -- rather, we
need to tighten the belts of the poor by taking away a few more dollars
from Medicaid and Social Security.
How to justify meanness?
It's
not easy to be cruel to someone who is down and out. After all, most of
us feel ashamed when walking by a homeless person or watching kids
crammed into over-crowded classrooms. It requires several psychological
twists and turns to make life even harder for low-income Americans.
- You
have to blame low-income parents for their own economic problems. Even
if the unemployment rate is sky-high it must be the poor person's fault.
- You
need to feel superior -- that somehow you got to where you are today
not by an accident of birth but rather by your own hard labors. Anyone
not as successful as you, by definition, is inferior.
- You have
to believe that meanness really is tough love -- that by taking benefits
away from the poor you are actually helping them on the road to self
sufficiency.
- It's helpful to have access to the broader
Randian/libertarian philosophy that argues all forms of collective
government action are an attack on freedom. In this view, altruism is
seen as a curse that justifies collective government programs which
essentially steal money from the makers and to waste on the takers. All
collective caring by the state, therefore, is evil, so that all support
for the poor via government is evil as well.
- It's
psychologically crucial to have your prejudices confirmed by charismatic
alchemists like Ayn Rand, Rand Paul and Paul Ryan who peddle
selfishness as the highest form of morality (although only Ayn Rand had
the guts to say it so bluntly).
Is Washington locked into increasing inequality?
While
the Republicans in Congress are committed to supporting the rich and
crushing the poor, smug Democrats can too easily look down upon the
bumbling Tennessee legislators. Tie welfare to school success? How
crude. But many of these same Democrats also are totally in sync with
the Wall Street hucksters who have, for a generation, siphoned off
America's wealth into their bottomless pockets. In fact, both parties
again are in competition for Wall Street campaign cash as if nothing
much has happened. And both parties clearly are unwilling to break up
the big banks, cap obscene financial incomes, or create public banks to
serve the public interest.
Washington politicians and pundits from
Obama on down (with very few exceptions) are enthralled by Wall Street
wizardry. Making a million dollars an hour no longer seems strange or
repugnant. Too big to fail, jail and regulate are just the natural order
of things. In fact, more than a few public servants can't wait to race
through that revolving door to get in on the big casino games.
This
should tell us that the path to social justice requires a new political
movement that operates outside the two great corporate parties.
Is it too late?
I
ran into a young woman who is very concerned by the enormous gap she
sees between life on campus and the hardships of the low-income people.
She wants to know what she can do with her life to really change things.
What
can we say? I look back over a lifetime in the cause of social justice
and I don't have much to show for it -- more war, more poverty, more
inequality, more disinvestment in critical human infrastructure. Yes,
we've made great strides on gender, sexual preference and overt racial
discrimination compared to a generation ago. But how can we explain why
America has the world's highest incarceration rates? Why couldn't we
prevent a criminal justice system from sending 40% of young black males
to prison? How, on our watch, did our relatively egalitarian country
develop the most obscene wealth gap in the world? How is it possible
that so many of our cities are in worse shape than a generation ago?
It's almost to impossible to comprehend, and even harder to change.
But
that young woman already senses that we have no choice but to try. And
that requires building a movement that targets the core of the problem
--- the systems that allow the economic royalists and their political
minions to hijack our country.
It's a long-term project. After
all, it required almost two generations of painstaking work for the Ayn
Rand right to take over the national debate. It may take just as long to
recapture it. Let's hope there are enough caring young women and men
who still have a sense of the common good. Altruism may have died in
Galt's Gulch, but it's still alive and well in the hearts of those who
share a passion for justice, even in Tennessee.
Les Leopold's latest book is
How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds are Siphoning away America's Wealth (John Wiley and Sons, 2013).
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