Republican Wants Poor Kids to Go Hungry

I was reading a front page story on Daily Kos a little while ago, and ran into the following audio clip from a woman who is self-identified Republican. The quote is from an NPR report that was broadcast on December 4th (about 3:30 into the report):

“I make a great deal of money through my own hard work. I don’t want to pay for someone else’s child to eat breakfast at school anymore.”
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16869086

NPR’s Steve Inskeep identified the woman who spoke the words as Gretchen Kauffman, an “editor and a Republican”. Ms. Kauffman is definitely more than an “editor and a Republican”. She’s a former teacher, and the co-author of a critically acclaimed book, A Disgrace to the Profession, which was written with an anti-education slant.

Probably more important than the single quote above, though, is the overall context of the full interview. Ms. Kauffman is clearly a Norquist Republican - there’s nothing good that the government can do, and having the government spending a portion of her wealth on social programs for poor leeches is not on her radar screen. (But I’d be willing to bet that she supports dumping billions and billions into the Iraqi money pit.)

The callousness of her remarks on government subsidized school breakfast programs, though, is especially stunning. I didn’t know - I really didn’t know - that there were educated, allegedly compassionate people, who supported these viewpoints.

I could write more, but I think that Devilstower at Daily Kos sums up nicely:

"This is a democracy, and we are the government. I will take your money. I will. Some of that money you worked hard for and want to keep. I will give it to a kid who is hungry. If your concern is that poverty should be addressed by individuals, then there’s a simple solution: feed him. If there are no poor children needing food, I won’t have to take anything for them. If your position is that people would be more generous if only the government would stay out of it, then sorry. I’m not willing to put this child at risk to as part of your experiment. Besides, if that were true, then why were their more hungry kids before we started these programs to give them a little breakfast? If your position is that your being able to keep all your money is more important than a child being fed, then I simply think you’re wrong. And sick. You want to keep that money? You better beat me at the polls. The strategy of vultures gives us both a party and a nation that would embarrass John Kennedy…"

We’ve known since the time of Gingrich’s contract on America that the GOP is run largely by a leadership that, in simpler times, would have been indicted for grand theft. Ms. Kauffman is the personification of Republican values - a social viewpoint to which I (and most progressives) simply can’t subscribe.

>>8
Crony capitalism is the inevitable result of removing regulations on big business. If you allow big businesses to accrue as much power as they have developed in modern society, then they will inevitably use it on the government. In fact, I would contend that a free market is impossible as long as corporations are allowed to exist in their present state. End the notion of corporate personhood and *maybe* (that's a big "maybe") such a thing will be possible.

The only thing that crony capitalism has in common with socialism is that they both redistribute income. The aims of the former are the exact opposite of the aims of the latter. And whatever they tell you, the latter barely exists in our society. I live in Boca Raton and you can barely go past five intersections without passing a bum begging for cash. Now maybe some of these people are mentally incapable of working - in fact a lot of them probably are, but I don't know of a single capitalist society, at least on the scale of ours, that has ever managed to employ everyone in it who wants to work. If you can name one, I'll be very interested to hear it, but thus far no one ever has.

Assuming unemployment is inevitable, though, we can conclude that if you don't have some form of unemployment benefits, then you're going to have a number of potential consumers who simply cannot purchase anything, and maybe they'll even starve. On the other hand, let's face it, the top 1% of the income bracket didn't become rich by spending everything they earn. In fact, a large portion of it goes directly into banks or other forms of investment that aren't likely to contribute anything to the economy for a large number of cycles. This is in direct contradiction to the poor dude who can barely make ends meet; he by definition *has* to spend pretty much everything he earns.

The way our economy is set up means that if anyone doesn't put the money they earn back into it, somewhere there's a producer who won't have enough to pay back the loans on all his investments, and thus he'll have to lay off people just so he can stay in business. Do you see what happens here? More people are going to need unemployment benefits or simply stop being able to fund production. It's fair enough that some businesses go out of business just due to shitty management practises, but when people stop spending, that just exacerbates the problem. (Of course, companies putting that money into their CEOs' pocketbooks and not using it to fund further growth hurts the economy just as much).

As a result, we can conclude that giving the money to the poor almost always results in that money going directly back into the economy, whereas giving that money to the rich results in the likelihood that it will end up in a bank somewhere or at the very least not going to finance the production or consumption of goods. That state of affairs directly contradicts the assertion in >>4 that the free market alone can judge "what is best for the economy," unless by "the economy" you simply mean "the rich."

(In case you got the wrong idea, I'm not one of those "end all property" commies. My ideal economy would be a mix of socialism and capitalism something along the lines of those recommended by Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and other similar economists).