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Tuesday, September 06, 2005

The Bush Legacy
Posted by Jill | 7:00 AM

It seems clear at this point that barring some sort of amazing economic comeback that benefits ALL Americans, or else a return to submissiveness by the media, the Bush legacy is going to be a pretty sorry one; perhaps knocking such luminaries as Herbert Hoover and Warren G. Harding down a peg in the category of Worst President Ever.

If the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has done nothing else constructive, it's forced the reality of American poverty into our living rooms again.

In the abstract, Americans are a pretty coldhearted bunch. The equating of tax dollars with welfare for the lazy is still repeatedly drummed into people's heads by the gasbags of the right. I went to a party recently in which "giving our money to people who don't want to work" was blamed for all of the fiscal problems in New Jersey, conveniently omitting things like the effect of home rule and the fact that New Jersey taxpayers only receive 57 cents in Federal dollars back for every dollar we send to Washington. It's easy to demonize welfare mothers, and lazy Scary NegroesTM, while we put the $300 in hush money sent us by Washington last year towards a new big-screen TV.

But when push comes to shove, and a disaster takes place, and the images of weeping black men men holding their babies aloft while wading through waist-deep sludge, and women with their arms around two of their children are weeping to television reporters that the other three children are missing, and a centenarian woman is shown being pushed out of the New Orleans Conference Center in a wheelchair while holding the hand of a black child, even the most hard-hearted Americans open their wallets.

The same person who blamed New Jersey's problems on welfare also echoed the appallingly cruel sentiments of Barbara Bush -- that those displaced were going to be better off because the government was doing to give them housing, money, and jobs. Aside from the fact that it remains to be seen just how much government assistance they're going to receive (Democrats are introducing a relief bill, but you just KNOW that Republicans are never gong to let it pass), can anyone possibly think that those airlifted out of New Orleans with nothing but the clothes on their backs and MAYBE a small bag of belongings wouldn't rather be in their homes, dry and safe, the way they were before the hurricane than be the recipients of all the government largesse in the world?

If this government handout meme becomes the predominant sentiment in this country as the result of it costing $100 to fill up the SUV that usually holds only one person, one can bet that not only charitable contributions will dry up, but middle-class resentment will begin. And it won't be directed at the oil companies or the companies outsourcing those Americans' jobs, it'll be directed at the poor -- just as it always is.

And there are more of them under the Bush presidency:

THE POVERTY level edged up last year, to 12.7 percent -- the fourth straight annual increase. Overall median income remained flat at $44,389, down 3.8 percent from its peak in 1999. This is a robust economic recovery?

[snip]

Administration officials counsel patience, pointing to the downturn of the 1990s, when it took several years for the poverty rate to start to fall. "The last, lonely trailing indicator of the business cycle," Commerce Department official Elizabeth Anderson said of the poverty rate.

This has about it more than a whiff of wishful thinking. For one thing, the increase in poverty between 2003 and 2004 is in fact out of the ordinary; such a rise hasn't happened between the second and third years of an economic recovery since the federal government began collecting poverty data in 1960. For another, the poverty rate may be a lagging indicator, but in this case it's not lonely: See, for example, the median income of working-age households, which declined 1.2 percent.

Another ominous signal involves health insurance coverage. Although the percentage of people with coverage remained unchanged from 2003 to 2004, that masked a shift from employer-provided insurance to government coverage. The percentage of people with employer-based health insurance fell for the fourth year in a row. Most of this slack has been taken up by Medicaid, the shared federal-state health program for the poor and disabled. But with state budgets under increasing strain from Medicaid costs and with Congress poised to make cuts in the program, it's not at all certain that states will be willing or able to maintain coverage for working Americans hovering at the edge of poverty.



The magic of trickle-down at work -- except that no one admits that "trickle-down" means that those at the upper end of the ladder piss on those at the lower end.

To me the question is what kind of Americans we want to be. Republicans always scream "class warfare" when Democrats and other progressives dare to point out that there's really no reason for a CEO who ran a company into the ground to make 500 times the amount of the average worker. Yet it's ALWAYS Republican policies that push the poor even deeper into poverty, push the middle class downward, not upward, and thereby sow the seeds for the kind of class warfare that draws attention away from how this president in particular, advocates policies that benefit his cronies and friends at the expense of the American people. And those affected by these policies are disproportionately those American people who are dark of skin and are currently being sent into an American diaspora through 14 states -- clutching garbage bags containing the few meager possessions they have left after Bush paid for his tax cuts by, among other things, cutting funding for the levees that protected them.

When the photographers leave, will anyone care? Will WE be too busy trying to hang on to our own standard of living to look upward at the policies that have made our situations precarious? Or will we too blame the poor because we are so terrified of joining them?
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