10 Biggest Doozies From the Right-Wing Wackosphere This Week

Who gets the prize for most deranged statement this week? Limbaugh? Palin? Santorum? Or maybe the RNC.

AlterNet / By Janet Allon

 

 

Photo Credit: Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com

December 7, 2013  |  

 

The week that began with talk of the socialist pope, ended with right-wing absurdities about Nelson Mandela. Is nothing sacred?
1. Rush Limbaugh: The pope rips America, causing Obama to orgasm! And then Mandela really showed those American blacks how to do civil rights!
The man who has continually raised the ante on outrageousness brought his A-game this week, starting with comments about Pope Francis and President Obama. “The pope is ripping capitalism, ripping trickledown economics, ripping America. And Obama is having an orgasm,” Limbaugh spewed. “The pope has co-opted Obama.” Because what really gets this president’s motor going is “ripping this country apart.” (Are you listening, Michelle?) Obama demonstrated his ejaculatory pleasure in criticizing America a few days later when he had the audacity to say that “increasing inequality is most pronounced in this country.” The nerve!
Nelson Mandela’s death provided fodder for the right-wing radio ranter to reach new paroxysms of offensiveness and denounce the civil rights movement in America, which of course helped bring about Obama’s presidency. Here’s his case:

“Nelson Mandela actually lived through the indignities, the punishment, the discrimination, the horrors of the South African apartheid system. Came out of it — you realize when he was inaugurated president, he invited as his special guests the white jailers from his Robben Island prison? He literally did forgive everybody.
“Nelson Mandela would not qualify as a civil rights leader in this country with that philosophy. They can’t let it go. It’s become too big a business. They will not let it go. Mandela let it go. It's just — amazing.”

Of course, Mandela went on to decry the ongoing “cancer of racism” in America and elsewhere. He did not think racism had ended (unlike the RNC, it seems: see item #3 below).
(h/t: mediamatters)
2. Sarah Palin: Thomas Jefferson and I agree. Those meanie atheists are trying to abort Christ from Christmas.
Sarah Palin managed to combine those dreaded atheists with abortion, Christ-killing and the dastardly war on Christmas all in one fell swoop in a speech at Liberty University. She was, of course, promoting her new book Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas, and the former not full-term Alaska governor is nothing if not good at self-promotion.
She also revealed a new talent for channeling the founding fathers. She knows exactly what Thomas Jefferson would do if he were alive today: He’d go on Fox News to complain about the war on Christmas. In other words, he’d be Sarah Palin.
That’s because—and this might come as a surprise to those who have read the part of the constitution about separation of church and state—Jefferson and his buds wrote the constitution specifically for religious people. Nonreligious people, in other words, amoral people, are not capable of understanding the constitution, and they are therefore not able to follow its precepts.
Here’s an excerpt from this marvelous bit of oratory:

 “If you lose that foundation, John Adams was implicitly warning us, then we will not follow our constitution, there will be no reason to follow our constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand that there is something greater than self, we are to live selflessly, and we are to be held accountable by our creator, so that is what our constitution is based on.”

There’s some more rambling after that, but you get the idea.

From there, she jumped back to her favorite topic and the one that promotes her book, saying Jefferson would agree with her that “angry atheists armed with an attorney” had set their sights on destroying the religious themes in Christmas celebrations.

“Why is it they get to claim some offense taken when they see a plastic Jewish family on somebody’s lawn—a nativity scene, that’s basically what it is, right?”
A plastic Jewish family. Is that in the scripture?
(h/t Raw Story)
3. Tin-eared RNC: Racism and sexism have ended.
The national Republicans deftly demonstrated how they can appeal to both women and blacks this week. They started offering lessons to candidates on how not to say offensive things about women, especially when you are running against one, as Todd “legitimate rape” Akin did. Clearly, a steep learning curve there. Emergency reinforcements may be needed.
Over the weekend, the RNC declared that racism has ended in a tweet marking the anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and celebrating Rosa Parks’ famous act of civil disobedience. “Today we remember Rosa Parks’ bold stand and her role in ending racism,” they said. Hilarious tweets ensued under hashtag #racismendedwhen, with answers like “when Mr. Drummond adopted Arnold and Willis,” “when Bill Clinton played the sax on Arsenio Hall” and “when the Fresh Prince moved to Bel-Air.”
Realizing their mistake after, well, millions of people ridiculed them, the RNC amended the tweet, “clarified it,” by saying Parks fought to end racism. But, let’s face it, they really think racism has ended. We’ve got a black president and the Supreme Court itself ruled there is no need for a Voting Rights Act anymore. That ought to settle it.
Does anyone still wonder why more than 90 percent of black America votes for anyone but the GOP?
4. Rick Santorum: Obamacare is like apartheid. And I am like Mandela. O’Reilly: Oh, you mean that commie?
Wow. Flabbergasting things happen when you combine two idiots on Fox with the death of a great man.
Here’s Santorum on Mandela:

“He was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people’s lives—and Obamacare is front and center in that.”

Apartheid and affordable healthcare. Yes, very similar. And that would, of course, make you Mandela-like in fighting this injustice. Amirite? We’ve seen some questionable analogies before, i.e. Obamacare and Katrina, Obamacare and the Fugitive Slave Act, Obamacare and the Nuremberg Laws, but this one might be the biggest doozy of them all. Points for creativity, Rick!
O’Reilly couldn’t top that, so he just kept repeating the one thing he did have to say about Mandela.

“He was a communist, this man. He was a communist, all right? But he was a great man! What he did for his people was stunning!...He was a great man! But he was a communist!”

So, uh, wait? Does that make Santorum a communist?
5. Fox News: Sharia law is here and the proof is that Muslim girls are taking swim classes at the Y.
Head for the hills. Sharia is here and it’s coming after your women. Fox continued its quest to stoke the fires of Islamaphobia when it targeted a seemingly harmless YMCA swim class in St. Paul Minnesota that offers hour-long swim practice once a week for Muslim Somali-American girls between the ages of 5 and 17. The YMCA (that’s “C” for Christian, hello) even makes considerations for the girls’ modesty and religious beliefs. On Fox & Friends, an outraged Heather Nauert said this is just one more piece of evidence that "Sharia law is now changing everything."
Modesty considerations have long kept observant Somali-American Muslim girls from learning even basic swimming skills, which, of course, is the problem that the program is designed to overcome. This pernicious tolerance trend is spreading all over the Midwest, Fox reports. Thankfully, Nauert promised viewers that Fox will keep an eye on it.
We are sure they will.
6. S.C. Sheriff refuses to fly flag at half staff for Mandela.
Another great American with a modicum of power and a desire to use it, Rick Clark, the sheriff of Pickens County, S.C., is taking a bold stand against... ummm... Obama’s tyranny? Sheriff Clark is refusing to lower the flag to half staff in honor of Mandela on December 9, 2013, as the president ordered.
Now, we know what you are thinking, but this has nothing to do with race, Clark swears. It has to do with Amurrica. "Nelson Mandela did great things for his country and was a brave man but he was not an AMERICAN!!!” Clark wrote on his Facebook page. “The flag should be lowered at our Embassy in S. Africa, but not here."
Clark knows full well when it is appropriate to lower that flag. He did it last Friday in honor of a deceased deputy, and on Saturday in honor of Pearl Harbor Day. But then it’s straight back up for Ole Glory. Unless another Amurrican dies.
7. Texas Republican Rep.: Minimum wage, schminimum wage.
Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. So, in a week when low-wage workers went on strike to demand an increase in the minimum wage, and President Obama finally acknowledged that inequality is the defining challenge of our time, Rep. Joe Barton decided to be deeply offensive.
Abolish minimum wage, he told the National Journal. “I think it’s outlived its usefulness,” he said. His view is that it was only useful during the Great Depression.
Raising the minimum wage is bound to be on the list of things not to do in the Republican obstructionist playbook, now that Obama has announced making structural inequality the focus of the rest of his presidency.
Think Progress reports:

“At least 67 Republicans who are still serving in Congress today supported an increase under President George W. Bush, including Alexander and Ryan. Yet House Republicans unanimously voted down an increase in March.”

But while many of them won’t raise it, Barton’s going one better.
Let them eat cake!
8. House Chair of Science Committee Lamar Smith: Climate change, no way; aliens, sure.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), who chairs the Science, Space, and Technology Committee, has no use for climate change science, and less use for the efforts to regulate carbon emissions. Setting standards for polluting power plants is partisan politics, he recently argued, blasting the EPA for trying to do so, not science. And the petroleum industry favorite knows from science. He’s using one of the seven days left on the legislative calendar to talk about extraterrestrials in a hearing called, “Astrobiology: Search for Biosignatures in our Solar System and Beyond.”
Well, if there are aliens out there living on some other planet, that could help give people a hint about where to go when the Earth becomes uninhabitable due to global warming, which isn’t happening, of course, no matter what 97 percent of scientists say.
9. California GOP-er: It’s part of Middle Eastern culture to lie.
Rep. Duncan Hunter must have been a cultural anthropology major. He displayed his deep knowledge of Middle Eastern culture in an interview with CSPAN this week when he expressed his opposition to the recent treaty with Iran. They lie, he said, in essence. Not only do they lie, they revere lying. Here’s how he knows. He’s heard about how bargaining goes on over there. "In the Middle Eastern culture it is looked upon with very high regard to get the best deal possible, no matter what it takes, and that includes lying," Hunter said.
His interlocutor gave him the chance to add some nuance to this keen geopolitical observation, and asked if he meant "all Middle Eastern countries are this way."
Yep, he said: "They like to barter there."
In damage control mode later, his communications director clarified that Hunter was talking about Middle Eastern political leaders, not all the people, especially Iranians.
Furthermore, Hunter, who also thinks U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants should be deported and opposes gays in the military, recommends using a nuclear bomb on Iran if necessary.
"I don’t think it’s inevitable but I think if you have to hit Iran, you don’t put boots on the ground, you do it with tactical nuclear devices and you set them back a decade or two or three."
Then you can go back to the bargaining table.
(h/t TPM)
10. GOP Rep: "I wake up every day not thinking about social issues."
Virginia Rep. Scott Rigell is up for re-election next year, and he just wants to clarify what does and what does not keep him up at night. He apparently told Politico: “I wake up every day not thinking about social issues.”
You have to admire his succinctness!

United States Is Now the Most Unequal of All Advanced Economies

Posted: 12/08/2013 3:15 pm

Eric Zuesse

Investigative historian

The United States has such an unequal distribution of wealth so that it's in the league of corrupt underdeveloped countries, no longer in the league of the developed nations, according to the latest edition of the world's most thorough study of wealth-distribution.
The most authoritative source comparing wealth-concentration in the various countries is the successor to the reports that used to be done for the United Nations, now performed as the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook. The latest (2013) edition of it finds (p. 146) that in the U.S., 75.4% of all wealth is owned by the richest 10% of the people. The comparable figures for the other developed countries are: Australia 50.3%, Canada 57.4%, Denmark 72.2%, Finland 44.9%, France 51.8%, Germany 61.7%, Ireland 58.4%, Israel 68.9%, Italy 49.8%, Japan 49.1%, Netherlands 54.6%, New Zealand 57.6%, Norway 65.9%, Singapore 61.1%, Spain 54.0%, Sweden 71.1%, Switzerland 71.5%, and U.K. 53.3%. Those are the top 20 developed nations, and the U.S. has the most extreme wealth-concentration of them all. However, there are some other countries that have wealth-concentrations that are about as extreme as the U.S. For examples: Chile 72.5%, India 73.8%, Indonesia 75.0%, and South Africa 74.8%. The U.S. is in their league; not in the league of developed economies. In the U.S., the bottom 90% of the population own only 24.6% of all the privately held wealth, whereas in most of the developed world, the bottom 90% own around 40%; so, the degree of wealth-concentration in the U.S. is extraordinary (except for underdeveloped countries).
The broadest mathematical measure of wealth-inequality is called "Gini," and the higher it is, the more extreme the nation's wealth-inequality is. The Gini for the U.S. is 85.1. Other extremely unequal countries are (pages 98-101 of this report) Chile 81.4, India 81.3, Indonesia 82.8, and South Africa 83.6. However, some nations are even more-extreme than the U.S.: Kazakhstan 86.7, Russia 93.1, and Ukraine 90.0. But Honduras and Guatemala are such rabid kleptocracies that their governments don't even provide sufficiently reliable data for an estimate to be able to be made; and, so, some countries might be even higher than nations like Russia.
Under Barack Obama, the U.S. has, for the first time in this nation's history, increased the concentration of its privately held wealth during an "economic recovery" from a financial crash. (Consequently: the bottom 90% have experienced no benefit from this "recovery.") Usually, there is more instead of less economic equality in the wake of a crash; but Obama's policies of holding harmless the Wall Street insiders who profited enormously from creating the bubble, and of restoring their wealth by taxpayers buying up their toxic assets via the bailouts, etc., have made the U.S. more like nations such as Chile, India, Indonesia, and less like nations such as Australia, Canada, and Finland. Although Mr. Obama's rhetoric has been opposed to extreme wealth-concentration, his policies have actually intensified that tendency. Republicans are not satisfied with the extent to which he has done this, and they call for even more extreme wealth-concentration policies, but Obama has actually benefited America's billionaires a great deal. Romney received most of their campaign money, but Obama has performed extraordinarily well for them.
According to the latest study by the highly regarded economic-concentration specialist Emmanuel Saez, the richest 1% of Americans have been receiving 95% of the income-gains during the Obama "economic recovery." This "recovery" has raised incomes for the top 1% by 31.4%. Everyone else has seen income-gains of 0.4%. Other studies have shown that the bottom 95% of Americans have actually experienced overall reductions in their incomes under President Obama. So: for most Americans, the "recession" has merely continued.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Rand Paul Tells Millions He’s Doing Them a Favor By Cutting Off Unemployment Benefits

Rand Paul Tells Millions He’s Doing Them a Favor By Cutting Off Unemployment Benefits

By: Sarah Jones more from Sarah Jones

Sunday, December, 8th, 2013, 10:58 am

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was on Fox News Sunday to continue his minority outreach to African Americans, by saying we shouldn’t extend unemployment benefits set to expire momentarily because he knows one black businessman who wants tax cuts.
Video:


Paul said, “I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they’re paid for, but if you extend it past that you do a disservice to these workers.” His reasoning is that when you “allow people” to be on unemployment for longer, you are causing them to be “perpetually unemployed”. Don’t forget about his one black businessman.
See, it’s not that there are no jobs, it’s that employers don’t like to hire people who have been out of work for very long. Thus, by taking away the “incentive” to stay unemployed, Paul thinks he can solve the unemployment problem. It’s the “firmer hand” theory, also used as an argument for slavery.
There can be no other explanation for Paul’s reasoning other than people want to stay unemployed, otherwise he wouldn’t think that taking away unemployment benefits creates job opportunities. This veers dangerously close to the “lazy urban” narrative that Republicans favor. It is not accurate to suggest that starving will create jobs. So this is not a good plan for jobs or for the unemployed.
Paul said that African American unemployment hasn’t budged under this President, implying that he thinks he can get the African American vote by criticizing this president and blaming him for higher unemployment among African Americans, as if this is a new phenomenon best addressed by letting a white Southern man make decisions for African Americans and this president. Some things just shouldn’t be said by certain people, especially not people who employed a white supremacist. It’s bad optics.
The carrot dangling is far from over. You know what the number once concern is for African Americans, after tax cuts for businesses? School choice, apparently. “My economic stimulus plan would stimulate Detroit. There is no other plan on the table. If my plan would pass I think it’s the only one that would pass. I am also talking about restoring voting rights and school choice.”
Voting rights? His party is the party that came after voting rights nationally and his party is the party that made Detroiters’ votes meaningless under Republican Gov. Rick Snyder. That’s going to be a hard sale.
When asked for alternatives to ObamaCare, Rand criticized ObamaCare and then said he’s for Freedom of Choice. Seriously. The anti-choicer is for Freedom of Choice, which means no plan. It means repeal ObamaCare because the “premiums are higher” – which they aren’t for the majority of people. So that’s his big sell to Detroit: Come and get nothing in order to protect the rich. That’s new for Republicans in Detroit. Detroiters will never see through that (see sarcasm). Clearly Sen. Paul is unaware of the high priority most Americans put on the issue of affordable healthcare. It’s an issue of economic survival for many. Not something they want to toss away into the GOP “freedom” for corporations ring.
Yes, 2016 2016 2016. The Senator is a GOP presidential front runner, and it seems he is already running for President, “the thought has crossed my mind, Chris.” But he’s concerned about the “haters and hacks”. So are we, Senator.
Image: Fox News

Rand Paul Tells Millions He’s Doing Them a Favor By Cutting Off Unemployment Benefits was written by Sarah Jones for PoliticusUSA.

© PoliticusUSA, Sun, Dec 8th, 2013 — All Rights Reserved

McDonald's can afford to triple their CEO's salary. Do you want lies with that?

McDonald's can afford to triple their CEO's salary. Do you want lies with that?

by MinistryOfTruth

We can't afford to raise the minimum wage?
But we can always afford a big pay increase for the CEO. Always. Even when sales are down for the year.

   McDonald's Corp. more than tripled the pay packages last year for its new CEO Don Thompson and the man he replaced, Jim Skinner. ~snip~
    McDonald's, based in Oak Brook, Ill., gave Thompson a package worth $13.8 million, up from the $4.1 million he received in 2011, according to a regulatory filing made Friday.
    Skinner's pay meanwhile rose to $27.7 million from $8.8 million the year before, reflecting a $10.2 million payment as part of his retirement under his contract agreement.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

   McDonald's gave a $9 million dollar raise recently to their new CEO. $9 million dollars that didn't "Trickle Down", $9 million dollars that didn't help workers at McDonald's unless they have a second, better paying job as a waiter at the nicer restaurants the CEO of McDonald's goes to. McDonald's can't afford paying their workers enough to climb out of poverty but just happened to find $9 million lying around to give to their CEO. The golden arches are actually golden parachutes too.     Over the last 40 years this has been the trend. Worker's wages stagnate but for some reason CEO salaries go through the roof. The result is growing poverty. No one who works full time should be poor. No one.
And yet these CEO's then proceed to lecture us about being lazy and how they can't afford raises this year, maybe next year, and the stock markets rise and the CEO salaries rise but the rest of us will just have to wait.
But the CEO never has to wait. He always gets his raise. Always.
Over the last few decades the CEO's of corporate America have made themselves filthy rich by paying themselves instead of labor. The boss gets a raise, you don't. You are lucky just to keep your job. Any profit made goes straight to the wealthiest 1% and stays there.
And if you complain they call you a socialist.
If you notice the 800 lb CEO in the room, they say you hate capitalism.
We all have to ignore how rich the rich have become in order for the never ending austerity brigade's working class death march to make any sense.
Because you must suffer so that record corporate profits can live.

With Wall Street and corporate profits at record highs we should be swimming in trickle down goodness right freaking now.
But we are not. Because trickle down is bullcrap.
So the boss gets a raise and you don't. The boss gets a bigger raise than he would have otherwise by not giving you a raise. Scrooge gets to count coins, Cratchet gets a piece of coal, maybe. If he is lucky.
And Tiny Tim? Humbug!
Overpaid CEO's can not be the end-all-be-all of our economy, sneering Mitt Romney types who think you are lazy and want to be dependent on food stamps, because working to death being dependent on the kindness of a heartless millionaire wasn't good enough.
I could understand maybe if NO ONE at McDonald's was getting a raise this year. If they were cutting executive salaries and that sort of thing, but McDonald's isn't, nor is WalMart or the other big box stores that wiped out your local Mom and Pop stores. All those businesses are still chugging out profits and raises for executives, but the workers are ass out in the deal, No raise for you, Cratchet! Because the CEO's of these huge corporations have decided they would rather steal your raise so they can get a bigger raise themselves. That's the only way we get record profits AND growing, record poverty at the same time, the rich are making the poor even poorer for their own profit. It's that simple.
The rich are getting richer by PREVENTING "trickle down" from happening.
And they don't even bother lying to you about how it will "Trickle Down" anymore, do they? It's all austerity all the time now, and if you even mention that it isn't "Trickling Down" conservatives get mad at you for even bringing it up. The say you are engaging in class warfare if you dare mention that the "Trickle Down" isn't working. The Right Wing's plan for the poor is basically "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", meaning the right wing has nothing to offer the poor other than animosity and Republicans would rather you not ask since they don't like to talk about the poor anyway.
So you get pushed into whatever low wage job you can get and you struggle to survive and your measly pay isn't even enough to get by on and here comes your local Republican to make things harder for you if you ever need food assistance or unemployment insurance. We can't have you being dependent on anything other than your credit card, can we? In Republican America paying taxes is slavery and working for poverty wages until you die is freedom so quit complaining.
The next time you hear some meathead tell you that we can't raise the minimum wage or prices will go up ask them if that means ANYBODY should ever get a raise again? I mean, if rising wages means rising prices doesn't that mean that all wage increases are bad, or is that just wage increases for poor people? Does that mean that giving huge pay increases to the already rich might drive up the price of certain things like oh say housing? This logic says that paying poor people more is a bad thing, but paying rich people more is good because "trickle down".
Try as you might to make sense of this you can't. There is no logic to talking points against raising the minimum wage. It is just rooted in poor people = bad/lazy and rich people = Randian Supermen who must be coddled at all times and told how awesome and brilliant they are. The same crap Mitt Romney embodied that the GOP breathes on a daily basis, open hostility towards the poor and working class, is embedded in this notion, that poor people have it too good and should just try harder. Because if poor people aren't kept in constant misery they may get lazy and stop contributing, unlike rich people who shit pure rainbows.
McDonald's can afford to pay their workers better, they just don't want to. They refuse to. McDonald's, WalMart and all of these other big box stores has created a class of poor people stuck in dead end jobs who will always be poor and they call them "Associates". McDonald's and these other corporations will not pay their employees decent wages until they are forced to. The rich will lie and lie and say they can't afford to pay their employees, they will lie and say raising wages will force them to raise prices, it's a lie, a lie to keep you poor so they can continue to make themselves rich.
They will say anything to justify not paying their employees a better wage. And this is the basis for our entire economy. The rich are getting richer BECAUSE they are keeping the poor as poor as they can. Keeping you from getting a raise means my CEO compensation might triple this year. Some businesses like CostCo might do the right thing and pay their workers a good wage, but others will not, and that is why we need laws to set a fair floor for wages so that people don't get trapped having to work until they die just to stay poor. Poor people wouldn't need food stamps if they just got paid better, and if some CEO's weren't as grossly overpaid as they are maybe there would be a little money leftover to pay everyone else a raise.
Justifying greed is what conservatives live for. Hating the poor is just a bonus. The people who nominated Mitt Romney as their Presidential candidate a year ago bristle with hostility whenever you mention the poor. Resentment is a dish best served buffet style at the RNC convention. But at the heart of it is this, when conservatives say they are against raising the minimum wage they are admitting that trickle down is not supposed to help "those people". Conservatives are admitting that helping the poor simply isn't in the trickle down plan. Nope, the plan is bigger tax cuts for the rich. The better to eat you with.
So let's give a big round of applause to the people who are marching against McDonald's and WalMart and all the big box stores that make huge profits by keeping their workers underpaid, and remember, they always have money to give their CEO's a big pay increase each year, so when they say they can't afford to pay better wages they are just lying to you.
My apologies for not having written much lately, getting adjusted to life with my newborn daughter Janis has made it difficult for me to sit down and think, let alone write. I will be on the Ed Schultz show tonight on MSNBC. Hopefully you catch me there.
Peace and love to all,
Cheers

Originally posted to MinistryOfTruth on Fri Dec 06, 2013 at 08:13 AM PST.

Also republished by In Support of Labor and Unions.

Revealed: Conservative think tank SPN coordinating right-wing assault on education, healthcare and the environment in 34 states

By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
Friday, December 6, 2013 2:57 EST

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers’ compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.
The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as “free-market thinktanks”, includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative strategy at state level.
The documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN’s summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.
Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities. Last week the Obama administration announced a new clampdown on those groups that violate tax rules by engaging in direct political campaigning.
Most of the “thinktanks” involved in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents propose the launch of “media campaigns” aimed at changing state laws and policies, or refer to “advancing model legislation” and “candidate briefings”, in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.
The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.
SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July. Ranging in size from requests of $25,000 to $65,000, the plans were submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Trust, a private foundation that in 2011 donated almost $15m to largely rightwing causes.
The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire – now part of Pfizer – which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Institute and the State Policy Network itself.
SPN’s link to Searle, the Guardian documents show, was Stephen Moore, an editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle on its grant-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a “top 20″ and “bottom 20″. It is not known how many of the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been successful.
Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said the grant decisions were made by Searle’s sons and grandsons based upon the late businessman’s “commitment to the advancement of free enterprise and individual rights”.
The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:
• “reforms” to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;
• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;
• an education voucher system to promote private and home schooling in Florida;
• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;
• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.
SPN’s president, Tracie Sharp, told the Guardian that “as a pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone issues of a free people and a free society.”
In its grant bid, the Maine Heritage Policy Center asked for $35,000 to support a “research and demonstration project” that would “release residents from extreme government dependency”. It would turn the state’s poorest area into what the Portland Press Herald describes in its report from Washington County as “a gigantic tax-free zone”.
Dubbed “FreeME”, the initiative would eliminate state income tax and sale taxes from residents and businesses until the economic conditions in the county rise to the statewide average. The hole in the county’s income from lost tax revenues – estimated at $35m a year by the think tank – would be filled through budget cuts.
Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely by rightwing foundations and corporations including the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, tobacco company Altria and the telecoms giant Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the document and points out that in its request for $40,000 from Searle, TPPF claims credit for blocking Medicaid expansion in the state.
“[S]topping Medicaid expansion is just the first step,” the proposal says, adding that the “missing piece to complete our message is an economic forecast” showing how block-granting Medicaid would “bring significant savings” to the state. That information would then be used to garner attention from the media.
The Observer describes TPPF as “one of the most influential state-level thinktanks in the nation”. One of its former executives was Ted Cruz, now US senator for Texas, who today is the keynote speaker at the national conference in Washington of SPN’s sister organisation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec).
Several hundred miles to the north east in Massachusetts, the Beacon Hill Institute requested $38,825 from Searle to weaken or roll back a five-year effort by states in the region to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The institute said it would carry out research into the economic impact of the cap-and-trade system operating in nine states known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
BHI appeared to have already arrived at its conclusions in advance, admitting from the outset that the aim of the research was to arm opponents of cap-and-trade with data for their arguments, and to weaken or destroy the initiative. “Success will take the form of media recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative activity that will pare back or repeal RGGI,” the funding proposal says.
The Beacon Hill Institute, technically an affiliate rather than a full member of the SPN, operates out of the economics department of Suffolk University in Boston. David Tuerck, its executive director, denied the group had engaged in lobbying. “There is never any lobbying,” he told the Guardian. “Maybe I need to look up the definition again, but lobbying consists of buttonholing legislators and other policymakers to get a particular result on a particular issue, and we never do that.”
But Suffolk University, which hosts the Beacon Hill Institute as a research arm of its economics department, sharply criticised the research proposal to the Searle Foundation. In a statement to the Guardian, the university said the grant bid had not been submitted to the university, as required, and that the university would never have approved the proposal. “The stated research goals, as written, were inconsistent with Suffolk University’s mission.”
Watchdogs that monitor the work of SPN and other conservative networks in the US said that the centralised coordination of state-level campaigns showed a significant attempt to build local activism into a nationwide movement. Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which issued a recent report on SPN, said that the local identity of the network’s members belied a larger purpose. “They appear to be advocating purely local interests but what they are promoting is part of a larger national template to radically remake our government in a way that undermines public institutions and the rights of workers,” she said.
The SPN said that its co-ordinating role was justified because local and state issues were increasingly impinging on national politics. “There’s no mystery here,” Sharp said. “The whole idea of a state policy network is that individual thinktanks can be in communication, share best practices and analysis, and combine their efforts when they see a benefit from doing so.”
Some of the grant bids to Searle focus specifically on prominent local politicians the thinktanks hope to influence. The grant bid that emanated from New Jersey, from the Common Sense Institute (CISNJ), another tax-exempt “research and education organization”, floats the idea of a campaign to support the efforts of the Republican governor Chris Christie in ending the ability of public employees to claim untaken sick days and vacation leave in their retirement packages.
“Governor Chris Christie has been waging a war to eliminate this practice; and CSINJ would like to provide ammunition,” the proposal says. The thinktank plans to produce a “research study” which it would call “Busting the Boat Checks” – an allusion to the phrase Christie uses to denote the watercraft retirees are claimed to buy on the back of sick and holiday leave payments.
The institute conceives a “media campaign” with its aim being the “full elimination of unused sick and vacation leave payouts”.
“We believe our study can be used to sway public sentiment further and be used as a brandisher for reform in Trenton,” it says.
CSINJ’s president, Jerry Cantrell, denied that the grant bid involved any element of lobbying, insisting instead that his group was providing a service that in the past might have been done by the decimated local media.
“CSINJ is an education organization focused on providing the public with facts and the truth. We don’t represent any interest besides the folks who are burdened by this practice – the taxpayers,” he said.
He said the proposal was focused on the “abusive practice of accumulating sick or vacation day payments over an entire career and using them as retirement bonus. We’ve seen too many instances of high level individuals working out the door with $500,000-$750,000 claiming to have never missed a day in 30 years of employment.”
The proposal from the Illinois Policy Institute for a campaign to deal with Chicago’s government worker pensions crisis by switching to 401(k)-style retirement plans similarly focuses on a politician – in this case Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The proposal says that “Mayor Emanuel has privately expressed the need for 401(k)-style changes to truly achieve reform.”
The institute plans to “leverage the leadership potential of Mayor Emanuel … as the spark for wider pension changes in Illinois.” It adds that “friendly legislators would be welcome to draft legislation modelled on our policy work and work in tandem with Mayor Emanuel to move it forward in the legislative process.”
John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Guardian that Emanuel had been “an outspoken proponent of pension reform that includes moving to a 401(k)-style, defined contribution system.” He saw no problem with the lobbying that the think tank undertakes.
“We are not allowed to do any campaigning or electioneering, and we don’t. We are allowed to spend a significant percentage of our expenditures on lobbying and we are very proactive in lobbying for liberty-based policy, including the urgently needed pension reform. We report our activities accordingly.”
© Guardian News and Media 2013

Rick Santorum: Nelson Mandela Fought 'Great Injustice,' Just Like Republicans Are Battling Obamacare

The Huffington Post  |  By Paige Lavender
Posted: 12/06/2013 9:53 am EST

During an appearance on Fox News Thursday night, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) discussed the death of Nelson Mandela, saying the former South African president fought "great injustice" just like Republicans who are battling Obamacare.
"Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that. That's the reason he's mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed," Santorum said. "But you're right, I mean, what he was advocating for was not necessarily the right answer, but he was fighting against some great injustice, and I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever-increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people's lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that."
The statement, pointed out by Slate's Dave Weigel in a tweet Friday morning, came after Fox News host Bill O'Reilly claimed Mandela "was a great man, but he was a communist."
"I would never attack Nelson Mandela," O'Reilly said next.
Watch a clip of Santorum's remarks above.

20 Things the Poor Really Do Everyday That the Rich Never Have to Worry About

Just staying alive is a struggle.

December 5, 2013  |  

 

This post first appeared on Ben Irwin's blog. 

Financial advisor and evangelical Christian Dave Ramsey probably wasn’t expecting this much pushback when he shared a piece contrasting the habits of the rich with those of the poor. In her response on CNN, Rachel Held Evans noted that Ramsey and Corley mistake correlation for causality when they suggest (without actually proving) that these habits are the cause of a person’s financial situation. (Did it never occur to them that it might be the other way around?)

Ramsey fired back, calling the pushback “immature and ignorant.” This from a guy who just made 20 sweeping assertions about 47 million poor people in the US — all based on a survey of 361 individuals.

That’s right. To come up with his 20 habits, Corley talked to just 233 wealthy people and 128 poor people. Ramsey can talk all he wants about Corley’s research passing the “common-sense smell test,” but it doesn’t pass the “research methodology 101” test.

To balance the picture a bit, I wanted to take a fact-based look at 20 things the poor do on a daily basis…

1. Search for affordable housing. 
Especially in urban areas, the waiting list for affordable housing can be a year or more. During that time, poor families either have to make do with substandard or dangerous housing, depend on the hospitality of relatives, or go homeless.
(Source: New York Times)

2. Try to make $133 worth of food last a whole month. 
That’s how much the average food stamp recipient gets each month. Imagine trying to eat well on $4.38 per day. It’s not easy, which is why many impoverished families resort to #3…
(Source: Kaiser Family Foundation)

3. Subsist on poor quality food. 
Not because they want to, but because they can’t afford high-quality, nutritious food. They’re trapped in a food system that subsidizes processed foods, making them artificially cheaper than natural food sources. So the poor are forced to eat bad food — if they’re lucky, that is…
(Sources: Washington Post; Journal of Nutrition, March 2008)

4. Skip a meal.
One in six Americans are food insecure. Which means (among other things) that they’re sometimes forced to go without eating.
(Sources: World Vision, US Department of Agriculture)

5. Work longer and harder than most of us.
While it’s popular to think people are poor because they’re lazy (which seems to be the whole point of Ramsey’s post), the poor actually work longer and harder than the rest of us. More than 80 percent of impoverished children have at least one parent who works; 60 percent have at least one parent who works full-time. Overall, the poor work longer hours than the so-called “job creators.”
(Source: Poverty and Learning, April 2008)

6. Go to bed 3 hours before their first job starts. 
Number 15 on Ramsey and Corley’s list was, “44% of [the] wealthy wake up three hours before work starts vs. 3% of [the] poor.” It may be true that most poor people don’t wake up three hours before work starts. But that could be because they’re more likely to work multiple jobs, in which case job #1 means they’re probably just getting to bed three hours before job #2 starts.
(Source: Poverty and Learning, April 2008)

7. Try to avoid getting beat up by someone they love. 
According to some estimates, half of all homeless women in America ran away to escape domestic violence.
(Source: National Coalition for the Homeless, 2009)

8. Put themselves in harm’s way, only to be kicked to the streets afterward. 
How else do you explain 67,000 63,000 homeless veterans?
(Source: US Department of Veterans Affairs, updated to reflect the most recent data)

9. Pay more than their fair share of taxes. 
Some conservative pundits and politicians like to think the poor don’t pay their fair share, that they are merely “takers.” While it’s true the poor don’t pay as much in federal income tax — usually because they don’t earn enough to qualify — they do pay sales tax, payroll tax, etc. In fact, the bottom 20% of earners pay TWICE as much in taxes (as a share of their income) as do the top 1%.
(Source: Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy, January 2013)

10. Fall further behind. 
Even when poverty is the result of poor decision-making, often it’s someone else’s choices that make the difference. If you experience poverty as a child, you are 3-4 times less likely to graduate high school. If you spend your entire childhood in poverty, you are 5 times less likely to graduate. Which means your future has been all but decided for you.
(Sources: World Vision, Children’s Defense Fund, Annie E. Casey Foundation)

11. Raise kids who will be poor. 
A child’s future earnings are closely correlated to their parents’ earnings. In other words, economic mobility — the idea that you can claw your way out of poverty if you just try hard enough is, more often than not, a myth.
(Sources: OECD, Economic Policy Institute)

12. Vote less. 
And who can blame them? I would be less inclined to vote if I didn’t have easy access to the polls and if I were subjected to draconian voter ID laws that are sold to the public as necessary to suppress nonexistent voter fraud.
(Source: The Center for Voting and Democracy)

13. When they do vote… vote pretty much the same as the rest of us. 
Following their defeat in 2012, conservatives took solace by reasoning that they’d lost to a bunch of “takers,” including the poor, who voted for Democrats because they want free handouts from big government. The reality is a bit more complex. Only a third of low-income voters identify as Democrats, about the same for all Americans, including wealthy voters.
(Sources: NPR, Pew Research Center)

14. Live with chronic pain. 
Those earning less than $12,000 a year are twice as likely to report feeling physical pain on any given day.
(Source: Kaiser Health News)

15. Live shorter lives. 
There is a 10-14 year gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor. In recent years, poor people’s life expectancy has actually declined — in America, the wealthiest nation on the planet.
(Source: Health Affairs, 2012)

16. Use drugs and alcohol pretty much the same as (or less than) everyone else. 
Despite the common picture of inner city crack houses, drug use is pretty evenly spread across income groups. And rich people actually abuse alcohol more than the poor.
(Source: Poverty and Learning, April 2008)

17. Receive less in subsidized benefits than corporations. 
The US government spends around $60 billion on public housing and rental subsidies for low-income families, compared to more than $90 billion on corporate subsidies. Oil companies alone get around $70 billion. And that’s not counting the nearly $60 billion a year in tax breaks corporations enjoy by sheltering profits offshore. Or the $700 billion bailout banks got in 2008.
(Source: Think By Numbers)

18. Get themselves off welfare as soon as possible. 
Despite the odds, the vast majority of beneficiaries leave the welfare rolls within five years. Even in the absence of official welfare-to-work programming, most welfare recipients enroll in some form of vocational training. Why? Because they’re desperate to get off welfare.
(Source: US Department of Health and Human Services)

19. Have about the same number of children as everyone else. 
No, poor people do not have loads of children just so they can stay on welfare.
(Source: US Department of Health and Human Services)

20. Accomplish one single goal: stay alive.  
Poverty in America may not be as dire as poverty in other parts of the world, but many working poor families are nonetheless preoccupied with day-to-day survival. For them, life is not something to be enjoyed so much as endured.

These are the real habits of the poor, those with whom Jesus identifies most closely.

Quote of the Day: The Latest Conservative A**hole To Lecture the Pope

Chez Pazienza on December 06, 2013

“The pope seems to prefer common ownership of the means of production, which is Marxist, or private ownership and government control, which is fascist, or government ownership and government control, which is socialist. All of those failed systems lead to ashes, not wealth… What shall we do about the pope and economics? We should pray for his faith and understanding and for a return to orthodoxy.”
– Fox News regular Andrew Napolitano in an op-ed in today’s Washington Times titled “Pope Francis Should Be Saving Souls, Not Pocketbooks”
I swear, right now there’s little that’s as endlessly entertaining as watching the clowns of the American right — who for so long figured they had the market cornered on Jesus — lose their minds over the new pope. Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Breitbart team, all either claim to be holier-than-thou servants of the one true God or just assume they can count on keeping those in his thrall safely under their thumbs. And here comes a guy who’s supposedly truly sanctified and infallible, the living embodiment of God on earth, and he’s completely fucking their shit up. He’s leading by example and taking on the responsibility of the papacy in a way that I’ll bet is more Christ-like than any of his predecessors were going back a very long time, and in doing so — by completely obliterating the status quo we’ve come to expect from the church and Christianity — he’s pulling a Jesus-in-Jerusalem on these people, upsetting their money-changing carts in the temple and gracefully challenging their corrupt Pharisees.
And they’re not happy about it.
It was bad a couple of weeks back when Sarah Palin — an idiot wouldn’t know true compassion for her fellow man if it got stuck in her ass like buckshot — concern trolled the pope over statements of his that she felt were a little too “liberal.” But all hell broke loose when the pope delivered that recent encyclical in which he slammed unfettered capitalism (read: greed). Over the past couple of days, you could close your eyes and practically feel the fabric of conservative reality being rent in two. Fox News, Limbaugh, Drudge, that pompous prick Stuart Varney — they’ve all torn into Pope Francis, because he happens to be a guy who loves atheists and gays and, most distressingly, has the nerve to go out at night in street clothes and feed the poor. They’re tearing into the pope for being exactly what Jesus was, word for word, action for action.
But Napolitano’s criticism is special. It’s special because, well, the fucking gall of him. He isn’t just offering, pardon the pun, good faith dissension — he’s lecturing, chastising. And maybe there’s something even more offensive about the fact that he couches his insolence in claims of being not simply a Catholic, but, astonishingly, a better Catholic than the pope. He “prays” that Pope Francis returns to what he’s come to expect from Catholicism and Christianity, the brand that’s embraced and been corrupted by the very greed Francis claims to be at least attempting to move away from.
I can ridicule the pope’s belief system because I disagree with it completely and don’t feel the least bit beholden to it; Napolitano has the balls to imply a position of authority above that of the leader of the church he purports to be a dedicated member of. He can’t even imagine the possibility that, as a man supposedly imbued with knowledge directly from the almighty, Pope Francis might be the right one in this scenario and he may be the guy who’s been doing it wrong all this time. That’s beyond his comprehension. It’s easier to just be an original sinning flesh-and-blood nobody thinking he’s got it all figured out and it’s the pope who’s screwing everything up.
Andrew, you arrogant asshole, you’re getting a lesson in how to truly be holy from a man who supposedly knows a lot more about these things than you. If you subscribe to the Catholic faith, then Pope Francis is the man whose example you have to follow. He’s right and you’re wrong. So it’s time for you to say ten Hail Marys and five Our Fathers, then sit down and shut the fuck up.

GOP debunked on food stamps: Everything they say about SNAP is wrong

Forget the nonsense about them breeding dependency. Food stamps increase self-sufficiency, research shows

Paul Rosenberg

 

Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, Rand Paul (Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst/Tami Chappell/AP/Ed Reinke)

 

Hilary Hoynes is a University of California at Berkeley economist who wrote a particularly notable paper last year. Instead of increasing dependency, as conservative critics have repeatedly claimed, Hoyen’s paper showed that, for women at least, food stamp use during pregnancy and early childhood has exactly the opposite impact of what conservatives allege: It actually increases economic self-sufficiency when children grow up, in the next generation.
That was just one of two main results reported in “Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net,” which Hoynes co-authored with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond.  As stated in the paper’s abstract, access to food stamps for women leads to “increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings, and income, and decreases in welfare participation).”  Hoynes and her colleagues took advantage of the fact that food stamp programs were established county-by-county over a period of years, creating a sort of “natural experiment” beginning half a century in the past.
“Hoynes’ work has been timely, innovative and revealing,” said Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which has highlighted Hoynes’ work this year as food stamps and the SNAP program have become a major subject of controversy. “Hoynes and her collaborators have really broadened our understanding of how programs like food stamps not only relieve hardship in the moment but can trigger long-lasting gains in participating children’s later health and education.  The implications of the research are considerable.  In this long view, such assistance is not only helping struggling families to scrape by, it’s a good investment in the next generation of citizens and workers.”
Hoynes herself said, “This work indicates that there are important benefits of the safety net that to date have been ignored. They predict that a more generous safety net can reduce health disparities. More generally, the emerging evidence points to an important role for investments in early life — and those investments generate important returns in terms of better health and economic outcomes in adulthood.”

It’s a startling result in light of the onslaught of conservative claims to the contrary, but it’s somewhat less startling — though still quite illuminating — in light of what’s actually known about the impacts of hunger on childhood development back in the “reality based community,” where population-based studies of hunger impacts date back to the 1970s, when researchers first began reporting on the long-term, adult impacts on children born during and shortly after the so-called Dutch “Hunger Winter,” a period from November 1944 through May 1945, when a large part of the Netherlands was subjected to drastically reduced rations under Nazi occupation.
But to really appreciate the significance of this research, one must also appreciate two other aspects of Hoynes’ recent research, which combine to provide a three-pronged counterattack on the right’s “culture of dependency” narrative. First, she has done previous research establishing short-term benefits — not just for food stamps, but also the for the earned income tax credit — specifically, a reduction in low-birthweight babies, a significant indicator of well-being. This research alone is sufficient to show that safety net programs are achieving the goals of bettering people’s lives, adding more weight to the already well-established statistics on poverty reduction.  Second, she has done research into safety net program utilization over the course of economic recession and recovery, research that shows that the current levels of food stamp and other program use are in line with past history, and not a sign of any alleged “explosion” in a “culture of dependency” under Obama, as the right-wing noise machine would have it.
Thus, Hoynes’ work provides powerful evidence for a three-pronged counterattack against this conservative narrative, which has come to play a dominant role in Republican politics in the post-Bush/Obama/Tea Party era: 1) The safety net works in the short term, producing measurable improvements in newborn health; 2) it works in the long term, improving health for both men and women, and reducing dependency among women in the next generation; and 3) it works currently in much the same manner as it has worked in the past.  The long-term effects findings are clearly the most remarkable, which is why they’re worth looking into more closely.  But it’s the overall combination of evidence — along with the work of others working on other aspects of the safety net — that provides a robust picture of what the real-world safety net actually does to build better lives, pushing back against the onslaught of right-wing lies.
In July, for example, when House Republicans were first threatening massive food stamp cuts, the CBPP released a report, “SNAP Enrollment Remains High Because the Job Market Remains Weak.”  It’s common sense, of course.  As the report stated in its very first sentence, “The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the food stamp program) historically has been the most responsive federal program after unemployment insurance in assisting families and communities during economic downturns,” so it stands to reason that our notoriously bad job market would keep tens of millions of people on food stamps.  CBPP began its analysis by citing Congressional Budget Office projections that “as the labor market recovers, SNAP costs will decline markedly. CBO projects that by 2019, SNAP costs will fall all of the way back to their mid-1990s level, measured as a share of gross domestic product (GDP).”
But as CBPP continued, they supplemented CBO data with the more detailed research that Hoynes took part in: “In a new piece of research, economists Hilary Hoynes and Marianne Bitler examine the relationship between poverty and fluctuations in economic activity since 1980 and the historical responsiveness of SNAP, UI [unemployment insurance], and other safety net programs over the business cycle. If SNAP had increased more in proportion to the unemployment rate over the past few years than it has historically, that would provide support to critics who claim that SNAP should have come down as the unemployment rate has declined. But that is not what the research shows. Hoynes and Bitler found that ‘[T]he safety net programs receiving the most attention through the Great Recession (Food Stamps and UI) exhibit adjustments very consistent with their behavior during previous historical cycles.’”
That research is vital for deflating claims of an expanding culture of dependency — and thus for holding the line against deeper cuts to SNAP. But it’s the long-term impacts research that holds the promise of informing a proactive, pro-safety net economic populism that can do more than just respond reactively to the Tea Party. And, indeed, CBPP’s president, Robert Greenstein, cited that research in his testimony to the Senate Budget Committee in February this year. Her research has gotten more attention in the last six months or so than it ever has before, Hoynes said — but if it’s to have the kind of impact that it deserves, this should only be the beginning.
What Hoynes and progressives interested in building on her work are up against is almost 20 years in which empirical data has been relentlessly marginalized. In 1995, in his first year as speaker, Newt Gingrich dismantled the Office of Technology Assessment (which had repeatedly dissed Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense), and imposed other internal changes — such as defunding House committee staff — which radically undermined the role of sound information in shaping the nation’s laws. As conservative iconoclast Bruce Bartlett put it, “Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it.”  Although Gingrich quickly burned out as speaker, the fact-free culture he promoted has only grown more virulent since then.
While all this was going on in Washington, Hoynes was producing a body of work about the safety net that no longer seemed to matter to those calling the shots in Congress. “My work, coming from the background and typical approaches of economics, had mostly focused on how … different kinds of programs [welfare versus the earned income tax credit, food stamps vs. cash welfare] lead to differences in employment decisions, poverty outcomes, family structure decisions, how it influences the propensity for kids to be living with 2-parent vs. 1-parent families, you know, these kinds of questions.”  In short, Hoynes was empirically studying the very sorts of outcomes that self-absorbed politicians were busily pontificating about.
About five years ago, Hoynes said, her interests began to shift toward “calculating the benefits of programs, rather than spending a lot of time talking about the costs of programs.”
“I got interested in thinking about how we could measure how these programs  affect well-being of children in the households, or the households more broadly,” Hoynes said. “It came from a broader interest in evaluating potential benefits of the safety net, which … had sort of never been thought about before — the sort of cream on the top, if you will.”  It wasn’t just a new direction for her, she noted, “There really wasn’t a whole lot of work on this.”
There was one exception, however: the child health impacts of Medicaid expansion, covering families higher up the income distribution. Of course it makes sense that expanding health insurance would impact children’s health; that’s the whole point. But Hoynes took things beyond the obvious. “I sort of thought, ‘Well, here are these measures of health and well-being, can we demonstrate that a more cash-based safety net, general redistribution [program] can be quantified in terms of effects on health outcomes?’ So that’s sort of where I was coming from.”
Her research agenda has focused on “the two programs that are the most important programs for low-income families and that is food stamps/SNAP and the earned income tax credit,” she explained. Her first projects looked at impacts on “a very common robust important measure of child health, which is their weight at birth.”
This is where she first used the county-by-county rollout approach. “When food stamps come into your county, we can use the full census of births in America,” she said, “comparing women across counties from one year to the next, using the full census of births from the birth certificate data; we can then look at the weigh of children at birth, their propensity to be a  low-birth weight birth and how this varies when food stamps is available versus not.” This is the short-term food stamp research referred to above. She and her co-authors found a  statistically significant reduction in the risk of low birth weight, which tended to concentrate in high poverty counties.
Her paper on the earned income tax credit used a conceptually similar approach, but instead of using a county-by-county rollout structure for the “natural experiment” design, she used changes in the tax law, which changed the incentives involved during the 1990s “as we reformed welfare and moved away from AFDC/TANF and toward the EITC, as a main way to provide cash assistance to low-income families.”
This is not how Washington understands welfare reform, of course. The decline of AFDC/TANF funding and the expansion of the EITC somehow live in completely separate boxes, and the “success” of welfare reform — primarily defined as the reduced number of recipients — has nothing to do with expansion of the EITC, which has helped keep so many millions afloat.  But what about the real world? How did expanding EITC compare to the rollout of food stamps more than a generation earlier? “Amazingly, we found very similar results,” Hoynes said. “If you provide more assistance through the tax system, using this good variation across a different kind of natural experiment, as it were, we found reductions in low birth rates, more so for  families that you would expect to be affected by the EITC, you know, lower education levels, single woman versus married.
“I would say it’s a very fertile area right now, that people are interested in trying to quantify these longer-term effects. And now, decades have passed, since that time period and the populations that are affected by them are sufficiently mature that we can really dive in and ask some questions that we hadn’t be able to do before.”
With all that data out there, and researchers like Hoynes starting to make sense of it, one has to ask if it isn’t time for a reality-based political movement to start using what they’re learned to shape a better future.
It might seem like a pipe dream now. But it was actually more or less like that before Gingrich “reformed” the House. As late as 1992, authors Fay Lomax Cook  and Edith J. Barrett found strong support for the welfare state and its programs, despite negative views of welfare in their highly detailed survey, Support for the American Welfare State: The Views of Congress and the Public. One key factor in Congress was that Republicans in committee leadership positions, who were much more familiar with how programs worked, showed significantly more support than Republicans as a whole. That was how things were before Gingrich went to work. It’s a good indication of what Speaker Pelosi should have undone when she held power from 2007 to 2011.  The next time Democrats do gain control of the House, they will need to prioritize making it friendly to the likes of Hilary Hoynes and her reality-based colleagues. It’s the only way, ultimately, to make it friendly to all the rest of us as well.

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulHRosenberg. More Paul Rosenberg.