Ben Spielberg Archives - Talk Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/person/ben-spielberg/ Real People. Real Stories. Real Solutions. Mon, 05 Mar 2018 21:25:10 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://cdn.talkpoverty.org/content/uploads/2016/02/29205224/tp-logo.png Ben Spielberg Archives - Talk Poverty https://talkpoverty.org/person/ben-spielberg/ 32 32 The Paul Ryan Guide to Pretending You Care About the Poor https://talkpoverty.org/2017/11/20/paul-ryan-guide-pretending-care-poor/ Mon, 20 Nov 2017 17:39:04 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=24643 Once, at a town hall in Wisconsin, someone asked known anti-poverty crusader Paul Ryan (R-WI) the following question:

“I know that you’re Catholic, as am I, and it seems to me that most of the Republicans in the Congress are not willing to stand with the poor and working class as evidenced in the recent debates about health care and the anticipated tax reform. So I’d like to ask you how you see yourself upholding the church’s social teaching that has the idea that God is always on the side of the poor and dispossessed, as should we be.”

It’s a tricky one, but if you want to simultaneously cut taxes for rich people and benefits for poor people, you need to be ready for it. So, just in time for the tax debate, I’ve written a handy step-by-step guide on how to convince your constituents that a help-the-rich, whack-the-poor agenda is really what’s best for everybody:

1. Say you share the same goals.

Let’s be honest: It sounds pretty bad to say that you want to take from the poor to give to the rich. So, don’t do it! The trick here is to convince people that you’re with them on the importance of helping the poor. You just disagree about “how to achieve that goal.”

Congratulations! You’ve just turned a profound moral question about whether we should help the poor or the rich into what appears to be a minor disagreement between ethically equivalent opinions.

2. Direct attention away from what it means to be poor.

Lots of people think poor people simply don’t have enough money to meet their families’ basic needs. You know better. Tell them what the poor really need is “upward mobility,” “economic growth,” and “equality of opportunity.” Not only do these airy concepts all sound really good—who could be against any of them?—they also let you pivot away from the obvious solution: giving people the money, food, health care, and other necessities they lack.

True, Ryan’s agenda doesn’t provide any of those things. But don’t worry! If you just repeat the lie that tax cuts for the rich spur economic growth, no one will even have time to dig into the intimate connection between inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity.

3. Imply that poor people’s personal failings are what’s holding them back.

You can’t pull off the enlightened nice-guy routine if you’re blaming poor people for their problems outright. You need to do it subtly. Instead of saying, “Poor people are poor because they’re lazy,” try saying, “We’ve got to change our approach … and always encourage work, never discourage work.” Never mind that most people who can work already do, or that wages are so low it’s possible (and quite common) to work full-time and still be in poverty. People are predisposed to believe that our success relative to those less fortunate is a result of our superior work ethic and talents, rather than a product of race, class, gender, and/or other forms of privilege and sheer dumb luck. The more you tap into that inclination, the more people will oppose helping those less fortunate and support imposing burdensome requirements on the Have Nots instead.

He’s fine with leaving those inconvenient details out, and you should be fine with doing so, too.

4. Choose unrepresentative examples and statistics.

Paul Ryan loves to tell people that “our poverty rates are about the same as they were when we started [the] War on Poverty,” which is more or less what the official poverty measure shows. Does it bother him that the official measure excludes the effects of the very programs he says aren’t working? Nope. It shouldn’t bother you, either. You also shouldn’t feel obligated to mention the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which shows that anti-poverty programs cut poverty nearly in half and have reduced poverty by 10 percentage points since the late 1960s. After all, Ryan doesn’t!

Similarly, Ryan likes to lament the case of “a single mom getting 24 grand in benefits with two kids who,” because of the way the safety net is designed, “will lose 80 cents on the dollar if she goes and takes a job.” The extraordinary rareness of this case doesn’t phase him, nor does the fact that his proposed remedies for this problem make life for that single mom—and thousands of others—much worse. He’s fine with leaving those inconvenient details out, and you should be fine with doing so, too.

5. Hammer “focus on outcomes” rhetoric.

Focusing on outcomes is popular in many fields, so this talking point—that “instead of measuring success based on how much money we spend or how many programs we create or how many people are on those programs … [we should] measure success in poverty on outcomes”—is very effective. The fact that nobody actually measures program effectiveness by how much money we spend or by the number of programs we create is irrelevant, as is the large and growing body of research showing that the safety net boosts the long-run outcomes of children growing up in poor families. As long as you contend that we currently don’t focus on outcomes, you can make our anti-poverty programs seem misguided.

There will always be those who oppose funneling money from low- and middle-income Americans to the wealthy and corporations. But if you stick to these tried-and-true steps from Paul Ryan, before you know it, you’ll have convinced a constituency (and perhaps even yourself!) that helping the rich is actually about helping the poor. Or, at the very least, people will be too confused to know the difference.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on 34justice.com. It has been edited for length and content. 

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The Obama Legacy: Keeping the Recovery Going https://talkpoverty.org/2016/12/23/obama-legacy-keeping-recovery-going/ Fri, 23 Dec 2016 13:37:31 +0000 https://talkpoverty.org/?p=22091 Contrary to the tired trope that “we fought a war on poverty and poverty won,” our anti-poverty policy agenda has been far more effective than most people realize. In 1967, the safety net lifted the incomes of only about 4% of otherwise-poor people above the poverty line; today it lifts 42%.

The safety net’s effectiveness was extremely important during the Great Recession in 2008. Thanks in part to President Obama’s work through the Recovery Act, programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Child Tax Credit (CTC), and SNAP (food stamps)—not counted by the official poverty measure—were particularly effective at protecting people. While the official poverty rate grew by 2.6 percentage points between 2007 and 2010, the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM)—which includes the effects of safety net programs—grew by only a fraction (0.5 percentage points). In contrast, the milder downturn of the early 1990s resulted in the official poverty rate rising 2.3 percentage points, while the SPM was up a similar 2.2 points. All told, the Recovery Act kept nearly 9 million Americans out of poverty.

The Recovery Act’s expansions of the EITC and CTC were eventually made permanent, and—along with the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, if preserved—will serve as long-lasting anti-poverty achievements of the Obama Administration. These and other safety net programs will also continue to boost long-term opportunities by raising earnings and improving health outcomes in adulthood for people who received the assistance as children.

Unfortunately, Medicaid and other anti-poverty programs—not to mention labor standards like the Department of Labor’s new overtime rule—will likely be in jeopardy under a Trump Administration and Republican-led Congress. Protecting these programs from unwarranted attacks must be a top goal of advocates in the coming years.

Pursuing full employment must be another top goal. Though 2015 brought the biggest single-year improvements in income and poverty since the late 1960s—3.5 million fewer people were in poverty than during the preceding year, and inflation-adjusted median household income rose by $2,800—one strong year does not make up for years of wage and income stagnation. Real household income still remains lower—and poverty remains higher—than they were in 2007, before the Great Recession. We haven’t yet offset the weak (“jobless” or “wageless”) early stages of the economic recovery.

Full employment is, quite simply, a situation in which most everyone who wants a job is able to find one. The least economically well-off benefit the most from a full employment economy through higher hourly wages and more hours of work. A decrease in the unemployment rate from 7% to 4.9%, for example, would be associated with a 3.2% raise in hourly pay for low-income workers, a 1.3% raise for middle-income workers, and no raise at all for workers at the top.

Full employment also provides low-income, working families with the opportunity to increase the time they spend in the paid labor market. In simulations, for example, a fall in the unemployment rate from 5.3% to 4% correlates with a substantial increase in annual hours worked by single mothers in the bottom third of the income scale, from about 700 hours per year to over 900. Given their average hourly wage of about $10, that increase in hours worked adds $2,000 to their annual income.

These figures demonstrate that labor demand matters—the working class will take advantage of available hours. Far too often, what conservatives label as an unwillingness to work is in reality an absence of ample, remunerative opportunities to work.

So where do we go from here?

To keep the recovery going, the Federal Reserve must support a full employment economy by not overreacting to price pressures and thus preemptively raising interest rates. Congress should pass a deficit-financed job-creating infrastructure program, rather than the president-elect’s proposed infrastructure privatization scheme and tax giveaway to the wealthy. We must also continue to pressure policymakers to pursue better trade deals—which would remove special investor privileges and patent protections and include enforceable environmental standards, human rights provisions, and rules against currency manipulation—and strengthen labor standards, like the minimum wage, that are extremely popular and improve job quality.

Policymakers also need to start preparing for the next recession.

Policymakers also need to start preparing for the next recession. One of the best ways to do so would be to strengthen the federal budget’s “automatic stabilizers,” which are features that expand and contract in response to economic need. SNAP, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance already serve this function well, but they can be improved to better stimulate the economy. We recommend building on what Congress and the Obama Administration did in the last recession by improving the existing triggers—or economic indicators—that automatically extend the number of weeks during which people can receive unemployment insurance benefits. New triggers that would temporarily bump up both SNAP benefits and the portion of Medicaid spending that the federal government covers for states should also be added.

Concerns about whether a government controlled by the Republican Party will even consider such reforms are well warranted; politicians who oppose anti-poverty spending in general are not likely to support making more of such spending automatic. But recessions can quickly change the politics of public investments. Both Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic President Obama passed stimulus legislation during the last recession, and Congress has enacted temporary expansions of unemployment compensation in response to every major recession since 1970.

Much of our job over the next few years will be to protect vital gains we have made in the fight against poverty. But recognizing those gains—and how much work remains to be done—should provide us with all of the motivation we need to continue that fight.

Editor’s note: TalkPoverty presents this series in collaboration with the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

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