HEY, HUMPTY DUMPTY – GET IT TOGETHER, STUPID!

By Edwin Cooney

Last week, I asserted that poverty did exist in America 50 years ago and that Lyndon Johnson (or if you prefer, Daddy Bird!) was right to go to war on it.

Surprise! Surprise! Not all of my readers agreed with me! (What a shock!)  What’s rather interesting is that both the right and the left blame the problem on the very people they expect to solve it.  My righteous rightist reader blames immoral and lazy people while my lion from the left blames faint-hearted politicians – that is, the government.

The righteous reader from the right who responded to last week’s column, insists that if everyone simply graduated from school, got a job, got married, and raised socially and morally responsible children, things would be pretty good in America.  The poor are poor largely due to their immorality, he insists!

My lion from the left observes that my analysis is right on, but he scolds me for not being either radical or courageous enough to offer a credible solution to poverty.  My leftist lion, who identifies himself as a social liberal and an economic conservative, insists that poverty would disappear if we’d take certain factors off the commodity market – in other words, if everyone were entitled to them free of charge or at minimum cost.  He asserts that clothing, food, housing, health care, education and public transportation ought to be practically free.  Payment ought to be for luxuries. Supposedly, you could even tax luxuries to pay for the “non-commodities” and America would soon be up and running like LBJ’s once powerful political juggernaut!

Beyond that he suggests the following:

Privatize NASA; cut the military and subject it to market forces; close the White House;
amend the Social Security Act and require everyone to pay into the system based on their earnings; require the House and Senate to meet in virtual meetings online thus eliminating the Capital complex; do away with cash money; end all federal holidays; and amend the Constitution to reduce congressional salaries.  Finally, he establishes the following tax schedule:  those earning $30,000 or less a year should be tax exempt, $30,000 to $60,000 should be taxed at 15%, $60,000 to $80,000 -- 25%, $80,000 to $100,000 -- 35 %, and $100,000 to $400,000 -- 45%.  People making between $400,000 and $2 million should be taxed at 60% and those making above $2 million should be taxed at 80%.  My socially liberal friend asserts that the very wealthy would make a minimum of $400,000 a year.  Presumably, $400,000 is enough money for anyone    to feel prosperous. (Now, I wonder if you Milton Friedman fans recognize my leftist lion’s economic conservatism! Somehow, I’ve got my doubts.)

Even with all the huge holes in it, I like my leftist lion’s solutions better than my righteous rightist’s political, social, and spiritual smugness!  Solutions offer promise while observations merely offer a degree of rather static clarity.

My problem is how to adequately assess the damage that poverty has had on America.  My righteous rightist keeps asserting that there are too many Americans on food stamps – 47 million of them to be exact.  That’s approximately, as I calculate it, 15% of the population, which means that 85% of Americans aren’t on food stamps.  Of course, the problem my righteous rightist never mentions is “the working poor,” those who are hired part-time and paid the minimum wage which is not a living wage while their bosses also avoid paying medical benefits.  The fact that fulltime workers for Walmart and MacDonald’s annually receive 2.66 billion dollars in aid from the federal government hasn’t been brought to him as a conservative talking point.  By the way, that includes a billion dollars a year in health care benefits.  In other words, the federal government is subsidizing both Walmart and MacDonald’s.  Additionally, most people don’t realize that we write laws that keep people poor.  We zone people into areas where the education is poor.  We allow homeowners to write off their costs of home ownership, but we don’t allow renters to write off the cost of their rents.  We allow a banker and a builder to write off the cost of their martini lunch whether most of their conversation concerns business or the upcoming Super Bowl. However, a grocery market food checker and a grocery market shelf stocker having lunch together don’t get to write off the cost of their hotdog and coke even if they are discussing nothing but business!

The point here is that there’s more, much more that ought to confound people at all points on the political spectrum.  Poverty is a problem for absolutely everyone and until we face it, it will continue to evolve into a force greater than any international political or ideological foe.  FDR stayed the hand of poverty in the 1930s not because he was a liberal, but because he was willing to use government, the people’s greatest political social and economic weapon, to combat it.  He put it this way in a 1938 Fireside Chat:

“...Therefore, the only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over its government.”

FDR largely, if imperfectly, put “Humpty Dumpty” together again between 1933 and 1945. Now, it’s our turn!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY