Paul Krugman is pissed off that the Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee are looking to slash spending on food stamps. But, as Steven points out, food assistance is one of those things that conservatives and libertarians really hate. They can’t stand anyone getting a meal for free. It’s the principle of the thing. They don’t care that food stamps prevent malnutrition in children or that food stamps are calculated by both governmental and independent analysts to be one the most efficient forms of stimulus for the economy. Giving people food assistance in a down economy actually creates jobs and helps end recessions. Even if preventing people from starving or suffering from malnutrition were not the right thing to do, it would still be a good idea to do it.
One of the problems with conservative thinking is that it cannot account for nuance or complexity. They think that giving a starving person some free food will disincentivize them to go find work. They’ll become complacent moochers, happy with their lot in life. But to whatever pitifully small degree that is true, we’re making a good financial decision when we allow some of our tax dollars to go to these moochers. They will be less sick, their children will do better in school and then in life, paying more money in taxes into the system. The money they spend now will help create jobs in agriculture and throughout the food distribution system.
Plus, if Romney really lost because 47% of the people are just looking for handouts, then picking on moochers seems like a bad strategy.
So, children should go hungry because it will teach them a lesson about personal responsibility? Dickens couldn’t have written villains like these guys.
“Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.”
~George Carlin
It. Doesn’t. Make. Sense.
The irony here is that only the most whacked out conservative sees absolutely no role for the government to do anything.
Convervatives believe governments that govern least are best, not those that don’t govern at all.
A credible conservative wants to as much as possible keep the government out of mainstream daily life. It should be limited to the fringed and unusual circummstances — such as wars, natural disaster, public saftey and crime, and those who are too young, old, weak, infirm, or the like to contribute and care for themselves.
And it should be limited to situations when other means are not more efficient and effective — and the market and data is the only thing that should be trusted to prove that.
So based on those things alone, genuine conservatives have no problem with food stamps. Faux conservatives who can’t be troubled with actual data not so much.
Convervatives believe governments that govern least are best, not those that don’t govern at all.
Really? They say they do, but they don’t really mean it. Just look at Mr. Transvaginal Ultrasound.
The word used was “credible conservative”. And once upon a time, in a world vastly different from this one, say the 60’s, there were credible conservatives like that. In fact, there still are, but they now form the right wing of the Dem Party.
Because, in truth, the GOP is no longer a party composed of conservatives. It is a party composed of fringe radicals bent on destroying the current American society. They are closer to anarchists than conservatives.
They seem even more like nihilists than anarchists to me. At least anarchists think there will be a utopian future if we get rid of all governments.
Conservatives on the other hand seem to hate everyone and everything outside of their own narrowly-defined tribe, and are constantly panicked about the hordes they see marching towards them to steal “their” stuff. They’d prefer to just “go Galt” and let the rest of us burn and starve to death. And for the Christianists, the End Times can’t come soon enough. That’s nihilism to me.
Seems to me that nihilists, anarchists, vandals all apply. But more than anything else they seem like a cult to me. Isolated and self isolating from outside influence, sharply dismissive of “others” and deeply angry with apostates, they have their own language rich in code words that have no meaning to non members. And largely unmoved by any argument from those outside the fold.
More faux conservatives.
Social conservatives have little in common with the constitutional principles that “conservatives” founded the nation on.
Dole may have been right. The party should close for repairs until they put more of a premium on reason and facts and on anything that happens to actually promote the public welfare — because that’s the proper end goal of any politcal philosphy.
It’s funny coming from Dole because he was once the GOP’s hatchet man. Just read Perlstein today:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/174601/laugh-week-bob-dole-tribune-civility
Note that conservative ideology is precisely opposite when it comes to the motivations of the wealthy. Whereas subsidizing the poor is held to demotivate them from gainful employment, they insist that massive subsidies are absolutely necessary to motivate the wealthy to do their market magic.
And of course the easy argument against the “it’ll make ’em lazy” argument is that Sweden, a country with some of the most generous social welfare benefits on earth as well as relatively high taxes, has a workforce participation rate not much different than our own. People will work as long as they don’t have to abandon their child on the sidewalk to do so. The question is whether they will be miserable and begging for scraps while they work, or not.
“If welfare is so awesome, why aren’t you on it?”
A bunch of corporations and rich folks are. It’s just not called welfare. It has names like quantitative easing, private school tax credits and the like.
Conservative thinking 🙂 Make sense. http://linkapp.me/PPV3K
All of these people, all across the country, devoting their political interest and effort to the problem of poor people getting over on them.
What a bunch of suckers. How can they not see how they are being played?
Because it would require them to perceive and accept that they have more in common with the poor they despise than the rich they aspire to be.
The problem with authoritarian right wing child rearing is people grow up damaged, insecure and without an inner core identity. For example, you don’t steal because it’s immoral or you don’t wish to deprive someone else. Control is externalized, meaning, You don’t steal because you might get caught. That’s one of the reasons they’re so heavily into “law and order” as a means of external control of themselves.
And by the same token, righties think if I don’t have to work to eat then I just might quit my own
In my opinion many right wingers are unhappy people who don’t seem to like their jobs or families and are perpetually caught up in a scarcity mentality, a belief that there’s not enough good things to go around, someone’s gain is someone else’s loss, etc.