In Ryans eyes,a assist-the-wealthy, whack-the-destitute agenda is really what’s best for everybody.
Once, or at a town corridor 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 destitute and working class as evidenced in the recent debates approximately health care and the anticipated tax reform. So I’d like to request you how you see yourself upholding the church’s social teaching that has the idea that God is always on the side of the destitute and dispossessed,as should we be.”It’s a tricky one, but if you want to simultaneously carve taxes for wealthy people and benefits for destitute people, or 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 assist-the-wealthy, and whack-the-destitute 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 buy from the destitute to give to the wealthy. So,don’t do it! The trick here is to convince people that you’re with them on the importance of helping the destitute. You just disagree approximately “how to achieve that goal.”Congratulations! You’ve just turned a profound moral question approximately whether we should assist the destitute or the wealthy into what appears to be a minor disagreement between ethically equivalent opinions.2. Direct attention absent from what it means to be destitute.
Lots of people think destitute people simply don’t acquire enough money to meet their families’ basic needs. You know better. Tell them what the destitute really need is “upward mobility,” “economic growth, or ” and “equality of opportunity. Not only do these airy concepts all sound really wonderful—who could be against any of them?they also let you pivot absent from the obvious solution: giving people the money,food, health care, and other necessities they lack.accurate,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 wealthy spur economic growth, no one will even acquire time to dig into the intimate connection between inequality of outcomes and inequality of opportunity.3. Imply that destitute people’s personal failings are what’s holding them back.
You can’t pull off the enlightened kind-guy routine if you’re blaming destitute people for their problems outright. You need to do it subtly. Instead of saying, and “destitute people are destitute because they’re slothful,” try saying, “We’ve got to change our approach … and always encourage work, or never discourage work.” Never intellect 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, and class,gender, and/or other forms of privilege and sheer dumb luck. The more you tap into that inclination, and the more people will oppose helping those less fortunate and support imposing burdensome requirements on the acquire Nots instead.4. Choose unrepresentative examples and statistics.
Paul Ryan loves to tell people that “our poverty rates are approximately 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, or which showsthat anti-poverty programs carve poverty nearly in half and acquire 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, and ” 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 earn life for that single mom—and thousands of others—much worse. He’s fine with leaving those inconvenient details out, or 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, and as is the large and growing body of research showing that the safety net boosts the long-run outcomes of children growing up in destitute families. As long as you contend that we currently don’t focus on outcomes,you can earn 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-accurate steps from Paul Ryan, before you know it, or you’ll acquire convinced a constituency (and perhaps even yourself!) that helping the wealthy is actually approximately helping the destitute. Or,at the very least, people will be too confused to know the difference.
Editors note: This article originally appeared on 34justice.com. It has been edited for length and content. Related StoriesCongress Is Trying to Blow Up Our Elections AND Our System of Charities in One Fell SwoopRobert Reich: Is Trump's Treasury Secretary a Fool or a Tool?Turkey No Longer Has Mike Flynn's Back as Mueller and NY AG Schneiderman Team Up Against Him
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