Daniel TilsonLyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of The United States, must be spinning in his grave and cursing up a storm this week.
You see, to mark the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s landmark ‘War On Poverty’, congressional conservatives like Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio are taking turns trying to discredit it.
First came a video released by Sen. Rubio posing the question:
“Isn’t it time to declare Big Government’s War on Poverty a failure?”
It’s not exactly a new script.
The GOP has been selling a storyline for a while now that because there’s still rampant poverty in America, the social safety net programs that have helped so many for so long are a failure.
Uh-huh, tell that to your grandparents on Medicare.
Tell that to your old friends who fell on hard times and got a little help with their preschoolers from Head Start.
In point of fact, the array of programs LBJ unveiled in 1964 lowered the percentage of Americans living in poverty by more than 40 percent in their first six years of existence.
But then funding started drying up as conservatives and corporations implemented an increasingly successful anti-government, anti-poor strategy.
Millions of economically insecure middle-class taxpayers were told their hard-earned money was being wasted on “big government” programs and “handouts”…and many of them believed it.
Medicare, Medicaid and Head Start survived because they were proven, literal lifesavers for so many old, young, disabled and poor Americans.
But most of the more targeted economic redevelopment programs that had lifted many Americans up and out of poverty were sabotaged.
Over the ensuing years, federal and state tax laws and rules were rewritten to wildly favor the richest people and biggest corporations.
Labor unions were drummed so far out of the private sector workplace that middle class wages remained stagnant and benefits were slashed.
Surprise, surprise! Fifty years later, the national poverty rate has only dropped from 19 percent to 15 percent.
Income inequality, that gaping gap between rich and poor people, is worse than ever.
And so, understanding the need to keep fooling some of the people all of the time (if you want to keep/gain control the House, Senate or presidency), the GOP’s “young guns” have decided to get surreal about becoming poverty problem-solvers.
Problem is, their solutions feature the same old anti-government, anti-tax propaganda, diversion of millions more from public coffers to private, for-profit corporations…and ridiculous rhetoric.
Take the speech from Rubio that followed his YouTube video this week.
Please…take it.
In addition to clamoring for diversion of federal funds to individual states so they can wheel and deal with the private sector, Rubio cited marriage as the “greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty”.
As one of three sons lifted out of poverty in the early 60s by a single hard-working mother, I find that as insulting as it is ignorant.
And I hope millions of single moms and dads out there feel the same.
Less than an hour after Rubio’s speech, GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor launched into his own heap of hypocritical double talk, saying:
“School choice is the surest way to break this vicious cycle of poverty and we must act fast before it is too late for too many.”
Translation?
“Draining more money from public education is the best way to make poor folks support vouchers and pull kids from public schools into our pals’ private, for-profit charter schools”
Now seems the time to declare war all right, on the impoverishment of honesty and fairness in the ranks of the Republican Party.
