The Poor: A Bipartisan Case of 'Don't Know, Don't Care"

By Steve Hynd

Bob Herbert at the NYT is turning into one of my favorite mainstream columnists. On Friday he hit one out of the park :

Consider the extremes. President Obama is redesigning his administration to make it even friendlier toward big business and the megabanks, which is to say the rich, who flourish no matter what is going on with the economy in this country. (They flourish even when they�re hard at work destroying the economy.) Meanwhile, we hear not a word � not so much as a peep � about the poor, whose ranks are spreading like a wildfire in a drought.

The politicians and the media behave as if the poor don�t exist. But with jobs still absurdly scarce and the bottom falling out of the middle class, the poor are becoming an ever more significant and increasingly desperate segment of the population.

How do you imagine a family of four would live if its annual income was $11,000 or less?

During a conversation I had this week with Peter Edelman, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and a longtime expert on issues related to poverty, he pointed out that the number of people in that tragically dismal category has grown to more than 17 million. These are the folks trying to make it on incomes below half of the official poverty line, which is $22,000 annually for a family of four.

...�There is this astonishing number of people all the way down there at the bottom that we just don�t talk about,� Mr. Edelman said, �and they�re in very big trouble.�

Welfare, even for the poorest of the poor, is not much help. More than 17 million people may be living in extreme poverty, but welfare, for most of the people who need it, was �reformed� right out of existence. TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), which is what welfare is called now, helps far fewer people than welfare used to, even though the poor have been laid low by the worst economy since the Depression.

Hardly anyone cares. Hardly anyone even notices.

With the tax cuts for the rich saved and William Daley coming on board, the atmosphere is being readied for Obama & Co. to tap the fat cats for the zillions necessary for next year�s re-election run. And that, of course, is the only thing that really matters.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman writes that Texas' abandonment of its poorest is the shape of things to come as it contemplates even deeper cuts to the tatters that remain of the state's safety net, in the face of a $25 billion budget shortfall.

Among the states, Texas ranks near the bottom in education spending per pupil, while leading the nation in the percentage of residents without health insurance. It�s hard to imagine what will happen if the state tries to eliminate its huge deficit purely through further cuts.

 The myth of Texas being recession proof has been built on gutting help for the poor along with a "smoke and mirrors" approach to accounting. One of the things the state is now looking at is dropping involvement in the federal Medicaid program and the Children's Health Insurance Program. "3.6 million children, people with disabilities and impoverished Texans" would suffer.

People, this is what Class War, waged on the poor by both the Democrats and the Republicans, looks like.

(A big hat tip to Kat for most of the links above.)