Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears. While we all sup sorrow with the poor.
–Stephen Foster. “Hard Times, Come Again No More.”
Well, not any more we don’t sup sorrow with the poor.
That idea is as dead as the 19th Century. These days we sup sorrow with tax accountants and rich people who are oppressed by that most threatening of all bogeymen, the Internal Revenue Service.
And our compassion is aimed at the middle class, where having children is such a big challenge that each and every one should be worth a $500 tax rebate.
A round of deep tax cuts is just what this country needs, says Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole. President Clinton has his own plan for some lesser tax cuts to help the middle class.
Almost everyone in politics (at least majorities in the House and Senate) seems to believe that the best thing for the poor is a stiff kick in the butt, along with “an end to welfare as we know it,” whatever that might come to mean.
These developments are signs that as the political convention season begins, the theme of this year’s presidential campaign has become as apparent as the diamond stickpin on a 19th Century robber baron’s cravat: Comfort the comfortable, afflict the afflicted.
Not so long ago, it was fashionable in politics to talk the talk when it came to sensitive issues like the welfare of children and improving the lot of the poor.
Poverty has long been an uncomfortable reality in this, the world’s wealthiest nation. Depending on how the number is tallied, about a fourth of America’s children close their eyes each night in its cold embrace and awake each morning to a dulling awareness that this condition is not going to change.
Giving a sense of hope to the hopeless has always been one of politics’ great responsibilities, even if it was a fleeting hope that soared more on the beauty of rhetoric than on any identifiable reality. Now we have abandoned even that.
Reform efforts to end welfare and a Republican tax plan aimed straight at people who already are among the more comfortable are signs of this transition.
Clinton and Dole are playing to the audience on these themes, something like vaudevillians trolling for laughs with jokes about breaking wind. It’s cheap, but it works.
It also edges right up against the unconscionable and is likely to be viewed someday as one of modern politics’ darkest moments. Think of the messages these two policy developments send.
Welfare reform, its backers argue, is aimed at discouraging people from having babies to increase the size of their welfare checks, as though that little bonanza comes anywhere close to the actual cost of raising a child.
As a matter of policy then, we don’t want poor people to have babies. It is obviously viewed as a bad thing for the poor to reproduce, as though love and parenting were components that could be measured on a W-2 form.
Getting rid of those unhappy welfare programs that are the perceived cause of this development is the solution, in the view of reformers. Each state can come up with its own plan on how to do that.
Look for lots of budget cutting and an end to Aid to Families with Dependent Children. It’s a quick way to save money, and the middle class simply isn’t going to rise up and reject the politicians who push it into place.
As for the poor, well, not much of a voting bloc there. As for the longer-term threat, They are poor people! If they were good at organizing, they wouldn’t be poor, now, would they? Case closed.
What happens to the children?
One of the important ideas behind the development of welfare programs was the noble idea that children should not be made to suffer just because their parents are unable to become investment bankers or hamburger flippers.
The truth is most politicians have no idea what will happen to the children. Look for more of them on the streets as their parents get pushed out of public housing. They won’t be hard to spot.
But it won’t be your problem anymore.
It’s their worthless parents who didn’t have the foresight to get born into the middle class who must bear the burden and the shame of it all. Life is a series of choices. They should have chosen birth in Kenilworth instead of Cabrini-Green.
That is the first half of the formula.
The Dole tax proposal, the other half, seems to argue that it is a good thing to have babies if you are in the middle class, such a good thing that the government will give you back money based on the number of children you have.
Politicians love middle-class children as long as they don’t demand too much as they grow up. Cranky teenagers who drop out of school and need lots of government services are a different matter.
So as long as you are employed and middle class or better, it pays to have as many children as you can possibly pump out. It makes good tax sense.
Of course they could well be miserable, because income isn’t much of a protection against trouble, but at least they won’t be miserable and poor.
The problem with both of these efforts is that the unintended consequences are likely to create problems as egregious as the ones they were supposed to solve.
We went down the tax cut route in the Reagan era, and the nation reaped a $300 billion deficit.
All that money that was supposed to trickle down and all those boats that would be lifted by the rising economic tides and all the other bad metaphors aimed at explaining the abysmal science of economics amounted to one thing: Rich people got lots more.
There is also another reality at work in taxes: They never go away. Cutting federal taxes will most likely mean services will shift back to the states, with the bills attached.
What a grand thing, your federal taxes go down and your property taxes go up. Or your state income taxes. Or taxes on food.
As for welfare reform and its implications, Stephen Foster may already have presented us with the verse we need to cover that dark future.
While we seek mirth and beauty
And music light and gay
There are frail forms fainting at the door:
Though their voices are silent, their pleading looks will say,
Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.
