A safety-net, not a hammock

http://www.samefacts.com/2012/04/watching-conservatives/a-safety-net-not-a-hammock/

A safety-net, not a hammock
by Harold Pollack


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The Congressional Budget Office cannot score Rep. Ryan’s proposals without specific details. However, Ryan’s staff provided CBO with general percentages to examine the long-term implications. Among other things, spending on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program \would decline “from 2 percent of GDP in 2011 to 1¼ percent in 2030 and 1 percent in 2050.” Meanwhile, other mandatory spending, and all discretionary spending, would decline “from 12½ percent of GDP in 2011 to 5¾ percent in 2030 and 3¾ percent in 2050.” In my opinion, President Obama fairly described Ryan’s plan when he called it “thinly-veiled social Darwinism.” Ryan’s proposals have only one redeeming feature: their political impracticality. Like Jon Cohn, I find this appalling.

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Ryan is speaking about many of the direct care workers who assist disabled persons such as Vincent. We trust these women and men to care for our loved ones. They clean soiled linens. They calm agitated people suffering from autism spectrum disorders. Their professional peers do similarly worthy work as nurse’s aides, and child care workers. They earn very low wages, nationally averaging just above $11/hr. Many provide health care while they, themselves, go uninsured.

Like their counterparts who scrub floors, change diapers, or operate cash registers at McDonald’s, these are the lucky duckies whose kids rely upon Medicaid or CHIP, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other elements of our safety-net. Below them on the economic ladder are low-income single moms trying to raise their kids on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), traditional cash welfare. Many of these women can’t find a job in the midst of an economic crisis. Still others are quite poor, yet for one reason or another are ineligible for TANF aid.

Few people are resting on “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” Welfare rolls are at record lows. In some states, maximum TANF cash benefit for a family of three are below $200. That’s well below the $350 that Rep. Ryan apparently paid for a single bottle of wine at a swank business dinner.

I live and work in the Chicago southland, near hundreds of thousands of poor people who would be deeply hurt by policies Congressman Ryan espouses. Some are jobless. Others work hard every day in crummy jobs. Others are students in elementary school. They don’t need lectures from a conspicuously pampered congressman regarding their “will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”

I don’t know who originated this hammock metaphor. Republicans such as William Weld have deployed it before. Whoever made it up, it’s pretty disgraceful.