The War on the Poor

First, a couple of quotes:

"Republican hostility toward the poor and unfortunate has now reached such a fever pitch that the party doesn’t really stand for anything else — and only willfully blind observers can fail to see that reality." --Paul Krugman, "The War on the Poor," The New York Times (October 31 2013)

"One piece of the puzzle seems to come down to ideology and a passionate and unquestioning faith in "the market". If you are poor in a market system, this ideology implies you've done something wrong; you aren't productive; you don't deserve a better quality of life. You are probably a drug addict, a welfare queen, a slacker." --Daniel Little, "Why a War on the Poor?" (October 8, 2013)

"In other words, low- or middle-income families may see their tax rates go up as they lose eligibility for benefits, but if they continue to work and earn more they may well reach a point at which this rate will decline." --Nancy Folbre, "The Marginal Tax Rate Mess," The New York Times (October 30, 2013)

Little and Folbre I think have hit upon a potent recipe not only for the Republican hostility toward the poor that Krugman sees on the right, but also the failure of both right and left to craft a compelling political case for what essentially boils down to the welfare state.  Perhaps the loss of that political functionality to create a theory that makes sense of a complex world can be chocked up to the decline of the humanities and an unfortunate side-effect of our data-obsessed policy space right now.  Numbers and data are cold comfort for the working family with supposedly "good jobs" at $16/hr that doesn't have significantly more disposable income than the working poor family.  Reinvigorating the philosophical case for the "means-testing compromise" is a primary leadership challenge for public officials today.

Closing with another quote from Folbre: "Any worker who can estimate her own net effective marginal tax rate (a detailed calculation that exceeds the capacity and curiosity of many economists with Ph.D.’s) can also figure out that the labor market often rewards effort and experience more generously in the long run than in the short run. As any college student seeking an internship can explain, it is economically rational to work many hours for a zero wage if that effort will improve future job market opportunities.

Workers’ perceptions of their future opportunities in the labor market may affect their labor supply as much as, if not more than, their current marginal effective tax rate."