OK, to be crystal clear, then: you say that raising the minimum wage is so obviously positive, so clearly unambiguously the correct thing to do, that “it’s about as certain as anything having to do with the behavior of human beings can be.”
Yes?
There may be a point where the minimum wage stifles jobs, but we’re nowhere near there. Progressive states with higher minimum wages are often doing as well or better than the national average. $10 an hour is not an unreasonable minimum, businesses can either slightly raise their prices or tolerate slightly lower profit margins to compensate. Republicans often act like they’re the little Dutch boys with their fingers in the dike preventing a disaster if the minimum wage is raised. It happens every time it’s raised and their gloom and doom prognostication is quickly forgotten.
AGAIN, though – you see what happens here? I’m not arguing the specific issue of which answer is the best one. I’m arguing AGAINST the notion that one answer is so blatantly, obviously correct that no one can possibly support the other one except through “pathetic moral bankruptcy.”
I don’t object to someone saying, “Look, the facts strongly support my case.” I objected to the comments above that said, in effect, “The opposition to my case is outright evil.”
“I disagree” is not an argument. Even in court, I’d expect.
I’m not calling any person evil – only actions and outcomes.
Sure.
Not the supporters, the action of supporting abortion. Do you think doing something that may result in a woman choosing to abort is an evil action?
I don’t think those who oppose the right to abort are necessarily evil, but I believe that any action that is intended to result in a woman not having the legal right to choose to abort or not abort without interference is an evil action. For example, I believe that standing outside of an abortion clinic (or women’s health clinic), berating women and showing them graphic images of aborted fetuses, is an evil thing to do. It doesn’t mean that everyone who does it is evil – but I think that specific action is an evil action to take.
Since we are deep into the semantics of theology, invested in resolving the utterly crucial question of evil, how might we interpret Mr. Ryan’s remark about his political opponent’s program for a full stomach and an empty soul?
I am well aware that many spiritual guides recommend fasting as an aid to spiritual growth, but fasting is voluntary, otherwise its simply “going without”. What is the source of Mr. Ryan’s insight into the care and maintenance of the soul? Didn’t hear anything like that in my Sunday School, my understanding was that my number one favorite Jew was quite explicit about the need to provide for the needy.
And how is it that he can offer such pronouncements ex rectum without so much as a “tsk tsk!” from our resident semantic theoretician? A very fine line to draw, seems to me, between advocating policies that degrade and impoverish the soul and “evil”.
Even aside from the fact that the supply side economics that has been the Republican mainstay for the last 3 decades has done little to help job creation particularly when we are in the problem with the economy is more on the demand side, the notion of opening up fishing holes is very different from “teach to fish”.
The point of the aphorism wasn’t that one should not give people fish. All it says about it about is that it is inferior to the alternative. The key is in the actual harder work of teaching to fish. In fact it helps matters to give the man fishes while he is in the process of learning to fish. The later would involve providing assistance to help people escape their under privileged circumstances and reach a point self sufficiency. Such things would include providing the means to do a job search, such as cell phones, and reliable public transportation, economical broad band internet access, child care, as well as job training and education grants. All things Republicans are generally opposed to. The Republican attitude really is that those who can’t learn to catch fish on their own for whatever reason don’t deserve to have any. That is, they are effectively told to “Go fish”. It’s possible that in a world of limited resources this attitude is the correct one, but it seems extremely patronizing to me when it is portrayed as being for the person’s own good.
It isn’t just dogs who can hear that one, Paul.
More from Mr. Ryan today on his CPAC speech; he was a guest on Bill Bennett’s radio show:
[QUOTE=Paul Ryan]
“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with…[W]e want people to reach their potential and so the dignity of work is very valuable and important and we have to re-emphasize work and reform our welfare programs, like we did in 1996.
"That’s this tailspin or spiral that we’re looking at in our communities…Your buddy Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard, those guys have written books on this.”
[/quote]
I think most folks around here are familiar with Charles Murray’s arguments from his book The Bell Curve.
First off, last time I checked, most anti-poverty initiatives included a work requirement (largely as part of the reform in 1996). Second, whenever someone starts lauding “the dignity of work”, I wonder why they don’t also criticize lazy aristocrats living off trust funds? Why can’t a billionaire benefit from mopping floors the same way the poor do? Any chance there’s a stereotype at work here, especially considering he says it’s part of the culture of men from the “inner cities in particular”?
With statements like these, I simply do not believe Ryan’s plan has any interest in the poor. At all. He’s not looking for a better way, he just wants to cut them off, and he seems willing to lie about the history of welfare reform, use racist code-words, and cite Murray’s discredited work to do it. What would you call that?
He forgot to say “shiftless”.
I don’t completely agree.
It’s true that Ryan doesn’t laud the virtues of “hard work” for lazy aristocrats living of trust funds. But the reason is very basic: Ryan believes that personal freedom should be even more sacrosanct. The difference is, however, that the aristocrat does not demand others feed, clothe, or shelter him. Ryan is, I suspect, not saying that everyone should work. He’s saying that work is the proper vehicle to obtain money, which can be traded for goods and services. If you already have the money, i imagine he’d add, then work is not something your government can demand of you.
As to “racist code words,” I hope you agree there is a difference between the cities and the suburbs, and that the phrase “inner city,” has a meaning that is not racial. I hope you can concede that there are specific social issues that arise in the inner cities that do not translate well, or at all, to suburbs or rural areas.
What word or words would you recommend someone use to describe such issues?
Or do you contend that the social problems to be solved in this country are identical in the city, suburb, and rural environments?
If that is the difference, then does that mean that you think the poor demand that others feed, clothe, and shelter them?
There’s a history of the Republican party using the phrase “inner city” to mean black people. Maybe Ryan didn’t mean it that way, but he should be knowledgeable enough about the history of politics and his party to recognize that it might be interpreted that way, and perhaps he should have used a different phrase.
Or maybe he meant it exactly that way, because there’s a significant segment of the party that really buys into that stuff.
Right – which is why I asked:
I assume you don’t contend that no Republican is permitted to even speak of such issues.
No – but others demand these things on behalf of the poor. There is generally no such demand, directly or by proxy, for the lazy aristocrat.
Of course Ryan wants to help the lazy aristocrat by lowering his taxes. And helping the companies that make up the aristocrat’s holdings with all sorts of corporate welfare and relaxed regulation.
Ryan’s vision of helping poor people is to actually help rich people, and then because of trickle down magic, poor people better off.
As I’ve said before, he isn’t mustache-twirling evil, in that I doubt he knows he’s a bad person. He’s delusional because of an ideological addiction to a profoundly stupid set of beliefs.
He does want to do cruel and damaging things however. And the fact that he’s too mixed up to know it, doesn’t mean the damage he’s trying to do is any less. So is it better to say that Ryan is doing evil rather than is evil? Does that satisfy the nitpicker in you?
I don’t know how to do nested quotes, so I put your question in quotes.
It depends on what he’s trying to say. Is he trying to say “some poor people don’t work hard enough”? If so, then there’s no need to confine the statement to inner cities.
Is he trying to say “some city poor people don’t work hard enough”? If so, why is he focusing on city poor people, who are disproportionately minorities, while there are plenty of non-city poor people? In fact, the poverty rate in rural areas is and has been for many decades higher than the poverty rate in urban areas.
Is he contending that, despite the higher poverty rates of rural areas, the urban poor are lazier? Because that’s an utterly ridiculous and evidence-free statement. It’s the kind of statement that is so patently ridiculous that it makes me question the motives of the speaker – either he is extremely ignorant of the nature of poverty in the US, or he is deliberately focusing on “inner city poor” for political reasons. Either choice deserves criticism.
I suspect many poverty programs are the result of multiple factors.
One is the common human decency you describe. People want to help those that have fallen. Well, most people. Some stand by and laugh.
The other more important factor in our safety net, is, I would say, the desire to not live in the 19th century. We don’t want to have corpses in the streets. Swarms of mothers turning tricks to feed their children. We don’t want masses of hopeless people getting more and more desperate.
Ryan’s ideas of greatness may be a neo-gilded-age, with fewer laws and regulations protecting the small and inconveniencing the rich, but those ideas would increase the amount of human misery and work back the improvements we’ve made to our society over the last century.
The fundamental difference is that lowering taxes and giving money are two different things. The taxes are money taken away – I’ll help you by not taking as much of your property away – as opposed to *I’ll help you by giving you property that used to belong to other people.
I – and, I am sure, Ryan also – understand that some measure of taxation is necessary. But in my view, you cannot credibly claim that it’s evil to have a different opinion on how much taxation is wise policy.
It’s a certainly a better formulation, and perhaps one I should simply accept for the sake of my primary point here. But in fact, I don’t even concede that that he’s doing evil.
Still, that’s not what I was arguing against.
Only because the lazy aristocrat already has food, clothes and shelter. We do find that aristocrats, both lazy and active, do themselves lobby, both directly and by proxy, for other things of value.