People who cut food stamps - and gut child labor laws - most all
had empathy when they came into the world. So what squeezed the empathy
out? Analysts are pointing to inequality.
November 1 brought $5 billion in new cuts to the nation’s food stamp
program, now officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program, or SNAP. Poor failies will lose on average 7 percent of their food aid, calculates the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The cuts could cost some families a week’s worth of meals a month, says the chief at America’s largest food bank.
More cuts are looming.
A U.S. House of Representatives majority is demanding an additional $39
billion in “savings” over the next decade. Ohio and a host of other
states, in the meantime, are moving to limit food stamp eligibility.
Four states,now, have “lifted restrictions on child
labor.” In Wisconsin, state law used to limit 16- and 17-year-olds to no
more than five hours of work a day on school days. The new law erases
these limits. Other states are cutting back on protections for low-wage workers of
all ages. Earlier this year, the new EPI survey relates, Mississippi
adopted a law that bans cities and counties in the state “from adopting
any minimum wage, living wage, or paid or unpaid sick leave rights for
local workers.”
The sick and elderly aren’t faring all that well either. In Arizona,
the governor proposed a health-insurance cutoff that would have tripped
some patients up right in the middle of their chemotherapy. Texas is
considering Medicaid cuts that could end up closing 850 of the state’s
1,000 nursing homes.
Right after the 2010 elections right-wingers in 11 states gained “new monopoly control” over the governor’s
mansion and both legislative houses.
Lafer links this right-wing electoral triumph directly to growing
inequality. A widening income gap, he explains, “has produced a critical
mass of extremely wealthy businesspeople, many of whom are politically
conservative,” and various recent court cases have given these wealthy a
green light to spend virtually unlimited sums on their favored
political candidates.
An
insensitivity toward the problems poor people face, researchers have
shown, reflects a deeper psychological shift that extreme inequality
makes all but inevitable.The wider a society’s economic divide, as Demos think tank analyst Sean McElwee noted
last week, the less empathy on the part of the rich and the powerful
toward the poor and the weak. In a starkly unequal society, people of
more than ample means “rarely brush shoulders” with people of little
advantage. These rich don’t see the poor. They stereotype them as lazy
and unworthy.
Some cheerleaders for the rich and powerful, adds
economist Nancy Folbre, go even further. They attribute unemployment
and sluggish growth “to excessively generous public assistance.” Cutting
food stamps, for these self-righteous souls, comes to seem an easy
solution to all that ails a failing American economy.
CNN columnist John Sutter
last week brought America down to inequality’s ground level, with a look at the most unequal county in the United States, East Carroll Parish in Louisiana. In East Carroll, the rich live north of Lake Providence, the poor
south. The two groups seldom interact. East Carroll’s most affluent 5
percent average $611,000 a year, 90 times the $6,800 incomes the poorest
fifth of the parish average. Such wide income gaps, Sutter shows,
invite “gaps in empathy.” East Carroll’s
rich see food stamps as an “entitlement” that rots poor people’s
incentive to work. Yet these same affluent annually pocket enormously
generous farm subsidies. In 2010, East Carroll’s most highly subsidized
farmer grabbed $655,000 from one federal subsidy alone.
The average food stamp payout in the parish: $1,492 per person per year.
Taken from a longer article here
Insensitivity? Lack of empathy or compassion? Or just sheer psychopathy as pointed out in this earlier blog?
Capitalism's economic system seems eminently adapted to dividing populations in areas other than economic.
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