On March 13, 2014, Igor Volsky writes on ThinkProgress:
CREDIT: APRep. Paul Ryan’s claim that young “inner city” men are “not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work” because they rely on government assistance hassparked outrage from a growing number of Democratic lawmakers, one of whom called the comments “a thinly veiled racial attack.”
Ryan defended himself on Wednesday night, telling the blog Crew of 42, “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.”
But whether or not race was at the heart of Ryan’s intentions, it appears that the government data and the social research he uses to argue that “inner city” men are taking advantage of anti-poverty programs to avoid employment actually only undermine his claims.
When discussing “this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working” on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America on Wednesday, the Congressman specifically mentioned two social scientists to substantiate his views: Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who openly believes that African-American men are less intelligent than whites due to genetic differences, and Robert Putnam, a Harvard professor whose research has found that lower-income Americans are more distrustful of others and more disconnected from society’s important institutions than their middle or higher-income counterparts. Putnam argues that these trends are a sign that the United States is “heading towards a caste system where social standing and community involvement are inherited from generation to generation” and undermine social mobility.
When asked to substantiate the Congressman’s claim that inner city men aren’t thinking about employment, a Ryan spokesperson pointed ThinkProgress to Putnam’s paper “Growing Class Gaps in Social Connectedness among American Youth.” While the analysis in that paper finds evidence that lower-income groups are less socially and civically engaged, part of what Ryan’s remarks implied, it doesn’t examine whether poor people are unwilling to work.
In fact, Putnam himself explained in an earlier examination that civic investment and welfare spending “appear essentially uncorrelated.” “Citizens in free-spending states are no less trusting or engaged than citizens in frugal ones,” he wrote, before directly undermining Ryan’s thesis: “Among nineteen member countries of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for which data on social trust and group membership are available from the 1990-1991 World Values Survey, these indicators of social capital are, if anything, positively correlated with the size of the state,” Putnam concluded. That means higher spending on welfare programs can actually help lower-income people become more engaged.
In defending his “inner city” remarks on Wednesday night, Ryan changed his focus to “rural” poverty, saying, “This isn’t a race based comment it’s a breakdown of families, it’s rural poverty in rural areas, and talking about where poverty exists — there are no jobs and we have a breakdown of the family. Government data has corroborated that rural areas, not inner cities, are increasingly key to the problem of poverty.
According to the Department of Agriculture, poverty is actually more heavily concentrated in rural, rather than urban areas. “More than 35 percent of the people living in completely rural counties live in high-poverty counties and more than 26 percent live in persistent-poverty counties. In contrast, about 6 percent of the people living in the most urban nonmetro areas live in high-poverty counties and 4 percent live in persistent-poverty counties,” it finds:
Ryan’s comments come a week after he released a 204-page report analyzing the effectiveness of the nation’s anti-poverty programs, 50 years after President Lyndon Johnson declared a national War on Poverty. Following its publication, several prominent economists publicly complained that Ryan misrepresented, misunderstood, or selectively quoted their research.
The former GOP vice presidential candidate, who argues that federal anti-poverty programs have contributed to the nation’s high poverty rate and “created what’s known as the poverty trap,” is expected to offer reforms to the nation’s programs in his upcoming FY 2015 budget.
Republicans continue to blame ineptness and laziness for the plight of the poor.
During the age of labor-intensive contributions to the process of producing goods, products, and services it is true that America created the largest middle class the world had ever seen. This was the state of the political economy in times past.
This was a time of “full employment” with jobs paying decent livable wages due to the bargaining power of unions to demand better wages, working conditions and benefits from corporate owners who were “dependent” on labor for the production of their goods, products, and services. But as tectonic shifts in the technologies of production began to put more of the contribution to the process on the non-human factor of production, labor workers lost bargaining power because they could be eliminated by advanced tools, machines, super-automation, robotics, digital computerization, etc. Today and into the future, this shift will intensify with most economic value created by the non-human factor, which without reform of the monetary and finance system will continue to owned by fewer and fewer people.
When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advance amplified the productive power of non-human capital, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels.
The resulting impact of our current approaches has been plutocratic government and concentration of capital ownership, which denies every citizen his or her pursuit of economic happiness (property) as originally envision by the founding fathers of our country.
At present, there is a brewing power struggle going on in the United States between individual human beings (citizens) and the plutocratic powers who manipulate our government and the would-be plutocratic powers (top corporate executive managers and financial barons). What the 99 percent movement should advocate is returning America to economic democracy. If we do not achieve economic democracy, then plutocracy will lead to fascism—the ownership of productive capital by the rich and by their institutions.
At one point in 1976, the discussion led to The Joint Economic Committee of Congress endorsing the two-factor policy to broaden capital ownership as an economic goal for America. The 1976 Joint Economic Report stated: “To provide a realistic opportunity for more U.S. citizens to become owners of capital, and to provide an expanded source of equity financing for corporations, it should be made national policy to pursue the goal of broadened capital ownership. Congress also should request from the Administration a quadrennial report on the ownership of wealth in this country, which would assist in evaluating how successfully the base of wealth was being broadened over time.” Unfortunately the Congress has never paid any attention to this policy, and the goal has subsequently been unacknowledged and unheeded by our plutocratic political leaders.
We should demand to know why there is no Department of Ownership.
In order to return to a system of broad-based prosperity we must restore our founding fathers’ principles and recognize that we cannot have political democracy without economic democracy, the foundation of what we once had.
In order to once again achieve broad-based prosperity means that we must reform the system and create a new way, the JUST Third Way, designed to prohibit monopoly ownership of productive capital and broaden personal ownership of FUTURE wealth-creating, income-producing capital assets in this century and for future generations of Americans.
Support the Agenda of The Just Third Way Movement at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, Monetary Justice at http://capitalhomestead.org/page/monetary-justice, and the Capital Homestead Act at http://www.cesj.org/homestead/index.htm and http://www.cesj.org/homestead/summary-cha.htm.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/03/13/3399441/ryan-research-lazy-inner-cities/
