Safety net reduces poverty - now more than ever

LBJ and every Democrat since then was right: the safety net works. We have reduced poverty.

The facts show that we are right and the critics are wrong. Liberals should never apologize for policies that have saved millions of lives. 

We liberals should be proud! 

Study: U.S. poverty rate decreased over past half-century thanks to safety-net programs

By Zachary A. Goldfarb

December 10, 2013 | Washington Post

URL: http://wapo.st/IMOJhu

For conservatives, charity's all about THEM

Rush Limbaugh's latest monologue on government assistance vs. charity is quite telling on his part.  Unintentionally so.

See, he sets up government assistance and charity in opposition to one another. That's not necessarily so, it's not a zero-sum game, but let's go with his conceit. So, which one is better?

I've settled this before.  First, look at U.S. poverty statistics pre- and post-LBJ's War on Poverty.  Presumably, America has been just as Christian and charitable all along, so the only independent variable here is government spending, which made all the difference.  Second, there is scant data on how effective charity is.  (I'm not talking about overhead rates; I mean, how well do they achieve their stated mission.)  Most charities don't seek to measure their effectiveness, and most contributors don't demand it in the first place.  So next time somebody tells you charity is more effective than government assistance, ask him to prove it.  He probably can't.  Or if he can, only anecdotally*.  Third, and perhaps most important, both charitable giving and poverty are pro-cyclical.  So as people's incomes go down in tough economic times, so does charitable giving.  As a result, charity is at its weakest when it's needed most.  Whereas government can borrow all it wants at low interest rates even during downturns -- especially during downturns, in America's case.  (Never mind, for now, the downsides to over-borrowing.)

Beyond the pre-eminent effectiveness of government aid, what's so telling about Rush and conservative's view of charity is their focus on the giver.  See, with government assistance there is no "should I/should I not donate" moment of moral decision-making for the giver.  The decision on the amount, the form, and the recipient, is decided by our elected officials. According to conservatives, government assistance "deprives" givers of the good feeling they get from giving.  And it "deprives" them of the moral opportunity to be good Christians and decide personally whom to give their money to.  You see, it's all about making them feel good and getting them into heaven, not helping the needy.  

That shouldn't surprise anybody, since their rock-bottom belief is that our world is evil and sinful; it is a "vale of soul-making" constructed as an elaborate test to separate the Saved from the Damned, like God's version of Survivor.  Therefore, by design we are not entitled to enjoy our time on Earth, they firmly believe.  Indeed we should expect pain and privation, perhaps even welcome the chance to endure it.  And if we are well off, well... according to Evangelicals at least, that's a sign of God's blessing for a righteous life.  Thus it is doubly sinful of government to "punish" the righteous with higher taxes as it "takes away" their chance to be charitable.  Rush dog whistles at this all the time.

I know too many Christian conservatives to say, as some liberals do, that this is all about their greed. For the super-rich One Percent, it certainly is about greed.  But for the GOP base it is not so simple.  Nay, there is a distinctly Evangelical Christian underpinning to all this.  (Rush acknowledged the rift among Christians by calling out the Catholic Church's consistent and principled stand for government aid to the needy.)  Nevertheless, it's all about their feelings and their salvation, not the needy.

(*The question of results/performance is all about them, too, in a way.  Monitoring and evaluation of results demands precious resources that many small charities don't possess. A possible way to overcome this is to have many small charities working very locally, where the results are "evident" to givers.  "Seeing is believing" for most conservatives who distrust statistics, especially government stats.  They may also want that good feeling of seeing the people they benefited.  But to have only micro-scale charity would not only be inefficient and duplicative, but also dangerously inadequate and unequal, because it would concentrate charitable giving around wealthy people, creating vicious cycles of local poverty and virtuous cycles of local well-being, both isolated from each other.)

It really does come down to whether or not you believe we're all in this together. Conservatives don't.  

If you do, then the question is not so much the how (the process of giving assistance), but the result (improved well-being for the needy).  To put it in ethical terms, liberal-progressives believe that one's personal moral satisfaction should not come from being a superior charitable giver (in relative or absolute terms, no matter); one's satisfaction should come from knowing that he contributes to a fair and just society that guarantees the basic needs and dignity of those who can't take care of themselves, for whatever reason.  Liberals don't want to live in God's obstacle course for human gerbils; liberals want to live in a normal, civilized country where everybody is better off.  It is well within our power to make that happen, therefore it is our moral obligation.  

If you're morally serious about that aim, then you have to look at statistics, you have to put pre-conceived notions aside, and make evidence-based decisions.  And government assistance, as mentioned above, has proven in every developed country to be the best way to achieve that aim.

Taxes and Welfare Do Not Equal Charity

September 11, 2012 | The Rush Limbaugh Show

URL: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/09/11/taxes_and_welfare_do_not_equal_charity

What's good for a business is not necessarily good for Business, or for Us

Since the 1980s, business schools have taught future executives that shareholder value maximization (SVM) is the best way to structure the operations of a firm and measure its performance.  Yet a few years ago, precipitated by the financial crisis, something changed.  Even Businessweek, one of the biggest cheerleaders of b-school since its ratings and admissions info is a cottage industry for the publication, acknowledged it in 2010: "How Business Schools Lost Their Way."  

No less than former GE CEO Jack Welch, the hero of many a business school case study, has seen the light and fallen from his high horse, calling SVM "the dumbest idea in the world."  Perhaps that's because GE lost 60 percent of its market value since Welch left in 2001?  Is GE that much worse now, or was it overvalued then?

Explaining what Welch meant, Forbes' Steve Denning argued that in practice, SVM is not so much about executives' maximizing the firm's value, but rather managing (or manipulating) investors' expectations of the firm's value.  Citing the example of GE, he concluded that Welch & Co. were clearly managing the firm's earnings with uncanny precision.  Denning argues for regulatory changes that could thwart the influence of managed earnings and managed expectations, and get business back to the previous dogma of management guru Peter Drucker that, "There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer."  

Using other words, celebrated business leader Steve Jobs echoed Drucker's classic sentiment to biographer Walter Isaacson.

Meanwhile, alternative theories like the Triple Bottom Line and Porter's Shared Value have started to gain credence.  More companies are at least paying lip service to it, and the related concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).  Personally, I believe CSR is bunk.*  Expecting firms to focus on something other than their bottom line is misguided and naive, no matter what they state on their websites and annual reports.  It's not what they're made to do.  What are the internal incentives for firm employees to promote CSR?  Few or none.  Meanwhile, CSR gives irresponsible firms PR cover for their misdeeds.

(*When CSR really works is when consumer watchdogs, labor unions, environmentalists and other organizations shine the light of public scrutiny on the firm's lofty stated aspirations.  Yet this is just public regulation by other means -- and arguably not the most efficient means -- not the result of public altruism by the firm. And crucially, these public critics are often not even the firm's customers, shareholders or employees, but rather "stakeholders" in the most amorphous sense of CSR, meaning they may have no direct economic stake in the firm's performance.)

But I want to talk about the public arena.

Tragically, the theory of SVM has been accepted by many policy-makers and academics as the best model not only for individual firms, but also the model around which to structure our economy.  In effect, these public-sector cheerleaders of SVM gave up their prerogative and obligation to engage in precisely the kind of long-term planning for the common good that firm-level SVM is a incapable of doing.  What is good for the firm is the firm's decision; what is good for society is not.  It's ours, the people's.  

Yet too many have swallowed the Kool-Aid that the "invisible hand," i.e. the mystical, untraceable aggregate of millions of individual business decisions, leads to the best outcomes in all respects for society.  Taken to its logical conclusion, this misguided belief compels policy-makers and regulators not to meddle at all; they should get out of business's way and let the magical accounting of economic debits and credits do its thing.  Because better outcomes for society simply aren't achievable.  Nay, a committed group of human beings with a singular purpose has no purpose, in their view, outside the confines of the firm.  

(The one exception to this rule of human endeavor, conservatives tell us, is private charity, which they believe should replace publicly-funded safety nets.  Yet a simple look at poverty statistics pre- and post-LBJ show us that charity never was, and never can be, nearly adequate to "mop up" the Dickensian poor among us.  Indeed, the key failing of private charity -- with its high overhead, wasteful duplication, lack of scale, and most importantly, non-reporting on performance -- is that it is at its weakest when it's needed most: during economic downturns.)

Certainly, we must strive for a delicate balance between impeding business and giving it free dominion over society.  Unfortunately, today we hear many thinkers and politicians on the Right calling for chainsawing regulations and giving polluting industries and exploitative labor practices free reign over our economy -- all in the name of creating jobs.  Indeed, I have no doubt that gutting regulations would boost those firms' bottom lines in the short and even medium term, and even create jobs.  What worries me is the long term.  When our productivity suffers from lack of skills and capital that have been exported, never to return.  When unaccounted-for pollution creates enormous health costs which nevertheless exist in the real economy yet are absent in polluters' financial statements.  When we have privatized every government service and public asset until we are at the mercy of executives whose primary motivation is this year's bonus, and next year's "golden parachute."  

To whom then do we appeal for amelioration, when there is nobody to appeal to but impersonal market forces?

"The Dumbest Idea in the World": Corporate America's False - and Dangerous - Ideology of Shareholder Value

By Lynn Stout  

August 29, 2012 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/dumbest-idea-world-corporate-americas-false-and-dangerous-ideology-shareholder-value?paging=off