Mischaracterizing Poverty and the Limits of Liberalism

The notion that poverty is generated within a self-reproducing “cycle” of material deprivation and behavioral or cultural dysfunction was itself an expression of a way of thinking that had deep roots and many variations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American social thought and has been the source of a disproportionate amount of theorizing ever since. Despite considerable change over the course of centuries, this theorizing has consistently centered on the most thoroughly subordinated or socially “submerged” segments of industrial and postindustrial working-class populations—Marx’s lumpenproletariat, the Victorians’ “dangerous” or “vicious” classes, the ghettoized American “underclass,” Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen”—and on the behavioral pathologies that, even when understood to be adaptive to circumstances, supposedly perpetuate these groups’ marginality. The War on Poverty helped to institutionalize such theorizing, but also to embed it within a consciously developmentalist, putatively sympathetic frame: Liberals embraced deeply flawed ideas about a “culture of poverty” as a rationale for remedial intervention, and not, as such ideas quickly became for their conservative critics, as an explanation for why intervention would only make things worse. The War on Poverty was an especially important venue for cultivating and trying out theories about how to help the “culturally deprived” children of poverty that were emerging within the specialized field of child development—in particular, ideas about the imperatives of early intervention that would quickly be embraced as gospel truth.

Alice O’Connor, Poverty and Paradox

This One Chart Shows Everything That’s Wrong With Liberal Politics

All right, not just a chart, but the chart and accompanying post. And not everything, but something important.

The other Jonathan Cohn had a post from shortly before the election at the New Republic that highlights a chart from the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute regarding the state’s decision not to expand Medicaid as part of the ACA.

It’s easy to recognize the human toll of refusing to expand Medicaid. It’s not so easy to recognize the economic toll. Maybe this chart will help:

[snip]

But the state officials who have blocked expansion aren’t simply depriving some people of health insurance. They are depriving the entire state of federal funds. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government picks up 100 percent of the expansion cost for the first three years, then scales back its support to 90 percent. At that point, states will have to find the money to cover that remaining 10 percent. It’s real money. But it’s tiny compared to what they get in return. The federal money is a huge influx of cash, which goes first to providers and suppliers of health care. That money, in turn, generates additional economic activity.