1995 video of Ron Paul Touting His Newsletter

[thucythucy]

42. "The system of welfare"

was pretty much abolished in the 1990s when Clinton/Gingrich "ended welfare as we know it."

There are now caps on how long a family can be on welfare.

In case you haven't noticed, this didn't solve the basic problem: an economy shedding quality jobs while dis-investing in public education and quality infrastructure. Combine this with a continuing corrosive racism as aptly demonstrated by Ron Paul's newsletter and the people who defend it, and you can draw a pretty good picture on why poverty in this country is such an intractible problem. Basically, we've given up on even trying, and prefer to blame those locked in at the margins.

And all that "ending welfare as we know it" did was push even more people into poverty. It didn't even end the continual right wing whining about "welfare cheats." It's such a good talking point that even now, with millions of people in the middle class slipping through what's left of the safety net, right wingers still can't bring themselves to give it up.

"When Robert Kennedy visited the poorest rural parts of the South, the people he spoke to had a dignity and displayed an intelligence...what changed?"

I know lots of people you'd probably consider "poor" who have dignity, self respect, and intelligence. You think somebody loses intelligence and "decorum" because they're poor or black?

If anything has changed, it's our attitudes toward the problem. The Republican Party today is certainly far more focussed on blaming people for their problems than doing anything to try to solve them. Hell, we've got Teabaggers telling us unemployment insurance makes people lazy!

Can you imagine any senator visiting poor people today? Instead, Newt Gingrich wants to turn children into janitors, and Ron Paul wants people without health insurance to die.

What's changed then is that our culture has shifted to the hard right, with the result that it's crueler, meaner, and uglier. This works fine for the one percent and their addled minions.

For the rest of us, not so much.