Sunday, April 22, 2012

Cato Institute offers "tools:" Get a Job, any Job.

With so many American now in poverty, maybe the lack of jobs, a Great Recession and a decade of stagnant wages has something to do with it?

Not if you’re conservative. For some reason, the conservative mind is unable to take the cause of poverty into account. Instead of tackling the problem that caused so much poverty, they would rather attack the safety nets. Tort reform is similar in that instead of preventing medical injuries and death, they would much rather go after the victims monetary settlements.

It’s all this upside down thinking that drives me crazy.

According to the conservative whack jobs at Newsmax, in an email summary:  
Welfare Spending Up 41 Percent Under Obama: In 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty” in America, the poverty rate stood at around 19 percent. Since then, total federal, state, and local spending on anti-poverty programs has amounted to $15 trillion, yet the poverty rate now stands at 15.1 percent, the highest level in nearly a decade. “Clearly we are doing something wrong,” according to the Cato Institute.
Instead of considering the Great Recession, joblessness and the lack of wage increases that promote consumer demand, the Cato institute is focused on government spending:
The federal government will spend more than $668 billion on anti-poverty programs this year, an increase of 41 percent or more than $193 billion since President Barack Obama took office. Tanner concludes … “The vast majority of current programs are focused on making poverty more comfortable rather than giving people the tools that will help them escape poverty.”
The Cato Institute’s ridiculous set of “tools” (where have we heard that term used before…Scott Walker. Thank you Frank Luntz)?  
“Finish school, do not get pregnant outside marriage, and get a job, any job, and stick with it.”
That was easy, blame the victim. Really, not getting pregnant outside of marriage is part of the plan? But more importantly, getting “any job” is just where they want us; desperate. Americans will then give themselves up to business. A feudal system of lords and serfs.  

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