The poor you shall always have, part 2

I read the following comment the other day:

"[Republicans] sincerely believe that helping the poor actually hurts them because it deprives them of the suffering they deserve for being poor"  (From user Wendy's Chili on Fark).

You know, it's interesting... when I was a hardcore Republican, what we were always taught about the poor was the following:

1.  People will take advantage of social welfare programs every way they can.
1. I was told a story about someone who claimed to have "horizontal inertia" - which was described as the inability to get out of bed - and this was their reason for getting disability checks.
2. I had a good friend until we got into an argument about this issue, but her story is of exactly the same type as those that I was told by others during my right-wing days - that she knows that the statistics about disability/welfare/SSI fraud are incorrect because she personally knows people who abuse the system (I do not know why she didn't report them).
3. I was told that people on welfare often have additional kids just so they can get lucrative welfare checks and not have to work.
2. People sometimes do need to be helped, but...
3. The government is inept to fight the problem, both because of fraud and because of red tape, so...
4. It is and should be up to people to donate to programs to help the poor.
5. And it must be programs, because when you donate directly to a poor person, such as when you see someone standing with a sign on the street, that person will abuse it.  
6. Poor people, when left to their own devices, will use donated money to buy drugs.
7. It's certainly good to fight poverty, to help those who are poor, but it's useless to try to find ways of eliminating it, because, "The poor you shall always have with you," (Matthew 26:11; Mark 14:7; John 12:8).
8. Poverty isn't really that bad, and...
9. Poor people who aren't on drugs are probably happier than rich people anyway, (see the Notorious court case: Mo' Money v. Mo' Problems).

This has the following results:

1. It encourages giving of funds to religious organizations.
2. It encourages voting for conservative policies, such as further tax breaks and the elimination of social welfare programs.
3. It helps to define "the poor" as a distinct social other, often the other that is responsible for taking your tax money and threatening your children's safety with drugs, an other that cannot be trusted to look after its own needs.
4. It encourages us to believe the poor may be responsible for their situation, and thus the suffering they undergo is deserved.
5. It teaches us to hate the poor.

That last point may seem extreme, but hate is exactly the response that people feel when they feel they have been taken advantage of by an other.  You may have an "other" if you think of another group as anything other than human.  It gives political and religious leaders a clear target to direct your rage toward as the cause of your problems.  It lets the "us versus them" mentality run far beyond simple debate and turn into war.  It's how Hitler honed the Nazi party, by identifying others (most notably the Jews, but he targeted lots of other groups, including gays and Freemasons), Hitler was able to consolidate his power.  He convinced the German people that the cause of their problems came from these others rather than from themselves, honed that belief into hate, and used it to go to war.  This is the danger of seeing people as other.


Of course, we can attempt to argue against these points, but we run into a problem immediately: the distrust of statistics.  Statistics are not given to us by God or by our preachers, but rather by guys in lab coats who make phone calls and ask questions, and those questions are kept secret from us, and maybe the people who are answering the questions don't have the best intentions or the utmost honesty, and so they are always suspect.  They are especially suspect when they seem to go against God or our preachers.

I can show any number of statistics showing that fraud is not rampant, that drugs are used more often by the rich than by the poor, that money actually does buy happiness, that the federal government is more efficient at delivering social welfare moneys and resources to the poor than any non-profit organization... but because those statistics are not trusted (after all, "I know people who..." always has greater impact than the statistics), there's really no point for me to do so.

It's a wasted argument until we can solve the problem of that mistrust of science.  That is to say, we cannot solve poverty until we find a way to teach evangelicals to love science.



If you know someone you believe to be committing fraud against one of our benefits systems, please report it.  Here are some of the links you can use to do so in the U.S.:

• Social Security Fraud: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/fraudreport/oig/public_fraud_reporting/form.htm
• Welfare Fraud: Contact your state agency.  In Oklahoma, where I'm from, that agency is: http://www.okdhs.org/contactus
• Medicare Fraud: http://www.medicare.gov/forms-help-and-resources/report-fraud-and-abuse/fraud-and-abuse.html
• Veterans Affairs Fraud: http://www.va.gov/oig/hotline/