Krugman: The Empathy Gap

[ProSense]

The Empathy Gap

In general, I’m a numbers and concepts guy, not a feelings guy; when I go after someone like Paul Ryan, I emphasize his irresponsibility and dishonesty, not his evident lack of empathy for the less fortunate.

Still, there are times — in Ryan’s case and more generally for much of his political tribe — when that lack of empathy just takes your breath away. Harold Pollack catches Ryan calling his proposed cuts in Medicaid, food stamps and more welfare reform round two, and suggests that our current suite of safety net programs is “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency”.

Oh. My. God.

First of all, if you think that welfare reform has been just great, read this extended Times report on the desperation of many poor Americans trying to survive in a depressed economy with a shredded safety net. It takes a monumental inability to imagine other peoples’ lives to blithely praise welfare reform’s results at a time like this.

And if you look at how desperate you have to be to qualify for food stamps and Medicaid, the notion that these programs encourage “complacency” is breathtaking.

- more -

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/the-empathy-gap/

Your Safety Net on Block Grants

Apr 08, 2012

Excellent reporting in today’s NYT on whether welfare reform worked as well as almost everyone says it did. The conclusion, as we’ve stressed in lots of recent work at CBPP, is that it is at best a fair-weather ship: it only appears to work when there’s lots of job opportunities for the low-income, single parents.

In other words, TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) has lost its critical counter-cyclical function—its ability to expand when jobs disappear. And since it is at its core a safety net program, designed to catch economically vulnerable single-parent families when jobs disappear, the loss of that function means sharply increasing economic insecurity for families with kids in periods like this one.

From the piece:

The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.

This is neither just an academic point nor simply a program evaluation of a big policy change. It is a stark warning about what happens when you turn a federal function over to states, through so-called block grants. They lose their sine qua non, their automatic ability to expand when most needed. And Republicans from Romney to Ryan have pledged to do the exact same thing with the rest of the safety net, including Medicaid and Food Stamps.

The data in support of this contention—block grants eviscerate counter-cyclicality—are extremely clear and compelling. This figure, from the NYT piece, contrasts the performance of TANF and Food Stamps, the latter of which remains a federal program (now called SNAP, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program). Note how they move together in the 1990s recession/jobless recovery but sharply diverge after that (SNAP goes up consistently in the 2000s because despite the expansion, low-income jobs were not forthcoming and poverty rates generally rose in those years).



- more -

http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/your-safety-net-on-block-grants/

[ProSense]

1. Kick! n/t

[JDPriestly]

2. You know what lulls a person into a life of dependency and complacency?

A big, fat trust fund, that's what.

And far too many right-wingers are dependent on them.

[SoCalDem]

3. The loss of empathy

SoCalDem Donating Member (1000+ posts) Thu Nov-10-11 02:31 PM
Original message

The loss of empathy


This is at the heart of so many of our most vexing problems..

Too many people see things every day that they would never tolerate in their own lives, but feel no need to intervene.

It could be something major like watching a grown man sexually brutalize a child, and then looking away..but hey..that child was not HIS younger brother/nephew/child.. That child was not someone he knew, so it was no biggie.

It could be something quite minor, like picking up money that someone in front of you drops unknowingly, and not saying "Hey, you dropped this". It's not like you knew that person, or that the $20 they dropped might be grocery money. Finders-keepers.

Empathy-loss is all around us.

TV shows delight in humiliating people.

Everything is now a contest.

Cooking shows used to be about teaching people how to cook..Now they are "wars", where contestants hope for others to screw up, so they can "win"..

It's all about the cheap laugh, the public humiliation of people who don't "measure up"..people who are placed there for our amusement when they get "punked".

It extends into politics too.

How many times have we seen politicians routinely and callously vote against things that people need, UNTIL someone in their own family (or they themselves) suddenly, by fate, are placed in the same boat?

Familial empathy is easy. In most families we are taught to care for and about each other.

An evolved society cares about ALL people.

We care when others cannot afford food, and we feed them. We do not laugh at them and deride them for being too lazy to find work.

We care when others cannot find health care they can afford, and we try to see that they do get care.. We do not shrug our shoulders and say.. "Too bad about that..they should have taken better care of themselves".

Lack of empathy allows all kinds of terrible things to happen, because as people get more and more insulated, it gets easier and easier to go from ignoring bad things that happen to others, to helping those bad things happen..and enjoying the process.

[PA Democrat]

4. I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

I think the right has become masterful at finding a few cases where the safety net is abused and using those exceptions as justification to make cuts to the entire system. Right wing talk radio and FOX use a broad brush to paint the majority of people receiving any type of taxpayer funded assistance as lazy, corrupt or undeserving. It's no longer socially unacceptable to be cruel and indifferent to the suffering of others.

I've seen how the poison spewed by the right has turned people that I used to think of as decent human beings into people without a shred of basic human empathy. They pay lip service to helping the least among us, but don't you dare ask them to pay any tax money to support those causes.