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How the GOP stopped caring about you

Its basically describing the rise and fall of civilizations but in this case its the Republican party and the economy.
 
If you're a woman, you can go ahead and read the "Worst person in the world" thread for more insight.
 
Good read. Thx WFF. If people actually read the piece, it's more about history and human nature than blame, but whateves....
 
In 1862 , in the midst of the Civil War, Republican Justin Smith Morrill stood in Congress to defend his party’s invention: an income tax . The government had the right to demand 99 percent of a man’s property, the Vermont representative thundered. If the nation needs it, “the property of the people . . . belongs to the government .” The Republican Congress passed the income tax — as well as a spate of other taxes — and went on to create a strong national government. By the time the war ended, the GOP had invented national banking , currency and taxation ; had provided schools and homes for poor Americans; and had freed the country’s 4 million slaves.

A half-century later, when corporations dominated the economy and their owners threw their weight into political contests, Theodore Roosevelt fulminated against that “small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power.” Insisting that America must return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him,” the Republican president called for government to regulate business, prohibit corporate funding of political campaigns, and impose income and inheritance taxes.

In the mid-20th century, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower recoiled from using American resources to build weapons alone, warning, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” He called for government funding for schools, power plants, roads and hospitals.

At these crucial moments, Republican leaders argued that economic opportunity is central to the American ideal and that government must enable all to rise. But each time the party has taken this stand, it has sparked a backlash from within, prompting the GOP to throw its support behind America’s wealthiest people and to blame those who fall behind for their own poverty.
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WASHINGTON, Sept 18 (Reuters) - U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner on Thursday expressed his dissatisfaction with a chronically high jobless rate and complained of a "very sick idea" that the unemployed would "rather just sit around."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/18/john-boehner-unemployed_n_5846084.html

"Strange to say, this outbreak of anti-compassionate conservatism hasn’t produced a job surge. In fact, the whole proposition that cruelty is the key to prosperity hasn’t been faring too well lately. Last week Nathan Deal, the Republican governor of Georgia, complained that many states with Republican governors have seen a rise in unemployment and suggested that the feds were cooking the books. But maybe the right’s preferred policies don’t work?

...

My guess, however, is that it’s mainly about the closed information loop of the modern right. In a nation where the Republican base gets what it thinks are facts from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, where the party’s elite gets what it imagines to be policy analysis from the American Enterprise Institute or the Heritage Foundation, the right lives in its own intellectual universe, aware of neither the reality of unemployment nor what life is like for the jobless. You might think that personal experience — almost everyone has acquaintances or relatives who can’t find work — would still break through, but apparently not. Whatever the explanation, Mr. Boehner was clearly saying what he and everyone around him really thinks, what they say to each other when they don’t expect others to hear. Some conservatives have been trying to reinvent their image, professing sympathy for the less fortunate. But what their party really believes is that if you’re poor or unemployed, it’s your own fault."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/opinion/paul-krugman-those-lazy-jobless.html
 
No surprise that the party of individual responsibility believes anybody who doesn't have a job is lazy but unemployment is the government's fault.
 
Reading a Woodrow Wilson bio and one of his advisors told him in 1912 during the campaign that Republicans care about property and Democrats care about people, 100 years later it is the same.
 
Yep. Compare Republican perspectives on police overreach to IRS overreach. When conservative political organizations have to fill out extra paper work to claim they're not political organizations, it's a tragedy. When black men are abused and murdered by police, it's justice.
 
bcobbdeacs said:
Reading a Woodrow Wilson bio and one of his advisors told him in 1912 during the campaign that Republicans care about property and Democrats care about people, 100 years later it is the same.
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I agree completely. Democrats today care about people who were born 100 years ago. Only explanation for fiddling while trillion dollar deficits pile up to be left to tomorrow's Americans to unscrew.
 
I thought the Krugman piece was interesting. Now as usual, Krugtron glosses over some salient facts, like how the disability rolls have swollen as DI becomes the paycheck of last resort for people who have been left behind by the global economy, but overall the point is sound. There's not a whole lot left to cut from unemployment support programs, short of a wholesale overhaul (like guaranteed minimum income) that greatly streamlines the bureaucracy.

First things first: I don’t know how many people realize just how successful the campaign against any kind of relief for those who can’t find jobs has been. But it’s a striking picture. The job market has improved lately, but there are still almost three million Americans who have been out of work for more than six months, the usual maximum duration of unemployment insurance. That’s nearly three times the pre-recession total. Yet extended benefits for the long-term unemployed have been eliminated — and in some states the duration of benefits has been slashed even further.

The result is that most of the unemployed have been cut off. Only 26 percent of jobless Americans are receiving any kind of unemployment benefit, the lowest level in many decades. The total value of unemployment benefits is less than 0.25 percent of G.D.P., half what it was in 2003, when the unemployment rate was roughly the same as it is now. It’s not hyperbole to say that America has abandoned its out-of-work citizens.
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