Richie Rich: The Class Warrior
Wingnut pundits like Lowry always whine about ‘class-warfare,’ but it is they who are the class-warriors. Top-down class warfare — that is, for benefit of the rich. These Bizarro-World Robin Hoods have always been loyal servants of what Theodore Roosevelt called “the Wealthy Criminal Class,” which, in modern context, means the freewheeling reaches of Corporate America. The whole wingnut economic project is about rolling back America to the age of the Robber Barons, and thanks to the complicity of the press and various neoliberal pundits and politicans, the project has gone smashingly. Lowry has shown his support for (another TR phrase) the “malefactors of great wealth” in the following ways:
Lowry is a great hater of poor people. He argues that the overwhelming cause of poverty is poor peoples’ own indolence and promiscuity. Here’s Lowry via Pandagon:
Poverty in America is primarily a cultural phenomenon, driven by a shattered work ethic and sexual irresponsibility. Child poverty would be nearly obliterated if every household had one adult working full time and married parents.
And if you don’t agree with that assessment, well, then you’re just a fakey homo fag:
You can argue with the particulars of this program, but if you’re not talking abut how to increase work and marriage among the poor, well then, you’re not serious about addressing poverty. You’re just some guy with pretty hair saying pretty words because you like the way they sound.
That was the weirdest insult to end a column in recent memory. And awfully stupid, coming from Wind-Swept Rich.
— like John Edwards!
According to Lowry, the stagnation of wages has had “little to do” with causing or exacerbating poverty. In fact, he argues, it’s workers’ greed for more wages and benefits that has sabotaged great companies from within. So of course raising the minimum wage is a “non-solution to a non-problem.” Lowry’s solution to poverty is the same as his solution to Katrina, and it’s a social conservative’s wet dream: Shotgun marriages:
Let me see if I understand what Lowry is saying. The problem is not that women are giving birth to kids too early. Oh no – that’s a good thing. The problem is that those they had sex with aren’t forced to marry the mother. So if we had shotgun marriages – poverty in America would be eliminated.
What a clever plan!
Ah yes… if only little Johnny had a father who flipped burgers and was married to Johnny’s mother who then could stay home with little Johnny. You think I’m being flippant? Lowry actually believes that a parent who works full time at minimum wage, which is $5.15 an hour nationally, isn’t poor because of the Earned Income Tax Credit and food stamps. According to Lowry, then, little Johnny has it made and is on his way to Harvard!
…A clever plan for me to poop on:
Even when there are jobs available, moreover, poor mothers often face tremendous barriers to getting and keeping them due to a lack of viable transportation from where they live to where they might work, to say nothing of the fact that someone’s got to take care of the kids while mom’s on the job. If conservatives were serious about putting America to work, they’d be trying to do something about this, too. Meanwhile, the various income supplements Lowry refers to as making work an effective anti-poverty tool — food stamps, refundable tax credits, etc. — are also stuff the right is against, as you’ll see, for example, if you look at the President’s plan to balance the budget by cutting housing vouchers.
Well, of course, Lowry is in the business of “damned if they do, damned if they don’t”:
On the one side, of course, we meet the objections from religious and social conservatives wary of working mothers and viewing daycare and other social services that might benefit working parents as an encroachment by the ‘nanny state.’ Thunders National Review editor Richard Lowry: “The mass entry of women into the workforce has acted to dissolve the family in general.”
(Lowry sneers back to the effect that Liberals hate marriage unless it’s for homosexuals.)
Lowry’s incoherent and hateful prescriptions for alleviating poverty are perhaps better understood when you consider that his general economic stupidity has been pointed out by people on the center- left, center, and right. But it’s a weaselly sort of dishonesty rather than garden-variety wingnut stupidity that causes Lowry to so often move the definitional goalposts, especially on matters pertaining to Social Security.
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