Katrina Changed Nothing

The meme going around after Katrina was that the exposure by the media of the conditions of poverty in which many of the flood victims lived in, and the disproportionate impact of the flooding on those poor, would ignite a nation debate as to how to alleviate such poverty in our country. Has this in fact been the case? Eh, not so much. In today's NY Times we see an article detailing how, to Republicans, Katrina is simply more evidence of the need to put into effect their policies of de-regulation and tax reduction:

"Conservatives have already used the storm for causes of their own, like suspending requirements that federal contractors have affirmative action plans and pay locally prevailing wages. And with federal costs for rebuilding the Gulf Coast estimated at up to $200 billion, Congressional Republican leaders are pushing for spending cuts, with programs like Medicaid and food stamps especially vulnerable."

"Indeed, even as he was calling for deep spending cuts last week, Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, who leads the conservative caucus, called tax reductions for the prosperous a key to fighting poverty.'Raising taxes in the wake of a national catastrophe would imperil the very economic growth we need to bring the Gulf Coast back,' Mr. Pence said. 'I'm mindful of what a pipe fitter once said to President Reagan: "I've never been hired by a poor man." A growing economy is in the interest of every working American, regardless of their income.'"

Wow. I find it simply amazing that in the wake of unprecedented natural disaster, the effects of which were largely the result of an unwillingness by the federal and state governments to spend money on it's prevention, Republican members of Congress take home the lesson that what is needed is yet more tax cuts. Pence is, like most Republican proponents of "supply-side economics" (the name of which they won't dare utter any longer, mind you) greatly over-simplifying the detrimental effects of taxation and the beneficial impact of tax cuts. The question I'd like to pose to Mr. Pence is, even if tax relief would boost the economy, exactly how is such a future benefit supposed to help the Katrina survivors now? His pipe-fitter allegory is simply ridiculous; that particular pipe-fitter might not have been hired by a poor man, but I'm pretty sure he's been hired by guys who paid their taxes and yet somehow, amazingly, managed to stay in business. I'm also pretty sure that pipe-fitter, had he been living in New Orleans today, might appreciate getting paid what a contractor in New Orleans would have paid him before the disaster, not what that same contractor can pay now, where he dramatically lower the wage to take advantage of desperate pipe-fitters who need a job. And I'm pretty sure that a larger tax burden, spread out over the entire nation, isn't going to imperil any economic growth along the Gulf Coast, as those taxes would be redistributed to contractors getting paid handsomely to rebuild devastated areas, and employing out of work survivors to do it. In fact, that sounds a lot like the economic growth they need, to me.

The Heritage Foundation, always bastions of consistency if not intellectual honesty, have this to say:

"'This is not the time to expand the programs that were failing anyway,' said Stuart M. Butler, a vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research and advocacy group influential on Capitol Hill."

Ah, that old line about the "failure" of the "welfare" state. It's hard to argue with this logic: there are still poor people around, so therefore anything liberals have advocated for has been a monumental failure, deserving only of complete dismantling and replacement by de-regulation and tax cuts. That conservatives have no empirical evidence that doing so would actually reduce the number of those living in poverty is no matter; they take these things on faith over on their side of the aisle.

Of course, that assumes that they actually mean what they say, and that in fact they actually care somewhat about the plight of those living in poverty. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those at the Heritage Foundation, and their conservative progeny and followers in Congress, are not actually concerned about the poor, and don't actually believe that their programs will directly aid the poor. No, their primary concern is those would be benefit from de-regulation and lowered tax burdens; those who own the business and control the majority of the wealth in this country. I'm sure most of them think that their programs would in some way, some how, at some point, benefit the poor of our country, but how that actually comes about, or when, or to what extent, is not really a concern of theirs.

I think we all knew that nothing would really change after Katrina. I think anybody who thought that Katrina would motivate the American people to look for solutions to the problem of poverty were greatly underestimating the extent to which we already know about such poverty, and greatly overestimating our willingness to do anything about it. And even if we were, beyond calling some telethon's 800 number that is, you can be rest assured that Republicans would do their best to prevent any such thing, as you can be assured the wishes of their wealthy base have not changed in the slightest.

As I stated before, tackling poverty takes real change, on a fundamental level, the kind which requires decades. And to make any such change requires the willingness to invest in the process for those decades. No, Katrina didn't change anything, couldn't change anything. The battle against conservatives and their Republican ilk is far from over.