Why do rich and powerful people engage in callous behavior?
Scrooge has come early this year.
He’s already kicking our Tiny Tims. This holiday season, kids in America’s
poorest families will have less to eat.
November 1 brought $5 billion in new
cuts to the nation’s food stamp program, now officially known as the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
Poor families are losing on average
7 percent of their food aid, calculates the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. A mother with two kids will lose
$319 over the rest of the current federal fiscal year. The cuts could
cost some families a week’s worth of meals a month, says the
chief of America’s largest food bank.
More cuts are looming. A House of Representatives majority is demanding an additional $39 billion in “savings.” Ohio and other states, in the meantime, are moving to limit food stamp eligibility.
Today’s heartlessness toward
America’s most vulnerable actually goes far deeper than food stamp cuts, as a new Economic
Policy Institute report documents in rather chilling detail.
Four states, the report notes, have
“lifted restrictions on child labor.” In Wisconsin, state law used to limit
school-age kids to five hours of work a day on school days. The new law erases
these limits.
Other states are cutting back on
protections for low-wage workers of all ages. Earlier this year, Mississippi
adopted a law that bans cities and counties in the state from giving local
workers even unpaid sick leave rights.
America’s current surge of
mean-spiritedness, observes Gordon
Lafer, the University of Oregon author of the EPI study, essentially erupted
right after the 2010 elections. In 11 states, those elections gave
right-wingers “new monopoly control” over the governor’s mansion and both
legislative chambers.
Lafer links this right-wing
electoral triumph directly to growing inequality. A widening income gap, he
explains, “has produced a critical mass of extremely wealthy businesspeople,
many of whom are politically conservative,” and various recent court cases have
given these wealthy a green light to spend virtually unlimited sums on their
favored candidates.
But America’s new heartlessness
reflects much more than this turbocharged political power of America’s rich.
The wider a society’s economic divide, as Demos think tank analyst Sean McElwee observes,
the less empathy on the part of the rich toward the poor. In a starkly unequal
society, people of affluence “rarely brush shoulders” with people of little
advantage. These rich don’t see the poor. They stereotype them instead as lazy
and unworthy.
CNN columnist John Sutter has just
brought us face-to-face with this phenomenon, via amoving and
insightful portrait of America’s most unequal locale, East
Carroll Parish in Louisiana.
In East Carroll, the rich live north
of Lake Providence, the poor south. The two groups seldom interact. East
Carroll’s most affluent 5 percent average $611,000 a year, 90 times the $6,800
incomes the poorest fifth of the parish average.
“Looking across Lake Providence from
the north,” writes Sutter, “can warp a person’s vision.”
One example of this warped vision:
East Carroll’s rich see food stamps as an “entitlement” that rots poor people’s
incentive to work. Yet these same rich annually pocket enormously generous farm
subsidies. In 2010, East Carroll’s most highly subsidized farm owner grabbed
$655,000 from one federal subsidy alone.
The average food stamp payout in the
parish: $1,492 per person per year.
What should we do about the rampant
inequality in East Carroll Parish — and far beyond? For starters, we could end
federal farm
subsidies for wealthy farmers — and restore food stamps to full
strength.
The longer-term task? That would
include everything from raising taxes on the nation’s most privileged to
raising minimum wages for the nation’s lowest-paid workers.
In 2013 America, sums up CNN’s
Sutter, we’ve come to see stark gaps between rich and poor as “inevitable.” His
simple reminder for us all: “They don’t have to be.”
OtherWords columnist
Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, edits the
inequality weekly Too Much.
His latest book is The Rich
Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the
American Middle Class. OtherWords.org
