CSotD: What color shall we paint the lifeboats?
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In case you missed it because you were working 80 hours a week for minimum wage, Brian McFadden brings you up to date with even more tips from McDonald's on how to live on the crappy pay from two crappy jobs. Because, y'know, you can't make it on the crappy pay from one crappy job.
Even the Clown doesn't have enough chutzpah to suggest that.
This summary of the proposed budget comes from Matthew Yglesias's article on Slate, which is now updated to note that, while initial comments pointed out that the budget doesn't include food or clothing, that is included in the "daily spending" of $27.
Also, the Clown has added fifty bucks to cover heat, which reduces that daily budget for food and clothing to $25 a day.
Not bad, if you are only supporting yourself, though, if you only spend $20 a month on health insurance (where are you getting that rate?) and nothing on entertainment beyond the cost of cable TV, I suspect you'll add a dependent or two at some point down the line.
Especially if the right-wingers continue their relentless campaign to eliminate birth control from coverage and to regulate lady-parts in the absence of effective birth control.
In all fairness, Lori Sanders, over at Town Hall, points out that it's a perfectly practical budget for those people and that lots of those people live on a similar budget:
We don’t like to admit that, often, poor people can’t and probably
shouldn’t enjoy the same levels of food, clothing and entertainment that
others consume. Or that they buy minimum liability car insurance,
choose to live far from work to find lower rents, or may be going
without health coverage. But we can’t wish these realities away with
snarky dismissiveness. Instead we should be thinking of more creative
ways to make such conditions as temporary as possible with
better-targeted assistance.
That should not include raising the minimum wage, she notes.
Moreover, the Earned Income Tax Credit she cites as positive is a key factor in the right-wing whining over how many people don't pay any taxes at all (except FICA and sales tax and gas tax and the property taxes that are written into their rents).
The same right-wing that, as McFadden observes, is working hard to reduce food assistance to the poor.
I agree with her, however, that we should be thinking of creative ways to make such conditions as temporary as possible, although most of the ones I can think of involve mounting heads on pike poles.
Some time ago, I said I'd like to see some of these plutocrats and their Congressional allies live on minimum wage for a month to see what it's like, and it was pointed out to me that the experiment would be flawed from the start: If you know it's only for a month, you can just count down to the day you get your life back, and then it's just a camping trip with no lesson imparted, and perhaps even the opposite: An increased sense of "I made it and you can, too."
That's what makes the Preston Sturgis classic, "Sullivan's Travels," work: Sullivan's well-intentioned but ridiculous experiment in being poor and homeless suddenly hits a snag when … well, you should watch it, but let's just say the trail of breadcrumbs back to Beverly Hills kind of disappears on him.
Thing is, it's not impossible to live at or below the poverty line with grace and dignity. I did a story 20 years ago about a couple who were doing just that, who relied on a combination of luck and good people in their lives and carefully raising their kids to understand the limitations of their lives. As she explained:
Dwayne took them to a car show. The boys just love cars. But Dwayne told them, "You know you can't have anything. Don't ask me for anything, because they'll have a lot of vendors set up." And that's hard for a four and a six-year-old to understand that they can't have anything. But he said "I'm going to take you to see the cars, and that's what we're going to do." And they were so good. They didn't ask for one thing. So when they came back through town, he stopped at the store and got a soda for them, because they don't have soda a whole lot.
Which is great, and I had been directed to her because she was someone who had been able to find ways to make it on nearly nothing, and who could explain poverty from the street level.
But you can't base policies on people being able to step forward like that, any more than you can base military strategy on every soldier being a hero, which is why the explanation of sensible, real-world planning from Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny" is a classic:
“The Navy is a master plan designed by geniuses
for execution by idiots. If you are not an idiot, but find yourself in
the Navy, you can only operate well by pretending to be one. All the
shortcuts and economies and common-sense changes that your native
intelligence suggests to you are mistakes. Learn to quash them.
Constantly ask yourself, "How would I do this if I were a fool?"
Throttle down your mind to a crawl. Then you will never go wrong.”
People who think they are smarter than "the system" snicker over military intelligence, but the above is the absolute truth and it's why the military works.
It does not require everyone to step up. In fact, it assumes most of them won't.
The McDonald's budget planner and the right-wing approach to social justice generally is based on the opposite theory: That poor people are simply untapped geniuses and that, if you tap them hard enough, that genius will emerge and then you won't have to pay them a decent wage or assist them in any way at all.
So far, they've gotten away with it. In fact, they've managed to direct the fury of the dispossessed against immigrants and minorities and unspecified cheaters-of-the-system.
I would greatly appreciate it if someone could point out a time in history when this approach ended well.
I can't think of one.
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