WNC's GOP post-helene self-own

The following is my verbose response to a post from a former student. He remarked on the irony that folks in WNC who had long voted for federal cuts and who were supportive of DOGE's destruction of FEMA were complaining that the federal government was not responsive to their needs. It set me off and I troll-flooded his feed. Then I wend back and deleted the comments but they seemed worth keeping someplace. So here we are. [Late February 2025] Lloyd Benson Another comment does a good thing in trying to understand the attitudes of many (though far from all) folks in WNC as hurricane relief unfolded. They identify (1) gov't corruption (2) the desire to shrink the workforce because of the massive federal debt, and (3) Folks barely scraping by who conclude they could spend money better than the Feds can. My short answer is that some of these are true, some of these are things people believe because bad actors have disproportionate control of WNC's information channels, and most of these are things that the current party in power were the primary creators for, both in NC and nationally. Lloyd Benson (1) All governments, private sector firms, non-profits, and churches, have ethical or corruption problems. We are humans. However, if you look at the state by state corruption indices, states that do the best job providing social support for kids and the elderly, invest the most in education, and do best at public health, have the smallest problems with government corruption. N.C. does OK here (down at 41st worst) but the folks who run our national government are from Louisiana, the Dakotas, and other most corrupt states. This was the party that brought us the corruption of Citizen's United. Note, too, that WNC consistently votes some of the most ethically challenged people into Congress, including Russian bank guy Charles Taylor, Vote fraudster and election stealer Mark Meadows, nutty Maddy Cawthorne, and PEP funds grabber Chuck Edwards. We have met the enemy and he is us in WNC, as Pogo would say. Lloyd Benson (2a) Yes, we are spending money we don't have. But that, too, is disproportionately the result of policies enacted by the folks people in WNC keep voting into office. 2/3ds of the federal debt in the last quarter century has been the result of revenue declines relative to GDP. In FY2000 revenues were 20% of GDP. Since then, largely because of tax cuts, revenue has averaged just 16.7% We borrowed the rest. Trump alone added $6 trillion in debt from his TCJA of 2017, and is planning to add $4T more. Moreover, the largest increases in spending since FY2000 have been for defense and veterans, compensation increases to health providers, and interest payments, The dominant party in WNC voted enthusiastically for all of that. Lloyd Benson (2b) Research has shown over and over that voter perceptions of excessive spending are highly correlated with racial resentment. If you have been led to believe (wrongly, it turns out) that most government spending goes to Black people who won't work, then you tend to vote for candidates who encourage that sort of false witness dog whistling, White replacement theory, etc. Consider how few folks in WNC were bothered when Trump's FEMA failed Puerto Rico (predominantly People of Color) so evilly. From Jesse Helms to Rep. Edwards, dog whistle race resentment has been a top pathway to success at the ballot box. Lloyd Benson (2c) Something like 2/3ds of federal civilian employees work for Defense, Homeland Security, or the Va. Do you really want to fire all the nuclear watchdogs, forest fire preventers and firefighters, communicable disease trackers, USDA food safety teams, and the inspector generals who police government waste and corruption? That would be idiotic. You are not going to cut your way to prosperity by eliminating jobs. Note, too, that the average number of civilian employees per congressional district has fallen to about 70 percent of its 1990s levels. If government is not responding quickly, it is because there are fewer staffers out there doing the job. Wait 45 minutes to get someone at Social Security to answer the phone? That's entirely due to a quarter of a century of GOP staffing cuts. Lloyd Benson (3a) I understand and can appreciate the desire of folks on the edge of household budget survival to want to have tax cuts. Me too. But every dollar of tax cuts right now will have to be borrowed. If you get a tax cut now, your grandkids will have to pay higher taxes to pay off the federal debt. Lloyd Benson (3b) There is a strong correlation between GOP control of states and the percentage of the population in those states with high levels of non-mortgage debt, high levels of medical debt, high levels of medical debt bankruptcies, and unpayable credit card debts. Since the 1990s, the GOP blocked or tried to block every serious attempt to get control of our medical debt problem. In the early 1990s, US medical expenses and US health outcomes were largely in line with the other advenced nations. Now our our costs are far worse, and our outomes far worse, than most other nations. If North Carolina were a country, we would rank 83d in the world in life expectancy. Folks in NC voted for the folks whose policies have drowned the people of WNC in debt, even pre-Helene. Lloyd Benson (3c) Over and over again during the last few election cycles, folks here in WNC were warned that if the GOP got into power that we would end up bankrupting the nation to line the pockets of millionaires. Each year we borrow at least *$115 Billion* in federal debt to give federal tax subsidies to millionaires, inheritance trust fund kids, and profitable corporations. $115B for just them, not you. If you think borrowing billions of your tax dollars to give Amazon or Apple or UnitedHealth billions in taxpayer subsidized higher profits is a good idea, then, well, you might be a WNC voter, it turns out. We voted in our own suffering.

Severe Poverty Grows

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/16762913.htm

Severe poverty growing worse

By TONY PUGH

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — The percentage of Americans living in severe poverty has reached at least a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line, and the gulf between the nation’s “haves” and “have-nots” continues to widen.

A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of 2005 Census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty. A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 — half the federal poverty line — was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.

The McClatchy analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That’s 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. McClatchy’s review also found statistically significant increases in the percentage of the population in severe poverty in 65 of 215 large U.S. counties and similar increases in 28 states.

Fueled by illegal immigration, Texas is second only to California in the number of severely poor residents, with 1.62 million, and is tied with Arkansas and Alabama for the fifth-highest deep poverty rate in the nation: 7.3 percent.

But Tarrant County was one of only three counties in Texas that saw a decline in its deep-poverty rate from 2000 to 2005.

The review also suggested that the rise in severely poor Americans isn’t confined to large urban counties but extends to suburban and rural areas.

The plight of the severely poor is a distressing sidebar to an unusual economic expansion. Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind.

The share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries. That helps explain why the median household income of working-age families, adjusted for inflation, has fallen for five consecutive years.

These and other factors have helped push 43 percent of the nation’s 37 million poor people into deep poverty — the highest rate since at least 1975. The share of poor Americans in deep poverty has climbed slowly but steadily for three decades.

But since 2000, the number of severely poor has grown “more than any other segment of the population,” according to a recent study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

“That was the exact opposite of what we anticipated when we began,” said Dr. Steven Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University, who co-authored the study. “We’re not seeing as much moderate poverty as a proportion of the population. What we’re seeing is a dramatic growth of severe poverty.”

The growth, which leveled off in 2005, in part reflects how hard it is for low-skilled workers to earn their way out of poverty in a job market that favors skilled and educated workers.

It also suggests that social programs aren’t as effective as they once were at catching those who fall into economic despair.

About 1 in 3 severely poor people are under age 17, and nearly 2 in 3 are female.

Female-headed families with children account for a large share of the severely poor.

Nearly 2 in 3 people (10.3 million) in severe poverty are white, but blacks (4.3 million) and Hispanics of any race (3.7 million) make up disproportionate shares.

Blacks are nearly three times as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be in deep poverty, while Hispanics are roughly twice as likely.

Washington, D.C., has a higher concentration of severely poor people — 10.8 percent in 2005 — than any of the 50 states.

The problem of severe poverty is most pronounced, however, in towns near the Mexican border and in some areas of the South, where 6.5 million severely poor residents are struggling to find work as manufacturing jobs in the textile, apparel and furniture industries disappear.

Two Texas border counties had the nation’s highest rates of deep poverty among counties with at least 250,000 people: Cameron County at 21.5 percent and Hidalgo County with 19.6 percent.

The Midwestern Rust Belt and areas of the Northeast have been hard hit as economic restructuring and foreign competition have forced numerous plant closings. At the same time, low-skilled immigrants with impoverished family members are increasingly drawn to the South and Midwest to work in meatpacking, food processing and agriculture.

“What appears to be taking place is that, over the long term, you have a significant permanent underclass that is not being impacted by anti-poverty policies,” said Michael Tanner, the director of Health and Welfare Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

Arloc Sherman, a senior researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, disagreed.

“It doesn’t look like a growing permanent underclass,” said Sherman, whose organization has chronicled the growth of deep poverty. “What you see in the data are more and more single moms with children who lose their jobs and who aren’t being caught by a safety net anymore.”

Over the last two decades, the U.S. has had the highest or near-highest poverty rates for children, individual adults and families among 31 developed countries, according to the Luxembourg Income Study, a 23-year project that compares poverty and income data from industrial nations.

“It’s shameful,” said Timothy Smeeding, the former director of the study and the current head of the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University. “We’ve been the worst performer every year since we’ve been doing this study.”

With the exception of Mexico and Russia, the U.S. devotes the smallest portion of its gross domestic product to federal poverty programs, and those programs are among the least effective at reducing poverty, the study found.

Barbara Barrett contributed to this report. Extreme poverty growth in Texas

Harris County: Leads the nation, gaining 84,042 extremely poor residents between 2000 and 2005.

No. 4 nationally, adding 64,072.

Cameron County: No. 8, adding 31,622.

Dallas County: No. 12, adding 27,602.

Montgomery County: No. 6 nationally in percentage growth, up 149 percent.

Tarrant, Collin and Fort Bend counties: The only large counties in Texas to see declines in the deep-poverty rate from 2000 to 2005.

SOURCE: McClatchy Newspapers