News Flash: Republicans Aren’t Against Social Assistance!
Recently, I’ve had the privilege and the pleasure of corresponding with an imminently sane, inquisitive and (mostly) rational liberal female reader whose emails I’ve come to honestly cherish. After reading my review of the book Why You’re Wrong About The Right (in which I brought up the fact that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican), she wrote:
I have to give you a jab for the “Abraham Lincoln was a Republican” […] just because…well…it WAS 140+ years ago. Don’t your people have any more recent examples?
To be honest, I actually had to do some research. Like many folks, I remember things in general terms: Lincoln…good. Nixon… well, looking back he didn’t suck, but let’s face it: we Republicans got our panties in a wad when Bill Clinton, a Democrat, lied in office. Doesn’t integrity demand we be at least a bit ashamed of Nixon’s criminal activities and deceit?
But imagine my surprise, as a card-carrying Republican, when I learned that Republicans are actually behind most of the social assistance, Civil Rights and tree-hugging things the Democrats now parade as proof of their “social goodness”.
• For instance, how about Rutherford Hayes, under whom female attorneys were first given the right to argue before the Supreme Court?
• Chester Arthur initiated the International Meridian Conference which both established the Greenwich meridian and international standardized time. He also reformed the civil service, ditching the old crony system and requiring written entrance exams instead. That was a nice kick in the pants for corporations that were accustomed to putting their own employees into civil jobs so their employersd could continue getting away with corrupt practices.
• Benjamin Harrison oversaw the introduction of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which keeps corporations from forming monopolies and cartels.
• William McKinley was known for promoting ethnic diversity and yet protecting American workers by imposing high tariffs on imported goods. (Those tariffs eventually became the financial basis for the ‘era of Prosperity’.)
• So, okay, everyone’s bitching these days about how the Republicans have a Vice Presidential candidate who is a reform-minded Republican under 45 years old, totes a gun, loves to hunt and only served as governor for 2 years before being named as the Veep candidate. Guess what? It’s not the first time. Consider Theodore Roosevelt, the guy who started the tree-hugger’s pet project, the National Park System.
• Taft continued to battle corporate trusts, launching over 80 anti-trust suits. (Roosevelt got pissed with him over the U.S. Steel trust, which Teddy had personally approved.) He also created the parcel post system. Incidentally, he thought up the federal income tax idea which was initially supposed to target corporations for the privilege of doing business in the U.S. So those social programs that are tax-funded today? They hark back to a Republican’s creation.
• Harding’s not on anyone’s list of notable presidents, but he did create the Bureau of Veterans Affairs. Yep, vets who are receiving benefits and assistance can thank a Republican, too.
• Coolidge. Eh, admittedly the only good thing to say is that he supported lowering taxes and exempting more people from them.
• Hoover, for all the bad rap he gets, wrote the Children’s Charter that advocated protection for all children regardless of their race or gender; instructed the IRS to go after Al Capone and other gangsters for tax evasion; expanded the national park system; eliminated many of the tax loopholes for the rich; and doubled the number of VA hospitals. He also advocated a Federal public pension for those over age 65 which, although not enacted during his administration, was the basis for the Social Security program. That’s right, another social assistance program thought up by a Republican!
• Eisenhower expanded all of the New Deal programs then created the Dept. of Housing, Education and Welfare to administer them. (He also extended benefits to 10 million more Americans.) Those highways we drive on? He came up with the Interstate Highway Transportation System. He also supported the Brown v. Board of Education decision and told Washington, D.C. officials they had to integrate. Eisenhower, incidentally, proposed to Congress the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 and signed them into law. Although they weren’t as strong as those passed later by LBJ, the fact remains that a Republican president was the first to do something about Civil Rights for black Americans.
• Nixon. Okay, our bad. But, hey, at least he improved relations with China and helped bring along their split with the Soviet Union or I’d be typing this in Cyrillic right now.
• Ford supported a constitutional amendment allowing each of the states to make an independent choice on abortion, which didn’t win him many friends within the GOP. He remained pro-choice throughout his life, and his wife Betty (who is one of my personal heros) described Roe v. Wade as a “great, great decision.”. But that’s about the only nice thing I have to say about his presidency, aside from the fact that he was smart enough to give Betty a voice.
As to more recent Republican Presidents, well, it’s hard to debunk what people believe they personally witnessed. There is a reason, I submit, why so many Presidents are held in low regard until history provides hindsight on what they truly stood for and accomplished. And that reason is simply this: we all filter things through a thick lens of what we want to believe. It’s not until time has passed, and passions have cooled, that we see what truly occurred.
If we’re smart people, we revise our beliefs accordingly.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I truly believe that Nixon was paranoid. That was his downfall. Besides improving our relations with China, Nixon was also concerned with poverty in this country. Google Nixon Family Assistance Plan. Here’s a time article on it.
http://www.time.com/time/magaz.....-2,00.html
Marisas last blog post..What Happened To My House?
I think that the difference is that Republicans are for social assistance and Democrats are for a generational social lifestyle.
kimschs last blog post..Public Financing
With regard to recent presidents, Ronald Reagan decreased the size of government and that’s real social assistance.
While I generally applaud the advent of social assistance programs, given what I do in my day job, there is a point at which “help” becomes “enabling”. I’ve seen firsthand what happens when the combination of a budgetary surplus and a liberal administration pour money into human services, and it isn’t pretty. At the end of the 1990’s, Oregon’s “noble experiment” called the Oregon Health Plan had expanded health coverage to over a quarter of a million people that Medicaid doesn’t cover. It very nearly bankrupted our state, and trying to keep it afloat is one of the major reasons that Oregon is in the dire straits it is now.
Lest we forget, the welfare reform at the federal level was driven, passed, and then overcame a Clinton veto by a Republican majority. The program before reform was not a pretty sight - the good intentions of 50 years ago had created what a client of mine once called a self-perpetuating cottage industry of the poor doing make-work jobs that either didn’t need to be done or should have been done by bidding competitors.
Welfare in many ways still isn’t a pretty sight. I got a new job a few months back, calculating overpaid benefits, and the amount of waste that government goes through is horrifying.
wgs last blog post..Contrast & compare
Personally, I’m old enough to actually remember moderate Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller and Gerald Ford. There are also still sensible Republicans, like my own senator George Voinovich or Olivia Snow, out there, if you look hard enough. But the have been effectively silenced and rendered impotent by the “values voters”, whose inane hubris is the belief that they are the only people in the country who have values at all.
They have also been silenced, by the current President, and those lawmakers–all Republican thanks to Newt Gingrich and his ultimatum to lobbyists not to deal with Democrats–whose idea of “the public interest” consists only of the lobbying job they will score after they retire from public office.
I also am disabled, and on Social Security, with a bipolar psychosis, and so I am a client of the fine American social service system as administered in Ohio, a largely Republican state. I’m not going to try to refute the experience of wgs in Oregon, and on the other side of the desk from the clients.
But I will note two fine “cost containment” measures that I have experienced in Ohio. Medicare is my primary health insurance and Medicaid is my secondary. I re-apply for Medicaid yearly and across all the paperwork in big bold letters is the following: REPORT MEDICAID FRAUD IMMEDIATELY!.
Fine. The only problem with this is that, to cut costs, Ohio Medicaid does not send clients any Explanations of Benefits describing who has been paid what and for what service. So there is no possible way a client can know if his medical providers are committing fraud or not. Isn’t saving taxpayer money grand!
Also, if you are on Social Security Disability, you receive token “cost of living” increases every year. Now these are so small compared to the regular and routine “cost of living” increases voted for themselves by State Legislators, US Representatives, and US Senators, that even the tax accountants of those fine folks wouldn’t notice them.
But they are an increase that helps someone on a fixed income stay abreast of real inflation. Unfortunately, your help from the State of Ohio in Food Assistance is cut by exactly the same amount as your Social Security cost of living increase, so, since you are on a fixed income, you are hammered every year by the full force of inflation still.
At 1% inflation per annum, you find yourself a decade later trying to on 10% less.
What would Rutherford B. Hayes have made of it!?
Joseph Marshalls last blog post..Another Unwed Mother
The truly awful thing about experiences like yours, Joseph, is that you are a part of the population that the social service is intended to help. Being able to genuinely, in a small way, make a positive difference in the lives of people like yourself was about the only thing that has kept me going as a worker over the years.
Medicaid fraud is no joke. I am working a case right now that I’m anticipating will end up going to federal prosecution because of the amount - well in excess of $100,000 for Medicaid fraudulently received over the course of four years. By way of contrast, I wrote my largest single Food Stamp overpayment this morning, for nearly $5000. Makes you stop and think a minute doesn’t it?
The sick thing is that this is better than it used to be.
wgs last blog post..Contrast & compare
Please understand that one of the symptoms of my psychosis is that I find everything in life to be screamingly funny. I don’t take Medicaid fraud lightly. But, as I said, the State of Ohio puts me and every other client in a position where we cannot help while still exhorting us all to do so. That certainly is comical.
My companion is also disabled [RH arthritis and COPD] and on Medicaid as secondary. A couple of years back, she had an awful [though still comic] accident in a grocery store where an employee ran into her Amigo cart with a 10 foot long hand truck full of canned goods.
The monetary settlement went solely to a certain Chiropractor, for services beyond the Medicare limits, without any benefits to my companion. But, in the interval, I strongly suspect that the provider was double dipping by also billing Medicaid.
Why? Because, although we got superbills, the provider adamantly refused to indicate either the ICD codes or the CPT codes on them. So we have no record whatever of what was done when.
Without EOB’s as a cross-check for dates of service, Medicaid cannot know what we have and we cannot know what Medicaid, or the grocery chain’s attorneys have. And I strongly suspect that superbills without CPT’s and ICD’s would not be enough to start an investigation, even if we turned them in.
Joseph Marshalls last blog post..So Why Does Sarah Palin Make My Skin Crawl?
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that you weren’t taking it seriously. I agree, that is pretty funny. Government is often like that, however….take the current biggest frustration where I’m at.
Eligibility workers are required to have access to certain information from a lot of different sources, in order to do their job. Among other things, this includes access to Social Security payment records - since our programs are affected by Social Security eligibility and payment, it’s something we have to know.
So imagine my suprise, now that I’m working for one of the three different groups that’s intended to preserve the integrity of accurate decision making, by doing review work, and find that I no longer have access to one of the more basic and fundamental extra-Agency sources of information? It gets worse. There is one entire segment of the population we serve who, like yourself, are unable to receive benefits unless they are getting Medicare. My job is to pursue fraud of Medicare….which I am completely unable to prove now, because Social Security says I don’t need access to that information.
As if that weren’t enough, what they tell us is to contact the local SSA office and ask for information when we need it, since we don’t get to have access to it ourselves. Guess what they say when we call? “Oh, well, if you need access to that information, you’ll have to take that up with the administrative group that governs access to that information….”
wgs last blog post..Low posting anticipated
And yet people think the government should be trusted to bail out financial institutions, solve the “mortgage crisis”, provide universal health care, manage retirement savings (via Social Security) and fix the public school system.
Talk about screamingly funny.
The environment I work in is strongly liberal, as one might expect of a unionized government agency for social services. Every so often, one of my peers will be waxing poetic, all dreamy-eyed, about how wonderful government control of some things (like healthcare, for example) would be. It’s a lure I have never yet been able to resist.
There’s a cognitive disconnect there I’ve never been able to understand. Government is waste - there is a reason that this country’s Founders chose to phrase the Constitution in terms of narrowly defining what government is, what it may do, some specific prohibitions, and explicitly stating that all other rights not stated lie with the citizens and/or states.
The same government that supposedly screwed, not just the proverbial pooch, but the proverbial sled team, over Hurricane Katrina should be trusted to govern the entire healthcare industry (Because that’s worked so well in the UK, Cuba, Canada, and Russia.
The same government that hasn’t been able to find a way out of the pyramid scheme that is Social Security should be trusted to govern this country’s energy supplies in the form of federalized control of oil, natural gas, etc.
The same government that created the problem with subprime mortgages, by steadfastly refusing to regulate the industry at all should be trusted to now exert total, complete, and utter authority over that same industry.
You kmow, the Preamble to the Constitution lays out pretty well the things that government is supposed to do, and is actually capable of doing well.
1) Establish Justice - we have one of the best criminal justice systems in the world. It’s not perfect, nothing ever is….but it works pretty well.
2) Ensure Domestic Tranquility - Despite the sensationalism of the evening news, most neighborhoods in most cities outside really dense urban areas are actually pretty nice places to live. Some, you can even *gasp* leave your doors unlocked at night!
3) Provide for the Common Defense - Heh. The military of this country is the most powerful in the history of the world and has been for decades. This probably will not change unless something very, very bad happens.
4) Promote the General Welfare - Not create…promote. This means keep bureaucrats with an agenda out of private-sector business and let the economy of this country do its thing, with reasonable, mutually-agreed upon playing fields called laws. Given that the USA has the largest, most powerful and creative economy in the history of the world, I’d say we’re doing okay as we are.
5) Secure the blessings of Liberty - How many other countries have creaeted something as simple and yet society changing as the the capability for me to sit here in Oregon, replying in a conversation started by a woman in Kansas, to a guy in Ohio?
And yet liberals want to put the grubby fingers of government into business while screaming about governmental intrusion into “private” affairs. Does this make ANY SENSE?????
/rant
wgs last blog post..Low posting anticipated
Great post!!! Also, let’s not forget that the KKK started as a radical arm of the Democratic party. At one Democratic Convention they actually stopped the convention to go and have a KKK rally, complete with burning cross!!! I always find it interesting how history gets altered.
Uh, no.
The name of the Ku Klux Klan has been used by a lot of people over the last 140-odd years, and the only affiliation that the Klan has ever had with libaral-leaning politicians (Democrats indluded) was in the 1924 Democratic Convention you’re referring to.
Typical liberal bastions such as the NAACP have been targeted many times by KKK members. Racists like that have very, very little in common with most people, libarals and conservatives alike. They hate, and that’s what defines them.
I remember moving to Coos Bay when I was a kid. A former leader of the Klan, and one that was still very active, had tried to move into town a short time before, and he was quite literally run out of town. The local paper outed him, and after that gas stations refused to sell gas to him, grocery stores refused him service, restaurants would keep him waiting in the lobby and refuse him a table…even a local clothing store refused him service. He lasted about a week, and left saying it was the most hostile town he’d ever been in. The general consensus was that he’d gotten a taste of his own medicine and had had it coming.
wgs last blog post..Low posting anticipated
Hi WS! Sorry it took me so long to get back. I must say that what you described is something I’ve not heard of–Ohio Medicaid appears to be able to still access this. But the question I would ask is does your Medicaid office require proof of primary coverage payment by the providers? I’m certain they get some kind of line item version of the combined Medicare EOB’s that I receive.
I’m sorry to have to do this, but you and Kate are just putting a gun to my head and forcing me to get up on my soap box.
We are incredibly insulated in a organized cocoon of safety from our government. So much so that we really don’t know its even there or understand how much we depend on it.
Consider the Federal Aviation Administration: a few weeks back some of their radar computers went down and the traffic controllers had to halt most takeoffs, put everybody up in the air on a holding pattern, and bring those planes down a little at a time. There were hundreds of them up there, slowly losing fuel, circling around or backing down their airspeed to slow their arrival–a map of the United States on the television news that displayed this looked like the inside of a beehive at swarm. Thousands of people were at risk. Who got them down without a casualty?
The government.
I was in New Mexico about 20 years ago when young healthy Navajo men and women on the Big Res started catching what looked like a bad case of the flu and then simply dying. Who finally identified the problem as the Hanta virus, the carrier as mice droppings, and developed a protocol to keep it from spreading throughout the Southwest?
The government.
Specifically, the Center For Disease Control. It was particularly chilling to me because my shabby graduate student rental had plenty of mice.
There are currently two highly drug resistant strains of tuberculosis spreading wildly through the old Soviet Union. Sooner or later they will be here, so I don’t think we’d better defund the CDC just yet.
Who issues the tornado, hurricane, and severe thunderstorm alerts? The National Weather Service, i.e, the government.
Who organizes rescue and relief efforts when people can’t get out of the way? The government.
Who do small craft sailors turn to when they get in trouble? The United States Coast Guard.
Who maintains regular watch for forest fires and coordinates their containment? The US Forest Service.
You probably both travel on multilane expressways. Do you consider where the money comes from that keeps you from having to pay road tolls every time you do? When I was a boy just about the only such superhighways were toll roads such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Not only were there no Interstate Highways, every single United States highway was a two lane road–and usually a dangerous one. The one I remember best was US 23, which was a series of s-bends with blind corners snaking back and forth under the N&W railroad tracks all the way from Columbus to Portsmouth, OH.
Private enterprise didn’t change this. The government did.
And the runways that the first Boeing 707’s began to land on 50 years ago weren’t built by private enterprise, either. They had to be a lot longer back then, too. The first generation jetliners didn’t have reversible engine turbines to shorten their landings.
Two hurricanes have hit New Orleans in the past five years. One killed a huge number of people, the other merely a handful. A major reason for this was better cooperative preparation and effective government planning before the second hurricane hit.
Could the citizens of New Orleans have done this on their own? No. But does anyone really notice when the government does it right? Also no.
I could go on and on, but the real question is simple. Do we really want all of this to go away? Do we really want our family and friends to “adapt” to all of these problems on their own and without help? Are we that confident in the spirit of freedom and rugged individualism to take on these things all by ourselves?
Those who despise and decry “the government” are prone to forget or ignore how much it really does for us [rather than just to us] every moment of every day of our entire lives. They also fail to consider just how well it does most of those things for us.
They do it so well, we forget that they are even there.
We could all live as government service free as the people of Bangladesh, Somalia, or Myanmar, but we and our families would have no greater level of personal safety and comfort than the people do there if we did.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. Government can and does many wonderful things - my point was that government’s role is and should be confined to a very few things. Maintaining infrastructure, criminal and civil justice (which essentially comes down to solving disputes between citizens, most of the time), setting the playing field between private organizations, making everything as equitable as possible….yes. These are the civil functions that government does well, and should do well. There are some things, however, that government does not do well, and that’s operate like a business…because it isn’t a business, and it shouldn’t be.
A friend of mine once referred to red tape as the sword and shield of any bureaucracy, and he’s more right than he knew. Due process is a good thing, most of the time, but it does have the effect of slowing to a near-halt anything that isn’t an emergency situation.
Government doesn’t belong in business; its’ job is to govern, not to operate. As I said above, the Preamble puts it pretty well in saying that a government of the people is to promote the general welfare of its’ people not to create that welfare. For all its ability, for all its power, and for all its authority, our government does what its citizens decide is important, and not the other way around. It’s a fundamental, and often forgotten principle.
wgs last blog post..Freakin’ hippies, I tell ya