In this video provided by Move On.org, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich explains and exposes seven different Big Zombie Lies about the economy and government spending.
Another one of those Lies, is that the "War on Poverty" has—on the whole—failed. That after trillions of dollars worth of spending, the poverty rate now is just as bad as when these programs went into effect. And that the terms we use to define "poverty" are constantly shifted upward bit by bit as a means to keep the gravy train of benefits flowing to people who refuse to work.
This lie is the primary motivating factor behind the tea partiers who have taken the GOP in Congress hostage to their whims. We can't invest in education, we can't invest in infrastructure, we can't invest in clean renewable energy all because "we're broke."
According to them, it's all the fault of the poor, the needy, and the sick.
More than a few fairly rich people, or those fueled by their money, are willing to tell us day-in and day-out how easy the poor have it, and how they're such a aerodynamic drag on the rich, um er, everything.
Not surprisingly, many of the people willing to claim this are regularly featured on Fox News shows such as "The Five." Particularly in this clip in which they explain the "real" poor can't afford such luxury items as air conditioners and computers.
The segment starts off with former Bush White House Press Secretary Dana "Tiny Dancer of Doom" Perino proclaiming that a new report shows that we've spent over $22 trillion in the War on Poverty. She claims that's more then three times what we've spent on all military wars going all the way back to the American Revolution, and that according to the latest report from the Census Bureau, the poverty rate itself is now actually higher (at 14.5 percent) than it was in 1967 (13 percent) when she says the programs were "underway and implemented."
“The war, this war against poverty was plotted to continue indefinitely,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld opined. “The census counts a family as poor, but excludes the government spending that they get, the programs they get from that actual income. So what happens is it guarantees that programs will grow while poverty is unchanged because you’re not counting the money [they're] getting! So it's not a War on Poverty, it's actually a zombie that you can't kill. And it grows, and nothing changes, and the poverty rate remains the same, and you keep throwing money at it. That tells you something, STOP THROWING MONEY AT IT. This is crazy.” [...]
Co-host Eric Bolling argued that under President Barack Obama, poor people did not even have to “pretend” that they were looking for a job to receive government assistance.
“President Obama is the first president to pull that [work requirement] out,” Bolling said. “So it’s literally more financially beneficial for you to stay on welfare programs than it go out and get a job for a good percentage of the population.”
This chart from Pew Research shows the poverty rate across racial lines going all the way back to 1963.
As you can see from the report prior to 1967, the overall poverty rate was nearly double what it eventually became "when all the programs were in place" by 1967, so Perino's suggesting that things are now
worse than they were before these programs is flat-out false. From 1963 through the year 2000, ending when economic policies of Bill Clinton that balanced the budget by slightly raising taxes on the rich, the general trend for people of all races was for the poverty rate was to go down. After 2000, when President George W. Bush implemented his tax cuts, which went largely to the richest 10 percent of the population, the poverty rate has been slowly creeping back upward.
Now, clearly there are other factors involved here. For example, there was the economic crash of 2000 where many people with strong middle-class jobs lost them and had to start over again at low-wage, low-skill positions. And then you had the economic crash of 2007 where the same thing happened, only worse.
There's also a bit more that Perino declined to mention that came out of the Census Bureau report.
The official poverty rate in 2013 was 14.5 percent, down from 15 percent in 2012. That was the first time the rate has declined since 2006, a year before the recession began. However, the number of people living at or below the poverty line, about 45 million, did not budge. The decline in the rate at a time of unchanging raw numbers was attributed to population growth.
The federal budget deficit when President Barack Obama took Office in 2009 was $1.4 trillion. Today that deficit is projected at $564 billion for FY2015. That's an $836 billion Improvement.
Fox-fueled conservatives would like to pretend that spending under President Obama has done nothing but go up and poverty has, too. Neither of these things is true. Both of them are zombie lies, and it's well past time, we put them down for good.
As we grow closer to this year's mid-term elections, we would do well to keep all of this in mind.