FOX News has this grotesque graphic it uses for segments about the welfare state. It’s a grimy, cartoonish hand that breaks through the heart of an unlabeled map of the United States. The hand is open and faces palm-up, and it grows larger as it protrudes through an area bounded by the Dakotas, Texas, St. Louis and eastern Colorado. It cradles two words, stacked atop each other, written in all-caps and imposing font: “ENTITLEMENT NATION.” Its lifelessness calls to mind a zombie limb, and its imagery calls to mind a desperate beggar.
“What note do you give the graphics designer for that?” Jon Stewart asks. “‘Hey, give me the dirt-stained hand of the moochy-poor bursting alien-like through the heart of this once-mighty nation,'” he says, mocking an imagined television producer.
Stewart, hardly a man to do conservatives favors, has a point in framing this graphic in such a way. It wrongly imagines the needy as a wholesale class of bums, and it paints the poor as the enemy; an inconvenience; a pestilence upon the country. It reframes the fight against the entitlement state as one between the viewer and the ‘mooch’ instead of one between the viewer and the government. A better graphic — one that would reflect the true concerns of conservatives — would depict an ever-expanding Washington, D.C., with tentacles grasping dollars and reaching into all fifty states, kind of like the animated ‘nuclear strike scenario’ in which arced, red lines take out plains state cities after the metropolises on the coasts have been eliminated.
We fear the government creating a class of dependency. We do not fear the dependent. We want to help them, just in a way that is oriented more toward future success than present difficulty.
The failure of this FOX graphic to make that distinction is reflected in Stewart and his ilk’s misunderstanding of what it is conservatives actually want for the out-of-work and working poor. On his Thursday program, he broadsided Republicans for their unwillingness to simply extend a ‘temporary’ unemployment compensation program being debated in Congress this week. The fact is that this program is a short-term option for hard-luck Americans, put into place in the summer of 2008 before the U.S. economy was about plunge into its worst state in decades. It has been renewed — and in some instances, expanded substantially — nearly a dozen times as the unemployment rate has crept toward more respectable levels but the size of the nation’s workforce has shrunk dramatically.
So Democrats continue to use this as their linchpin — their ‘solution.’
Many Republicans have different ones, ones that focus on revamping the country’s labor market and expanding economic opportunity to more Americans. That comes by way of Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), who have made workforce development and education/tax reform signature issues, respectively; by way of House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), whose mission is comprehensive tax reform of our burdensome and inefficient tax code; Rep. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who inherited a regulatory reform measure from retired Rep. Geoff Davis (R-Ky.) that was one of Speaker John Boehner’s legislative priorities in the previous Congress; Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) and an increasing number of Republicans pushing healthcare alternatives that would eliminate the employment perils of Obamacare; and more.
The problem is that with a Democratic Senate and White House, both of which are stubbornly against considering or at least debating the GOP’s economic ideas, these proposals can be little more than messaging tools. The actual legislative vehicle of the day is a stopgap to keep dispensing federal unemployment aid.
It’s not wrong for Republicans to stand athwart such a measure by itself and try talking about their own principles before moving forward; to reshape the conversation into one about empowering Americans, not just supporting them. It is wrong, however, to stand athwart those Americans simply for treading water in some rough straits.
They should take note of “ENTITLEMENT NATION” and make it clear to the country that that is not us — their persistent opposition in Congress and those who don’t understand what drives conservative policy are trying to act like it is.
