President Obama spoke at a panel on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown on May 12, and he absolutely nailed it.
He called out Fox News and their stereotypes of poor people:
I think the effort to suggest the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction. And, look—it’s still being propagated. I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it’s a constant menu. They will find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them. They’re all like, “I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obamaphone” or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative that gets worked up. And very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress, which is much more typical, who is raising a couple of kids and is doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills.
And so if we’re going to change how John Boehner and Mitch McConnell think, we’re going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues and how people’s impressions of what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like and how budgets connect to that and that’s a hard process because that requires a much broader conversation than typically we have on the nightly news.
He discussed
the shrinking middle class:
Now what has happened is, is that since, let’s say, 1973—over the last 40 years—the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent has shrunk from about 65 percent to about 53 percent. That’s a big shift, a big transfer. And so we can’t have a conversation about poverty without talking about what’s happened to the middle class and the ladders of opportunity into the middle class. […]
What’s happened in our economy is that those who are doing better and better—more skilled, more educated, luckier, having greater advantages—are withdrawing from the commons. Kids start going to private schools, kids start working out at private clubs instead of the public parks, an anti-government ideology then disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together. And that, in part, contributes to the fact that there’s less opportunity for our kids. All of our kids. […]
Who had access to the firefighters job? Who had access to the assembly line job, the blue-collar job that paid well enough to be in the middle class and then got you to the suburbs and then the next generation was suddenly office workers … all those things were foreclosed to a big chunk of the minority population in this country for decades. And that accumulated and built up and over time, people with less and less resources, more and more strengths … because it’s hard being poor. People don’t like being poor. It’s time-consuming, it’s stressful, it’s hard. And so over time, families frayed, men who could not get jobs left, mothers who are single are not able to read as much to their kids … all that was happening 40 years ago to African-Americans, and now what we’re seeing is that those same trends have accelerated and they’re spreading to the broader community. […]
You look at state budgets, you look at city budgets and you look at federal budgets, and we don’t make those same investments like we used to.
And the breakdown between what Republicans say and what they actually do
when it comes to poverty.
“Talk to any of my Republican friends,” Mr. Obama told several hundred people attending the school’s poverty conference. “They will say, No. 1, they care about the poor — and I believe them. But when it comes to actually establishing budgets, making choices, prioritizing, that’s when it starts breaking down.”
The president said his unsuccessful effort to raise taxes on hedge fund managers was an example of the refusal by conservatives to compromise for the benefit of the poor. He noted that the top 25 hedge fund managers make more than all of the nation’s kindergarten teachers combined. He said that hedge fund managers were not evil, but that Republicans should be willing to tax their incomes at the same level as they do kindergarten teachers’.
Watch a video clip of a few choice comments below the fold or read the
whole transcript here.