ummsomething.com

So my mother posts some fairly right-wing essays, and then asks for respectful debate on them. I’ll give it a try, but if something is simply dishonest or wrong, it’s not an issue of politeness for me to point it out.

Seriously, read the essay first. You can tell by the author credits in his bio where this is headed, but still give it a try.

For starters, anyone who ignores simple inflation when throwing spending numbers around is intellectually dishonest at the jump. This error is compounded by ignoring that the country has grown over the period he’s talking about, so of course all figures are going to grow. Medicaid and Medicare costs are subject to the unsustainable increases in the cost of medical care, so they are also artificial accelerators in the fake numbers.

Finally, lumping Social Security in with all entitlement spending ignores the demographic spike of baby boomers hitting retirement age over the last few years. If you wanted to reason about the issue of entitlements, you’d separate Social Security, or at least acknowledge the issues in including it. If you need scary numbers, you count Social Security the same as food stamps or unemployment to make your point.

Real subtle to slip in this, too: “…minimum wages, maximum hours, and mandatory benefits for employees, or rent control for tenants. ” – which is simple regulation of commerce, not the creeping tendrils of the welfare state. No one who talks this way is attempting to make a reasoned case for anything. They are only trying to rile up people that are already receptive to the message, and further insulate them from reality with shoddy reasoning designed to convince them that the other side are all idiots who don’t see “obvious” things, instead of people who don’t accept the same framing.

For example, the framing of approaching the entire set of issues of common social welfare as one single issue, and then only with dollars and cents. That’s no way to consider or conduct complex policy that affects the health and well-being of people. I’m not saying to ignore money, because of course we want to get value for what we spend. I’m saying that money is not the start and end of the conversation.

And that’s the most obvious bullshit in the whole thing. Poverty *is* diminished by welfare spending. It’s preferable to be poor in America in 2014 instead of 1964, or 1914. Social programs are only successful if we achieve zero poverty? Is it really so hard to imagine that despite some waste and fraud, real people benefit from what we spend on social programs? Millions of children, elderly, and disabled people get housed and fed this way. Despite this fact, social programs are often characterized as setting money on fire.

The structural problems in our economy are growing poverty pretty fast, too – real wages are flat over the last 40 years despite a six-fold increase in worker productivity and greatly reduced job security and retirement benefits, while housing and health care continue to climb as a percentage of income, pushing people closer to the edge. The fact that we subsidize too-low wages with social programs, instead of the wages being high enough to not need them is also part of the issue.

I can’t blame people who can’t reason more effectively, but I can blame people who won’t. This guy knows – or should know – his version of “facts” as presented have obvious errors of reasoning in them. This does not qualify as debate.