BLOW: Government is a friend, with benefits

Government is not the enemy. Don’t believe that right-wing malarkey.

In fact, for millions of Americans down on their luck, they can quickly find that government is their last friend.

This function is now more important than ever, even as it is under more pressure than ever.

We learned recently that not only are there more poor people in America than previously reported, but that the only thing keeping millions more out of poverty were the very safety net programs that many Republicans despise.

For decades, experts on both sides of the poverty debate have complained that the official government measure is flawed because it doesn’t account for measures like benefits from government programs, health care costs or taxes.

So, to address those concerns, the Census Bureau has released a Supplemental Poverty Measure, or SPM. The new measure changed the composition of the poor but found that it was a larger group—the official 2010 poverty rate was 15.2 percent, but the SPM rate was 16 percent.

Even more important, the report highlighted the role government programs play in mitigating it. Many of these programs were expanded under the Obama administration with the much-maligned stimulus package. Now many of those expansions are scheduled to expire, and a new crop of callous Republicans threatens to not just trim the fat but to cut the meat.

For instance, the report shows that if the Earned Income Tax Credit, a refundable tax credit for low-to-moderate-income workers designed to offset Social Security taxes and encourage work, was not included in the SPM, the poverty rate would jump from 16 percent to 18 percent.

The stimulus bill increased the credit for people with three or more children and for married people so they would not face a “marriage penalty.” Those increases expire next year.

As for the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program for food stamps, the report says that without it, the overall poverty rate would move from 16 percent to 17 percent and for children it would move from 18.2 percent to 21.2 percent.

The stimulus bill increased financing for food stamps, but those increases are being phased out. And, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has pointed out, the Paul Ryan Republican budget presented earlier this year proposed slashing nutrition assistance by $127 billion over 10 years.

Obama’s stimulus package may not have provided the jolt to the economy that the country wanted and needed, but it kept a jobs and poverty crisis from becoming a catastrophe. The administration’s inability to convey that point is its own catastrophe.

A vast majority of people now believe that Obama’s economic policies have failed. After Republicans hammered that point for so long, most people can only see what didn’t get better, not what didn’t get worse.

This level of dissatisfaction makes people open to his cartoonish competitors’ Grinch-ish alternatives to economic policy, which invariably means the rich would get more and pay less and the poor would pay more and get less.

In a debate, Mitt Romney reiterated, with a straight face, that he prefers to let the foreclosure process happen instead of hold off “the normal market process,” or in plain English: help people to stay in their homes.

The lack of empathy for the poor and suffering on the part of the right is nothing short of breathtaking.

A recent Brookings report said that “after declining in the 1990s, the population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods—where at least 40 percent of individuals live below the poverty line—rose by one-third from 2000 to 2005-9.”

The Obama administration is far from perfect, but right is right and truth is truth: Government can play a very positive role in protecting the less-well-off from the interests of the more-well-off, and this administration’s view of government is much more benevolent than those of the people who are seeking to unseat it.

That’s worth remembering.•

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Blow is a New York Times columnist. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.