This is the first time since creating this blog that I have posted twice in one weekend. I have limited my posts to once a week, for the most part, because of the press of other business. This fall, as has been the case since 2008, that includes teaching a University of Iowa graduate class in the School of Urban and Regional Planning, “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery,” on top of existing duties, including extensive travel, with the American Planning Association. I have not wanted to establish a pace I could not maintain.
But I was struck this morning by a headline column in the Chicago Tribune Business section by Rex W. Huppke, titled, “Don’t demean jobless.” Huppke is generally a very well-balanced, thoughtful writer who does not engage in hyperbole. Nor do I believe he does so today. What he does is excoriate certain politicians for their own hyperbolic fulminations. While I was not present to hear the speeches of which he writes, I am fully inclined to accept the veracity of what he reports.
What he reports is that on August 26, in South Carolina, Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican, told supporters there that “more than 100 million Americans . . . . are simply not in the workforce” and compared them to stubborn children who refuse to do their chores. Huppke goes on to note that the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 11.5 million unemployed Americans, with another million that have dropped out of the labor market. That is a tiny fraction of King’s number, which is nearly one-third of the entire American public, children included.
So where does King get such a number?
The only way to do so is to replicate the kind of colossal statistical assumption committed at one point, before a private audience, by 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who noted that about 47 percent of the voters were beholden in some way to public handouts and thus likely to vote for his opponent. How so? You include everyone on a public pension, Social Security, unemployment, Medicare, Medicaid, and so on. There is no other way to compile such numbers, and Romney was quickly taken to task by numerous commentators at the time for the sheer arrogance that underlay his statement. You might think that the response to his comment might have cured others of such foolishness, but apparently not. Stay-at-home parents? Do your chores! Just got laid off when a factory moved overseas? What’s the matter with you?
Now let’s get serious. I know, that’s a challenge in a political environment that actually honors such discourse. If you want to bank on anecdotal evidence, we all know of people, young and old, who never quite learned how to accept responsibility and are happy to live off others. Some are the children of relatively affluent but overly indulgent parents. I know of such people. But I also know that they are a tiny fraction of the people I know because they represent a tiny fraction of the American public as well, nowhere near the numbers people like Rep. King toss around in such careless speeches. Then there are millions of elderly, living in whole or in part on Social Security, who simply retired because they had reached a point in their life where they were entitled to claim some benefit from the money they had paid into retirement benefits over decades of work. If they are deadbeats—and they must be included to get to King’s numbers—then so are we all, or at least the vast majority of us. So is my wife, a retired school teacher, one among many slowly but steadily being pushed out of the Chicago Public Schools. Me? Healthy and busy for now, but who knows? The day may come when I have to stop. I could become sick or disabled, as can anyone else. But I will certainly not apologize to the likes of King and Joyce if that day arrives. After all, when their constituents tire of them, or they retired, they will have their congressional pension.
And speaking of Congress, it’s time they start doing the chores for which they are already getting paid. That includes doing some honest research before spouting off.
Jim Schwab
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