In 2010, 17.2 million households, 14.5 percent (approximately one in seven), were food insecure, the highest number ever recorded in the United States. Credit: Bigstock

By Bryant Harris
WASHINGTON, Mar 5 2014 (IPS)

U.S. President Barack Obama released a 3.9-trillion-dollar budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, shaping an ideological battle over the role of government in reducing poverty that will likely define the coming election year.

In addition to conventional support for the economically vulnerable, such as extending unemployment insurance, Obama’s proposal, released Tuesday, seeks to expand tax credits for moderate- and low-income earners while replacing any revenue losses by closing tax loopholes on high-income earners.

“At a time when our deficits are falling at the fastest rate in 60 years,” Obama said, “we’ve got to decide if we’re going to keep squeezing the middle class, or if we’re going to continue to reduce the deficits responsibly, while taking steps to grow and strengthen the middle class.”

With a very conservative, Republican-dominated House of Representatives, it is unlikely that Congress will cooperate with the White House’s proposal. Indeed, Obama’s proposal is all the more striking in just how diametrically opposed it is to a recent Republican report on U.S. anti-poverty efforts, itself released on Monday.

As the 2014 election approaches, conservatives seem determined to reemphasise their opposition to welfare programmes. On Monday, Paul Ryan, a member of the House of Representatives and the Republicans’ lead budget expert, released a report criticising social safety net programmes stemming from the “War on Poverty,” a 1960s-era initiative designed to combat the effects of poverty.

Ryan suggests that key War on Poverty programmes have had the perverse impact of keeping poor people poor.

“The president’s budget is yet another disappointment, because it reinforces the status quo,” Ryan, the party’s vice-presidential candidate in 2012, said Tuesday. “It would demand that families pay more so Washington can spend more.”

Ryan also accused Obama of proposing a 1.8-trillion-dollar tax increase.

The White House says the budget calls for ending “inefficient and unfair tax breaks that benefit the wealthiest”. During his speech Tuesday, Obama supported “closing tax loopholes that right now only benefit the well-off and the well-connected.”

Obama’s budget does seek to expand certain tax credits, such as the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), both of which give low-income workers a greater return on their tax refunds.

Under the proposal, the EITC’s maximum refund for childless workers would double to 1,000 dollars. The credit would also become available to young workers between the ages of 21 and 24 as well as older workers up to the full retirement age.

The proposal seeks to balance this expansion of the EITC by closing “tax loopholes” for high-income earners. As in previous years, the proposal also stipulates that millionaires must not pay less than 30 percent of their income, in order to prevent them from taking advantage of tax preferences that have allowed some high-income earners to pay less in taxes than middle-class workers.

While Ryan and fiscal conservatives have voiced their support for the EITC in the past, some conservative analysts are arguing against Obama’s proposal to make the EITC more accessible to younger workers and workers without children.

“[The EITC] is an effective measure that has encouraged work,” Rachel Sheffield, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, told IPS.

“What the president is proposing is expanding the EITC to individuals who don’t have children, so single adults, and that’s problematic because it’s likely … to have marriage penalties. It would potentially reward fathers who don’t marry or support their children. When the person marries the subsidy would be eliminated.”

Sheffield considers an expansion of the EITC equivalent to expanding welfare programmes, long a target of conservative ire.

“It’s simply adding to our massive welfare programme that federally funds 80 means-tested welfare programmes at a cost that’s nearing one trillion [dollars] a year,” she said.

How to measure poverty

The proposals from both President Obama and Paul Ryan state that they have the best interests of the poor at heart. But on Tuesday, Democrats struck back at Ryan’s budget, suggesting that years’ worth of proposals from the Republicans would have negatively impacted poor communities.

“For several years now, Chairman Ryan has proposed annual budgets that would deeply cut programmes for the poor,” Sharon Parrott, a vice-president at the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank, wrote Tuesday. “The Ryan budgets have consistently secured between 60 and 67 percent of their budget cuts from programmes for low- or moderate-income people.”

Ryan’s report argues that under the War on Poverty, the poverty rate in the United States has only decreased by 2.3 percent. But Parrot argues that Ryan misrepresents important statistics regarding poverty reduction.

Parrot contends that because the report relies on the official measure of poverty, rather than a calculation known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), it ignores the role of certain social safety net programmes in fighting poverty, including the EITC, the Child Tax Credit and various low-income housing assistance programmes.

Under the SPM, the rate of poverty has fallen by 10 percent since 1967, rather than 2.3 percent.

“Ryan buries this fact, failing to note the deep reductions in poverty under the SPM since the 1960s until page 201 of his report,” Parrot wrote.

Nonetheless, conservative analysts warn that the SPM has its own set of problems.

“The traditional poverty measure gauges how much people can buy, whereas the SPM turns the poverty measure into a relative poverty measure – how much a person can buy compared to their neighbour,” Sheffield told IPS.

“By making it a relative poverty measure, even if the incomes of all Americans tripled over night, you’d still have poverty with this measure. The official poverty measure is a good measure of self-sufficiency, such as how many individuals are relying on government assistance.”

Meanwhile, economists cited by Ryan’s report have been claiming that their findings have been misconstrued.

For instance, the Columbia Population Resource Center’s Jane Waldfogel notes that Ryan only used the group’s data starting from 1969. In ignoring data between 1967 and 1969, she says, Ryan ignored 36 percent of the decline in poverty.

Likewise, Barbara Wolfe, an economist at the University of Wisconsin, says the report outright misstated her research on housing assistance and labour outcomes, while ignoring another of her studies that found that “the housing programme has more benefits than costs”.

A few weeks ago, President Barack Obama was seen as certain to collect the majority of women’s votes in the Nov. 6 presidential election. Four days before the election, however, the women’s vote is thought to be divided equally between Obama and his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

A poll released last week by the Associated Press-GfK found women are split right down the middle, with each candidate receiving 47 percent of the vote. These numbers mirror the tightness of the popular vote overall and are a significant turnaround from a month ago, when the same poll showed Obama with a 16-point lead among women voters.

“Presidential races always tighten towards the end as local trends come to the national level – this is not a surprise,” Judy Lloyd, executive editor of Thoughtfulwomen.org and an appointee for former presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, told IPS.

Even so, Obama does appear to have suffered a dramatic loss in his lead with women voters. According to many analysts, the shift could be due to women focusing on the economy rather than on the “women’s issues” for which Obama has been fighting, such as equal pay in the workplace or funding for family planning.

The fight for the women vote has grown more heated as each candidate vies for women’s attention by criticising his opponent’s policies.

“The Obama campaign has engaged in a despicable game of gender politics and fear-mongering this election in an effort to shore up a critical Democratic constituency – single women.” Sabrina Schaeffer, executive director of Independent Women’s Forum, a group with “a mission to expand the conservative coalition”, told IPS. “But it’s clear the War on Women rhetoric has failed.”

Such rhetoric refers to the Obama campaign’s claim that Republican policies run counter to women on issues that are critical to them.

According to the AP-GfK poll, Obama’s rhetoric may not be bringing him female votes, but he is still seen as the better candidate for women’s issues. Of likely voters polled, 53 percent think Obama is making the right decisions on issues directly affecting women, compared to 40 percent who think Romney is doing so.

Even so, it now appears many women are not basing their vote on women’s issues.

“The economy is undoubtedly the number one issue for women going into this election,” Lloyd told IPS.

During the second presidential debate on Oct. 16, each candidate was asked what he would do to achieve equal pay for men and women in the workplace. This is a significant economic issue, as women currently make less than three-quarters what men typically make for the same job.

Obama immediately referenced the first bill he signed as president, a law that makes the pursuit of wage discrimination claims easier.

Romney cited his record of hiring women as part of his cabinet while he was governor of Massachusetts. But he also said that the priority should be getting women into the workplace in the first place.

Indeed, the question many women voters seem to be asking themselves is simply who will create a better economy for them and their families.

“As for women’s issues, although I’m retired, I understand that women need jobs, and Romney is the best hope for restoring the economy,” Judy Smith, a retired voter in the state of Virginia, told IPS.

Yet Romney’s specific plans on how to strengthen the economy also worry many women who work and benefit from government programmes he plans to end.

“Many of Romney’s budget policies are job killers for women, such as his plan to slash funding for social programmes that disproportionately serve and employ women,” wrote Terri O’Neill, president of the National Organisation of Women, a group of feminist activists, after the second debate.

Beyond the economy

Although the economy is front and centre for many as the Americans head to the polls, some voters, particularly young ones, are looking beyond the country’s dire financial state to changes in social and foreign policies that could be a large part of their adult lives.

“I realise that the economy is a disaster and we need to get to a balanced budget. However, I can’t justify solving this problem by voting for someone who would take us backwards in terms of social policies,” Taylor Dempsey, 22, a New York state voter and Peace Corps volunteer, told IPS.

Feminists disagree that the economy is even the central issue for the presidential race.

“The issues women are voting on are the big health care issues,” Eleanor Smeal, the president and founder of Feminist Majority Foundation, told IPS. “They are voting for the right to birth control, to affordable health care, and health care coverage throughout their retirement.”

“The gender gap is alive and well, and Romney has chosen to be against us women on the issues that are most important to us,” Smeal continued.

Obama has worked hard throughout his administration and campaigns to appeal directly to women voters on  issues he thinks drive their vote. Yet many women voters are frustrated with the Obama campaign’s isolation of women from men on voter’s issues.

“I am frustrated by what I perceive to be the Obama campaign’s pandering to women on a very narrow range of women’s health issues, and I do not appreciate the assumption that women vote solely on such issues,” Julissa Milligan, a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, told IPS.

Despite Romney’s attempt to keep the conversation focused on the economy and job creation, his Republican colleagues around the country continue to stoke controversy on women’s issues.

When asked about his “no exceptions” stance on abortion last month, Representative Todd Akin, the Republican Senate nominee in Missouri, said that “legitimate rape” rarely causes pregnancy.

During a debate last week, Richard Mourdock, the Republican Senate nominee in Indiana, said in defence of his opposition to abortion, “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen.”

While Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, have distanced themselves from these comments, they continue to support their fellow Republicans’ candidacy.

With four days left before votes are cast, candidates have no more time to waste on issues that won’t drive people to the ballot box.

“The fact is, women voters today know that there is a lot of good news for women and girls in the United States today, and they want a president who wants to help grow our economy, not play gender politics,” said Schaeffer.

With less than three months to go before the U.S. presidential election, over the weekend Barack Obama’s Republican challenger for the presidency, Mitt Romney, finally announced his vice-presidential running mate, a young member of Congress named Paul Ryan.

Paul Ryan speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington D.C. on Feb. 10, 2011. Credit: Gage Skidmore/CC BY 3.0

At the announcement, on Saturday, Ryan promised that he and Romney wouldn’t “duck the tough issues”, but some have since pointed out that the Republican ticket is now characterised by a notable lack of foreign policy experience. Romney made his mark as a financier and one-term governor, while Ryan is a congressman known for his hawkish views on domestic fiscal constraint.

“This makes this year’s GOP ticket something fairly unprecedented in modern presidential politics: a pair in which neither the (vice-presidential) nor the presidential nominee has any substantial foreign policy experience on their resume,” associate editor Joshua Keating wrote on ForeignPolicy.com following the Ryan announcement.

Indeed, while Obama weathered similar criticism during his run in 2008, his choice of vice president – Joseph Biden – brought a seasoned foreign policy expert onto the ticket. The two previous U.S. presidents, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, both of whom lacked foreign policy experience, followed similar routes.

The move comes just weeks after Romney made his international debut as presidential contender, in a three-country trip beset by missteps and widely derided as amateurish.

“Whatever impact the pick has on Romney’s campaign, one thing is clear: the GOP ticket is not running on foreign policy this year,” Keating notes.

The decision to downplay foreign policy may eventually prove to be politically savvy, given a recent national poll that found that just four percent of U.S. citizens considered the issue to be of particular importance in the upcoming election. Yet it leaves unattended a significant hole in the national and international understanding of how this potential commander in chief would act in office.

Neoconservative win?

Throughout the first half of this year, Romney fought a long and brutal battle to win the Republican nomination, which is set to become official at the party’s convention later this month.

Yet despite being the only remaining contender for the position, Romney had failed to excite broad swaths of the Republican Party, including both its intellectual elite and its socially and fiscally conservative grassroots.

While the latter remained suspicious of the candidate’s adherence to conservative values, the former became increasingly vocal over Romney’s failure to detail his vision for a United States under his presidency.

The choice of Ryan, a 42-year-old, seven-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives, appears aimed at cooling both concerns.

Not only is Ryan a beloved figure among members of the conservative so-called Tea Party movement – which has gained particularly strength in recent years around calls to massively cut back on the size of the U.S. government and its debt – but he is most well known for being an ideologue on fiscal issues.

The choice of Ryan as a running mate has now received glowing praise from notable Republican corners, including the Foreign Policy Initiative and the American Enterprise Institute, both prominent neoconservative think tanks here.

Currently, Ryan chairs the House Budget Committee, a position from which he played a significant part in fashioning what are today seen as his signature legislative proposals, the Republican Party’s budget proposals for 2012 and 2013. These are most well known for moving to severely cut and partially privatise some of the United States’ most important health-related social safety nets, aimed at slicing away some 5.3 trillion dollars of spending over a decade.

While he was president, George W. Bush is reported to have called Ryan’s proposals too extreme, in part for the latter’s suggestion that the U.S. move towards privatising social security. More recently, Barack Obama has likened the Ryan plan to “thinly veiled social Darwinism” that would create a fight between rich and poor.

For many political pundits, the vice-presidential pick now inevitably binds Romney to Ryan’s budget proposals, at least in spirit.

Certainly that has been President Obama’s latest campaign approach. In the swing state of Iowa on Monday, the president called Ryan “an articulate spokesman for Governor Romney’s vision”, though some analysts suggest that dynamic could be the other way around.

Cutting diplomacy

To date, Paul Ryan is known almost exclusively for his stance on U.S. domestic issues, but he has weighed in on subjects of international interest.

On issues of human rights, for instance, he has been relatively more outspoken than some Republicans. A socially conservative, devout Catholic, on Saturday he stated, “Our rights come from nature and God, not government.”

Of particular interest is the most recent of the Ryan budgets, released in March, a 99-page document called “The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal”. Although concerned primarily with cutting the United States’ federal budget, the proposal maintains that national security should be the government’s foremost priority.

How exactly to attain that security, however, appears in part to be ideologically driven.

In his only major foreign policy-focused speech, in mid-2011, Ryan painted himself as a firm believer in U.S. exceptionalism and, more recently, as a proponent of military intervention. According to media reports, he is currently being advised by Elliott Abrams, a neoconservative former advisor to George W. Bush.

The Ryan budget would allow U.S. military spending to grow by some 90 billion dollars over the coming decade while, at the same time, drastically reducing other overseas tools.

According to a May 2012 report released by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank here, Ryan’s budget would cut around 31.6 billion dollars from the foreign affairs accounts in four years, including slashing budgets for the State Department and USAID, the foreign-development office.

“By any reasonable estimation, such an approach would decimate our nation’s ability to effectively advance our interests overseas,” the report warns, “and such budget calculations cannot be justified based on a deliberate analysis of our needs and foreign policy priorities as a nation.”

Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of defence currently with CAP, told IPS: “Ryan’s budget undermines our national security by providing funds to the military that it leaders say are unnecessary, while taking away money from diplomacy and development activities which can prevent crises.”