It wouldn’t be a presidential campaign if we didn’t eventually hear a wealthy Republican candidate contemptuously dismiss the unwashed masses for reaching out their endlessly grasping fingers for government largesse, and Jeb Bush has now obliged.
At an appearance in South Carolina on Thursday, Bush was asked how Republicans could appeal to black voters. “Our message is one of hope and aspiration,” he replied. “It isn’t one of division and ‘Get in line, and we’ll take care of you with free stuff.’ “
Let’s be clear about one thing: Bush shouldn’t be criticized for a “gaffe,” that common and tiresome genre of campaign microcontroversy in which a candidate says something in a way he wishes he hadn’t and his opponents and the media act as though he has revealed the true and hidden darkness within his soul.
This isn’t really about Jeb Bush so much as it is about the persistence of this idea, one that comes out again and again when candidates are speaking to conservatives and the topic of certain kinds of Americans comes up.
It’s not even about the size of government or the nature of the welfare state as much as it is about who benefits from government and how our ideas about those benefits are shaped by the people we think are getting them.
Whatever Bush actually believes, there’s no doubt that when many Republican voters hear about “free stuff,” they have a particular picture in their minds: poor people, probably black or brown, getting some benefit they didn’t deserve, paid for by “us,” the hard-working and upstanding Americans.
Republicans will tend to mirror those views back at the Republican audiences they’re trying to persuade. You no doubt remember Mitt Romney’s assertion about the 47% of Americans who pay no income tax and “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” You may have forgotten that after the 2012 election, Romney blamed his loss on the fact that President Barack Obama had given “gifts” to various groups such as African-Americans, Hispanics and young people, gaining their loyalty with handouts. In other words, free stuff.
Other Republicans agree, not just that that safety net programs are gifts to the undeserving, but that they’re morally corrupting to the people who get them. So Paul Ryan, ahead of the 2012 election, warned that things such as food stamps should be cut, lest we “turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” Just think of those fortunate poor people, complacently lolling about in their hammocks!
Yet oddly enough, no one suggests that middle or upper class people are morally compromised when the government helps pay their mortgage interest — an enormous entitlement costing nearly $70 billion a year.
The truth is that compared with most of our peer countries, we are enormously stingy with “free stuff.”
Citizens in much of Europe can avail themselves of generous paid family leave, free child care, free university education and inexpensive (and universal) health coverage, all paid for through taxes.
The result is societies that have significantly lower inequality than we do, not because they aren’t capitalist (they are) but because government policy ameliorates the inequality that unfettered capitalism brings.
Among the 34 advanced nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States ranks 10th in inequality, looking just at incomes, but second in inequality, trailing only Chile, after taxes and transfers (i.e. social welfare benefits) are taken into account.
Combine that with our almost demented commitment to working as many hours as possible and avoiding vacations, and you have a nation where people work extremely hard and long but find it extremely difficult to get ahead. Yet Republicans politicians continue to tell Americans that we suffer from an epidemic of laziness. If people would only put their nose the grindstones, they could be as wealthy and successful as someone like Jeb Bush.
So why do Republicans say this “free stuff” kind of thing so often? The main reason is the simplest one: they believe it. Beyond that, it serves to justify the prevailing distribution of income, wealth and privileges.
If we can believe this narrative — that the one percent got where it is through nothing more than its hard work and strength of character, and that those who are struggling financially are in that position only because of their sloth and moral deficiency — then there’s no need to change anything about how our system works.
You don’t need to criticize Jeb Bush for a “gaffe” — look at his policy proposals, and it becomes clear that like most everyone in his party, he wants to reward those who are already at the top, and give those at the bottom a stern lecture about how certain kinds of “free stuff” will corrupt their spirit and keep them from clawing their way up.
It’s a wonder that people find this argument insulting.