My latest column is up on AlterNet, Do Right-Wing Christians Want People to be Destitute? It’s about the conservative politicians who want to slash the social safety net, claiming they want to go back to a time when churches and private charity provided for everyone’s needs, and the evidence showing that the actual effect of that policy would be to throw millions into destitution – and its backers not only know that, they’re counting on it. Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the rest:
Nowhere in the U.S. needs healthcare reform more badly than Mississippi does; and at the same time, no other place seems less likely to get it, thanks to anti-liberal, anti-Obama fervor that that still burns white-hot. There was once a time when conservative politicians believed that government had a role in fixing these kinds of problems. According to a report by Sarah Varney in Politico, as recently as 2007, Mississippi’s Republican state government was planning its own health insurance exchange (paralleling the similar system created by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts).
But when Obama and the Democrats began championing that same idea, it become radioactive in conservative eyes, thanks to the reactionary rise of the Tea Party and its “we’re against anything Obama is for” platform. The Tea Party backlash resulted in the state abruptly abandoning its half-completed exchange and refusing the federal expansion of Medicare, leaving hundreds of thousands of Mississippians stranded with little or no access to care. This grim farce is emblematic of what the resentful right has wrought: Mississippi’s elected officials, whose job it is to look out for the common good and the general welfare of their constituents, have instead bent all their effort toward actively making their people’s lives worse.