"Helping" the Poor

Bush Plans Sharp Cuts in HUD Community Efforts (washingtonpost.com): "The plan was detailed in a December memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget to HUD.
"What we are trying to accomplish is to meet our obligation to people living in distressed communities, to hold communities accountable for helping those people and to become more efficient in the process," another official said."

Is this helping the poor?

Let's explore for a moment what is really going on here.

People pay their taxes in the expectation that the government to whom they pay their taxes will in fact create programs that will assist those citizens in the community who are unable to fend for themselves, ensure that there is a rule of law and generally keep people safe from each other, they expect that in the event of a disaster the funds which have been accumulating in the treasury will be used to assist them to recover and to rebuild.

Alas, these days the government in the USA seems hell bent on ignoring the needs of many of its citizens and more concerned with making the rich even richer. In addition they are bent on making the world a better place (read more like America - as if that is a useful goal) and getting their community into a debt that would stagger many other economies combined.

The notion that communities in which poor people live should take responsibility to the housing and other welfare needs of members of that community is in fact a wonderful attempt at misdirection.

On the one hand there is a generous attitude towards tax reductions across the board (favouring those who have large incomes of course) and then there is an unfair redistribution of taxation to hit those communities in which the poorest live to pay for their upkeep. The net effect of this is to ensure that instead of taxation being levied across the country where people in rich communities could be assisting those in poorer communities, what is now expected is that poor communities will be made even poorer by being held accountable for the welfare of those in their midst that can not survive without assistance while those in rich communities which have no need to spend on the poor in their communities - because there aren't any can keep their share of the tax dollars that have been returned in tax cuts and get richer still.

How Mr Bush and his cronies can manage to undertake this form of manipulation within their stated Christian ethics is certainly beyond my understanding it is also beyond my understanding how a country filled with supposedly intelligent people can believe the crap that is being handed to them and not only not vote the man and his colleagues out of office but actually return him to a second term.

Still that's politics in the USA.

Let's just hope that in the madness for all things American we do NOT adopt this idiocy!