The ugly truth: Republicans want more poverty and crime

The Republican Party is running a huge scam right now, similar to the one they ran in 1992 when President George H.W. Bush was setting up phony cocaine busts across the street from the White House having achieved his position by running his infamous Willie Horton ad four years earlier.

Here's the essential formula:

• Increase levels of inequality in the country to the point where poverty and homelessness are a crisis.
• Do this with huge, trillion-dollar tax cuts for rich people so they get massively richer, while gutting social safety net programs and supports for working-class people like unions.
• Poverty and homelessness increase, which produces an increase in crime, and that freaks out middle-class people—the majority of voters.
• Then, build your political identity and campaign around being "tough on crime" while completely ignoring the fact that the poverty you helped create is largely responsible for much of that crime.
• Blame the poverty-driven crime, instead, on "welfare" programs Democrats have put into place to try to soften the blow of the poverty caused by Republican policies.
• Get elected, create more poverty; rinse, wash, and repeat.

This is not a new idea. Around 170 A.D. Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius said, "Poverty is the mother of crime," although he was actually trying to reduce both in the wake of others who'd made poverty and thus crime worse.

And then there's inequality, which it turns out is at least as consequential as poverty as a driver of criminal behavior.

Years of research done by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Equality Trust in the U.K. found that as inequality goes up, so does crime—particularly violent crime.

As their research notes:

Rates of violence are higher in more unequal societies. This finding holds up in many different contexts, we looked at via different methodologies and after controlling for other determinants of crime such as low income, unemployment, and teen birth rates.
Small permanent decreases in inequality—such as reducing inequality from the level found in Spain to that in Canada—would reduce homicides by 20% and lead to a 23% long-term reduction in robberies.

Inequality, it turns out, may be an even more effective driver of violent crime then poverty. And the United States today is the most unequal society in the developed world.

This week while taking a walk in Portland, my wife Louise was attacked by a homeless man, who threw a water bottle at her and chased her down the street. He was almost certainly mentally ill as well as poor; programs for the mentally ill were mostly nuked by Reagan and have never recovered.

And research from the Equality Trust shows that inequality is associated with mental illness; as societies become more unequal, mental illness increases. The data holds all over the world.

Nonetheless, the GOP continues to promote policies that increase inequality and thus increase violent crime and mental illness, while blaming it all on Democratic welfare programs.

And Republicans believe them. A 2014 Pew poll found that while 90% of Democrats want the government to do something about inequality only 45% of Republicans think anything should be done.

And now they're all over the media being positively hysterical, wringing their hands, about a post-Covid bump in crime during a time when eight million jobs have literally vanished from the American job market and will almost certainly not come back any day soon.

Republicans find this particularly easy to get away with because American media is mostly owned and run by very wealthy people and the "talent" we see on TV are almost exclusively, themselves, multimillionaires. Such folks are rarely comfortable talking about poverty and its relationship to inequality, although they're fine discussing crime anytime the GOP brings it up.

The same is true of most Republican politicians, funded as they are by billionaires, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) pointed out last July.

"Republicans are all upset that I'm connecting the dots between poverty and crime," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. "I know most of them haven't experienced or seen these issues firsthand, but I have. This may be hard for them to admit, but poverty and crime are highly linked, both violent and nonviolent alike."

This blindness hits the entire economy. When Democrats work to lift people out of poverty, it lifts the entire economy. As Republicans work to cut taxes on rich people and spending on poor people, it whacks the economy.

Investment strategist Sam Stovall pointed out, in a USA Todayarticle by Doug Stanglin, that "every Republican president since Chester A. Arthur (1881-85) had a recession during his administration."

Stanglin notes that Clinton "averaged 3.7% [economic growth] over eight years," while, "of the post-World War II presidents, only Truman, at 4.8%, Kennedy at 5.2%, and Johnson at 5.1% scored higher average growth rates. By contrast, Reagan averaged 3.5%, Carter 3.3%, Nixon 3.1%, Bush I, and Ford 2.2% and Bush II 1.65%."

Republicans, however, not only are not interested in discussing inequality or poverty and the relationship of both to violent crime, they even have a handy rejoinder to anybody who wants to talk about crime, particularly crime committed in minority neighborhoods.

For them, it's not inequality or even poverty that leads to crime, particularly violent crime: it's "character." And "character," more often than not, is simply a stand-in reference for "racial minorities" or, at best, "poor people."

They know it like a mantra because they've been saying it for years. Poverty is just fine. Don't worry about it. It's not causing crime; you can just look at those folks and see their criminality. As my right-wing colleague talk show host Dennis Prager asserts, "It is not material poverty that causes violent crime, but poor character."

Trump's administration even claimed to reverse the arrow of causation, arguing that poverty is caused by violence, and therefore we don't need to give poor people money but, instead, we need to throw more cops at them. "But to break the cycle of poverty," he said in March of 2017, "we must also break the cycle of violence."

Of course, they're wrong. Taking this out of the American political and social context altogether, a study published by the National Institute of Health (NIH) about the impact of poverty in China is instructive.

The study looked at two years of homicides across China and found that "poverty and low income levels" are "positively related to homicide rates."

But don't expect the Republicans to wake up any day soon. This is just science, after all. They will never, ever vote to raise taxes on the billionaires and corporations that own them. And they'll never work to use tax money to reduce poverty and inequality in America. Crime, after all, helps them beat Democrats.

Nor do they want to restructure our society in a way that gives working people the power to demand higher wages and better working conditions (unions), thus reducing both poverty and inequality.

And you can bet your bottom dollar they'll continue complaining about the crime that they've created, particularly in the election ads they'll start running next year.