Reparing netting

I heard John Boehner profess to be in favor of our country maintaining a social safety net for those who cannot compete, but not available to those who refuse to compete. Aside from the fact that this assertion is not borne out by his and other Republicans' other statements and actions, it made me think about the social safety net itself and the cliche it has become.

First the cliche; having been asserted somewhat recently as the name for those programs that we have put in place to protect ourselves from economic hardship, it is important to realize that the name itself leads to a skewed thinking about such programs. Unemployment insurance is obligatory insurance, like auto insurance. There really is nothing social about it. Payments are made in, and in the event of particular conditions of unemployment, one is entitled to payments during the unemployment for a stated period of time. As with all insurance, it is possible to take more out of the system than goes in, but even then, that is the bet that is insurance. People who are covered by unemployment insurance need to have been employed during the previous statutory period, and after the statutory time ends, the payments end; need doesn't figure into it. Extending the time period of benefits at certain times does not change this basic concept.

Welfare has receded into some murky place, with lifetime caps to support it will provide, if I understand anything about what it is today...Food stamps might be a help, in the nature of a social program, but, if I understand it correctly, one uses it to increase buying power; it is not a system to eliminate hunger.

The thing that interested me most was the talk that I heard about this social safety net during the Christmas holiday. As the extension of unemployment benefits seemed to be in jeopardy, people would talk about the extreme sadness of that happening at Christmastime, because the tradition of gifts and celebration would be taken from these people. The issue is really, cutting off anybody's income stream at any time leads to homelessness and hunger. A social mind would see that immediately.

The way we count the unemployed (remember we count the jobless instead of the people in need). Those who stop the active search for work cease to be counted. They become the unadvertised poor. People who take jobs that cannot support them are not counted. It would appear, as we look at the people we intend to catch in the safety net, to be dragged to social safety, that it is more about protecting the property of people in danger of falling out of the system, rather than protecting the people (men, women, children) themselves. Once they lose their stuff, we cease to even count them as a problem.

We do this because that severe loss for our neighbors, emperils our own personal position, our hold on to our own stuff, and our safety within the society as competitors, not because we actually care about what happens to our neighbor as a human being.