As you can see from the YouTube clip above, last Saturday (7/28), I appeared on Fox News' business show Bears & Bulls from Denver to address the question, "Is one of the government's job to end poverty?" The show was pegged to John Edwards (D-NC) efforts to use his presidential campaign to champion an anti-poverty agenda.
I know - it's really hard to believe that this was the premise of a question to be debated on television, even Fox. This is why I go on these shows when asked - because someone has to call out these people for what they are: elitists.
The idea that there are people out there in America who think, no, the government shouldn't do anything to combat poverty is sickening in a country that is supposed to pride itself on family values. The idea that, as you can see, some of these people get to appear on national television networks to spew their hateful ideologies is more than sickening - it is disturbing.
As you'll see in the clip, I make the point that if America - the wealthiest country on Earth - can continue giving hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks, corporate welfare, and tax code subsidies to superwealthy companies like Fox News' parent, The News Corporation, then we sure as hell have the resources to combat and eradicate poverty. You may recall that according to the New York Times, the News Corporation "paid no federal taxes in two of the last four years, and in the other two it paid only a fraction of what it otherwise would have owed" at a time when its "domestic pretax profits topped $9.4 billion."
You'll also see in the YouTube clip that the panelists all try to claim that the War on Poverty and anti-poverty programs in general have been a failure - an insult to the millions of hardworking Americans who have benefited from programs like Medicare, affordable housing grants, etc. These right-wing elitists want us to believe that because anti-poverty programs haven't 100 percent eradicated poverty (in part, because Republicans have refused to adequately fund them), that we should just abandon all efforts to alleviate poverty in pursuit of an Economic Darwinism. By this same logic, of course, we should eliminate all counterterrorism programs in America because those programs have not 100 percent eradicated terrorism.
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