The Seattle Times Blows

[from 3/10/10]

The Seattle Times editorial board had this to say recently: "The General Assistance-Unemployable program has to go. This program, which provides a temporary safety net for people not working because of physical and mental disabilities, has been on just about every list of proposed cuts year after year."

Sort of like saying, "Charles Manson has asked to be released from prison every year since your mother wore hot pants. So by golly, it's about time we paroled him." Or, "Osama Bin Laden has been wanting to blow up a major US city for years. Let's give him Detroit. Hell, those people aren't working, let's blow it up for him."

That sort of reasoning impresses me. You can make a whole lot of things right, if all they have to be is mad-dog insistent. Why yes, I see it now, smoking crack has to be a good idea, there's someone smoking it in every doorway downtown every night. Why yes, if we're at war, year after year, then we should be.

"Who do these physically and mental disabled people think they are, going around being unemployed like that? OK, they're 'disabled', whatever that means (we're a newspaper, not some Poindexter-walking-dictionary), but that doesn't mean they can't be pimped!"

The Seattle Times editorial department seems to believe that if you withhold funds from GA-U, poverty will cost us all less. After all, if you don't give the poor people money, they'll either get by or die, right? And that'll be free for the rest of us! It's a win-win situation!

The Times is run by such adorable, cute, knuckle-dragging, social Darwinians. Aren't they the cutest social Darwinians you ever did see? Yes they are!

It's not that the Times doesn't understand the benefits of free money. They were happy to get their 40% discount in B&O taxes last year, along with this state's other newspapers. That was OK because at least they are working (only just -- it would help if they fired up a collective neuron once in a while) and the tax break was just a tax break and not income. Sill, it was a gift, justified at the time because newspapers were hurting, and granted in spite of a state budget shortfall. It was an investment, after all. An investment in newspapers, something we care about!

Maybe we have here a continuation of the "corporations are people, too, and they're bigger so they're more so than ordinary people" theory. When corporations hurt, they hurt more than anyone else.

I would be inclined to go along with the Times view if these disabled people on welfare were making off like Madoff, but what we're talking about is a benefit that has been frozen since the early 90s at $339 per month max, although that is now not enough money to pay commercial rent, even assuming that the recipient doesn't spend any of it on anything else.

By the way, the thinking behind giving so little money, apparently (I'm making this up as I write it because obviously legislators arranged it, and so there can't really have been any thinking involved), is that 1) disabled people take up less space than non-disabled people, on average, so they can double and triple up in apartments and 2) they get food stamps don't they? What's that? -- The food stamps only pay for enough to buy food for two weeks of each month? Well then 3) they can go to food banks can't they? What's that? -- Without places to live they can't cook anything and have to carry food bank food everywhere? -- so, fine, they'll lose weight, more of them will be able to pack in a room, savings all around. We've also heard that rice soaked in jars of vinegar for a month becomes chewable.

Summarizing: The Seattle Times, not satisfied with the fact that GA-U is inadequate, wants it gone altogether, and the poor magically gone with it. Well, I'd like the Times gone. So?