Why do Republicans continually stereotype, malign and beat up on the poor?

Question

Why do they demonize the impoverished, as though the poor are responsible for all the nations troubles?

Well, it's very nice to see so many Republicans who don't view the poor as the enemy of the middle-class. Very refreshing.

Kathy_is_a_nurse, no the U.S. doesn't have the "richest poor". Not by a long shot!!
Almost all other modern countries in the world have a higher standard of living for their poor than does the U.S.

Answer 1

Primarily because the poor are visible, and secondarily because it's funtional for the capitalist system of mass expolitation. Contrary to the myths bandied about by our corporate press and the indoctrination of the brain-washed public (just look at the comments), the US does not have the richest poor in the world. That honor belongs to the Scandinavian countries, which provide more than the pittance our government does. There, people are entitled to a standard of living that would shame Americans, but the corporate press does not report on it, and for good reason. If the truth were known, it would silence all those who maintain the flasehoods and outright lies propounded by our corporate-dominated society which blame the poor for being poor. The fact is that though the Scandanavians are entitled to a standard of living far above what the vast majority of Americans suffer, very few choose to stay at home and live off the system. There, unlike here, it is deemed a human right to be free of poverty and homelessness. The presence of poverty is funtional, in that it keeps wages low (more profits for the wealthy), serves as a basis for the mythology that hard work means wealth (as if the poor don't work as hard or harder than others), and provides a self-serving rationale for entrenched wealth and power. If the poor are poor because of some personal failing, that means that the rich are rich because they are better than the rest of us. Total nonsense.

"24.9 percent of American children live in poverty, while the proportions in Germany, France and Italy are 8.6, 7.4 and 10.5 percent. And once born on the wrong side of the tracks, Americans are more likely to stay there than their counterparts in Europe. Those born to better-off families are more likely to stay better off. America is developing an aristocracy of the rich and a serfdom of the poor - the inevitable result of a twenty-year erosion of its social contract."
Will Hutton

"Cuba has ... been condemned for not allowing its people to flee the island. That so many want to leave Cuba is treated as proof that Cuban socialism is a harshly repressive system, rather than that the U.S. embargo has made life difficult in Cuba. That so many millions more want to leave capitalist countries like Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, El Salvador, Philippines, South Korea, Macedonia, and others too numerous to list is never treated as grounds for questioning the free-market system that inflicts such misery on the Third World."
Michael Parenti

"[The ruling elites] know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy."
Michael Parenti

"[The Right] lie with impunity. Let's face it. They're liars. They lied about the reason they took our sons and daughters to war. They spend millions of dollars in campaign ads saying they are for a prescription drug benefit under Medicare while they work to destroy Medicare and replace it with private plans and HMOs. They call their dirty air legislation "Clear Skies" and their plan to give the timber companies our trees, "Healthy Forests." They call their job-killing economic program a "jobs program." They say they are for peace when they are for war. Millions of children are left behind under their miserly "No Child Left Behind" education bill. They tout a child tax credit for working families and then silently drop it in favor of more tax cuts for millionaires."
Rep. Jan Schakowsky

"America's punitive and reactive response to crime is an integral part of the new social Darwinism, the criminal justice counterpart of an increasingly harsh attack on living standards and social supports, especially for the poor ... America [is] a society in which a permanent state of social disintegration is held in check only by the creation of a swollen apparatus of confinement and control that has no counterpart in our own history or in any other industrial democracy."
Elliott Currie

"Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike."
William O. Douglas, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969

... "the United States is slipping into a category of countries - among them Brazil, Britain, and Guatemala - where the gap [between rich and poor] is the worst around the globe."
United Nations' Human Development Report

"America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number."
Arnold Toynbee, historian

Answer 2

i'll confess, I even have stereotyped the protesters.. yet I even have finished this as a results of reason or loss of reason that they project. The techniques they have chosen to Protest.. And the completed hypocrisy of their very own Protests... yet you have in basic terms finished a similar.. you have in basic terms stereotyped ALL Republicans.. hmmmmm and your clarification for this?? and that i QUOTE YOU.......take any college-point Sociology classification and you will see that the individuals who promptly stereotype each and every team of people they meet are the individuals who're the least smart and maximum gullible.............. OPPS...i think your Liberal based instructions in basic terms bit your person ***.. Hmm . you have seen instructors (liberal based instructors maybe) and that they are minimum salary workers? What instructor do you already know that gets minimum wages? BTW, their salaries come from the place? (the loose industry equipment, Capitalism, and the very tax equipment which they are protesting? and pick to rid?) You dont see the hypocracy?..... cops?? I fairly doubt that..... as a results of fact that between the situations of working in regulation enforcement is which you do no longer take part in protests as they are there to regulate the crowds no longer join it.. i think i will purely anticipate which you're in basic terms attempting to make up information to guard your person element view? here i circulate back... i'm Stereotyping you presently as an" uneducated poster".. How did i EVER arise with that HUH? i think i'm purely a form of damn gullible Republicans back.

Answer 3

They criticize the lazy and rightfully so. However often the line between poor who are lazy and poor because of other reasons gets blurred and so they end up demonizing all of them. When the difference finally becomes clear the Republicans I know are as generous as any other American and that is very generous. Too often generalizations are made about the rich or about the poor that are simply not true of either group as a whole. Each has an outstanding few that give a bad impression for everyone else in the group.

Answer 4

If you check history. In the 1940's and 1950's the number of black, hispanic, and oriental owned businesses were on a continious rise. Then came LBJ, the democrat, and his "Great Society". He ushered in an age of welfare with no responsibility, being paid for having children as long as the father did not live with the family. Give this to a population at large, and there should be no surprise at the results--I'm sure they were obvious to Johnson. What it did was make a large voting block beholding to the party. When you put together a system which gives you things "free" and doesn't require any responsibility the end result are a large number of impoverished Americans. However, the blame lies not with the Republican party, but with the Democratic party. Just my opinion, but the Democrats knew when they put the "Great Society" into action that first of all they would have millions of votes from the poor, and knew that this system would keep millions of votes impoverished and beholding to the Democratic Pary.

Answer 5

because they are for the rich. that is their group. many of them are also in that group
if they didn't make them look bad people would get angry that they are not being treated well under GOP reign. Reagan dismantled our concept of a middle class- people who work hard and can have a comfortable life. now the middle class lives pay check to pay check, must have two incomes in a home to even begin to live comfortablly, can barely afford to send their kids to college, and is typically in waist-deep debt from poor health care plans (or no plan at all).
the GOP would also cut 98% of all the services and aids citizens have if no one stopped them. they cut and downsize programs now because they make people think that those who benefit from them don't deserve them.

Answer 6

Unfortunately, many people...apparently including you...mistake the Republican emphasis on fixing a system that CREATES and ENCOURAGES poverty. We realize that just tossing money at those who have fallen prey to it doesn't solve anything and only perpetuates the situation. That's not to say the poor are ignored, but the focus is more along the lines of "teaching a man to fish, rather than just giving the man the fish."

I should also point out that we have the RICHEST poor in the world...another point that Libs tend to ignore. They keep redefining upward the standard for poor to perpetuate their victim agenda.

Answer 7

What really gets me is how many of them seem to think that all poor people are lazy and take advantage of the system, when in fact many of them DO work for a living and just barely scrape by.

Answer 8

the poor are the basic need in a market orientated state, less poor means less rich, i don't think the rich would like that. and a-s-s-h-o-l-e-s just are regardless of political leaning or money earn't

Answer 9

Because the stereotype fits. The reason they are poor in the richest nation in the world, that imports 12 million illegal aliens to fill the jobs that they don't want to take, because they are given handouts that equal more than the pay they would receive doing the job in the first place. I have seen 5 thousand people living at a waste dump in the Philippines, The USA's poor could hardly be called poor in comparison.

Answer 10

I made $7,000 my first year in business. I starved. I put in 60+ hours a week and built it from scratch, but the minute I started to make some money, the government came crashing down on me for every available dime. I simply believe that many (not all) have the power to do whatever they want in life, and the government more often than not makes their lives worse. It's easy in NY State to live off the system, so how is this system going to lift people out of poverty? It pays them to not work and to have more children out of wedlock.

Just for the record...Conservatives do more for the poor than Liberals. It's been studied. Liberals refuse to believe it because it's not what they "believe". They hate this study, but it was conducted by a Liberal professor at Syracuse University...

http://philanthropy.com/free/articles/v19/i04/04001101.htm