Bill Straub: Barr seems more concerned with plight of the banks than helping the truly needy

WASHINGTON – You sure have to hand it to old Andy Barr – he’s the kind of guy who has his priorities straight.

The Republican congressman from Lexington has made it clear he doesn’t much care for folks on the public dole and his solution, if a report on poverty he co-authored for the House Republican Study Committee means anything, is to make poor people poorer.

That doesn’t mean Barr is appalled at the prospect of providing a leg up to the truly needy. Heavens no. He’s all in favor of providing a helping hand as long as the recipients are his pals in the well-heeled financial services community. And those folks sure are grateful for his efforts, expressing their eternal appreciation to old Andy by helping to fill his campaign coffers, something the underprivileged folks in Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District are fiscally incapable of doing.

Barr currently is championing a plan to reform the nation’s anti-poverty efforts by, among other things, establishing a lifetime limit on certain federal benefits, including SNAP, the old food stamps program, and instituting work requirements aimed at filling recipients with a whole lot of “dignity,’’ which Barr feels they obviously lack.

The package also contains that old GOP trope block grants, dispatching funds to the states where they may, as tradition holds, abuse the privilege and use the dough to build roads and support programs other than SNAP, Supplemental Security Income for the aged, blind and disabled, public housing and other initiatives that support the destitute.

Now some folks might see old Andy as punching down, slamming folks you generally won’t find living in his neighborhood. His rationale for all this, outlined in the 19-page “Strengthening Our Safety Net to Empower People,’’ is composed of one tired cliché heaped on top of another.

“This proposal is based on a simple premise — government should offer a hand up, not a just a hand out,’’ the proposal states. “The most effective welfare benefit is one that leads to a job. We should change the incentives of our safety-net programs, so that instead of dependency, we foster a path towards success. Everyone deserves the dignity and freedom that comes from the self-reliance provided by employment.’’

The plan offers very little in the hand up category and whacks away with a machete at the handout component. Just where an under-educated recipient with a low skills level living in a place like, say, Salyersville, where the unemployment rate is 16.8 percent, is going to find even a minimum wage job is not thoroughly explored in the report.

Let’s first note the obvious – no one is getting rich off of America’s anti-poverty programs. As Isaac Shapiro, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, the age-old Republican argument that the low-income assistance system strongly discourages work is a fraud.

Statistics show a single mother with two children who takes a half-time job at the federal minimum wage earns $10,000 in annual net income more than a similarly situated woman without a job who receives available public benefits. If she takes a full-time job at the federal minimum wage, her family is nearly $20,000 better off than if she doesn’t work.

That’s what you call an incentive. Barr’s argument only works if you’re convinced that the poor in this country are so lazy they’d prefer living in a pig sty than holding down a job, even a part-time one.

Studies further show work requirements to draw benefits have practically no impact over time. Recipients often seek public assistance because they face significant challenges that limit their ability to work or reduce their ability to compete for a limited supply of jobs. Physical and mental health conditions that limit an individual’s ability to work or limit the amount or kind of work they can perform are much more common among public benefit recipients than among the general population. Cutting these poor souls off is the height of cruelty.

But the real stunner here is the proposal to impose a lifetime limit on SNAP benefits. Barr and his cronies have to know that children will suffer the most from this misbegotten idea. As it is, 49 million Americans, 15 percent of the population, struggle to put food on the table. Limiting SNAP benefits can only make the situation worse.

Here’s the kicker – most of those receiving SNAP benefits already hold down jobs, they just don’t make enough to assure their kids get fed. In families with children who receive SNAP benefits, more than 60 percent work and almost 90 percent work in the prior or subsequent year.

Apparently Barr intends to assure “the Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour’’ (see Dickens).

All of this, of course, is being done in the name of some ersatz compassion for the poor, teaching them to fish, etc. etc. The real intent is to get by on the cheap, hand off most of the problem to the states and ultimately make the conditions the impoverished have to operate under every day even more unbearable. Barr and many of his fellow Republicans would much rather spend the time and money on a segment of the population that is really ground down and desperately needs and deserves the kindness of the federal government – the nation’s bankers.

Old Andy does love him some banks. He loves big banks and little banks, Ernie Banks and the left bank of the River Seine. As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, Barr will do just about anything the money-changers request.

According to the Congressional Record, more than half of the bills Barr has sponsored during the current 114th Congress involve banking. And most of those proposals are taking dead-level aim at Dodd-Frank, the financial regulatory bill put in place after the 2008 crash when the entire world economy almost went swirling down the rabbit hole.

Just like Nipper, the little spaniel in the old RCA Victor ads, Andy Barr hears his master’s voice.

Right now, Andy is upset some people are being mean to the banks and, by gosh, he intends to do something about it. There’s this outfit called the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created about eight years ago as part of Dodd-Frank. The bureau, the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, was set up to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive or abusive practices and take action against companies that break the law.

With a financial system rendered so complicated that even Einstein wouldn’t be able to work his way through it, the CFPB is there to make sure banks and other financial institutions don’t misuse people’s money.

Speaking at the Washington Insights Conference sponsored by the Association for Credit and Collection Professionals – and wouldn’t that be a wild and whacky group — in April, Barr asserted that the bureau has “targeted’’ the financial industry, maintaining that it “published complaints without any context and continues to hold over you the threat of regulatory action through policy guidance or unprecedented enforcement action.’’

His legislation, the peculiarly titled Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending (TABS) Act, has passed the House Financial Services Committee and awaits possible floor action. The measure removes responsibility for funding the bureau out of the hands of the Federal Reserve where it currently rests and places it under the umbrella of the congressional appropriations process.

The move would essentially deprive the bureau of its independence and, in a very real sense, threaten its existence – Congress would have the power to simply defund the agency quicker than you can say Jack Robinson, which is something many folks on the Republican side would sorely like to do. The Federal Reserve itself is not subject to the federal budgetary process so it can operate independently within the government. Its money primarily comes from the interest on U.S. government securities that it has acquired through open market operations, a portion of which is then passed on to the CFPB.

What Barr fails to note is the CFPB is working like a charm. Over the first five years of its existence, the bureau has taken legal actions resulting in the collection of $11.7 billion, returned to 27 million consumers who were harmed by the actions of the financial institutions. Another $500m or so has been generated in penalties.

Barr’s concern may come as a result of his own payday lenders. He has raised $453,210 during the 2015-16 campaign season from individuals and political action committee connected to the insurance, securities & investment and commercial bank industries. Most of it came from PACs. Only 51 percent of the money he has raised has come from individuals. The rest came from PACs.

No wonder he loves him some banks.

A brief note on another sad occasion. My good friend of more than 40 years, Mark “Bones’’ Chellgren, the chief correspondent for the Associated Press, covering the state capital in Frankfort for 23 years ending in 2006, died Saturday in Ashland of a massive heart attack. He was only 62.

Kentuckians have no idea of the extent of gratitude they owe Bonesy, who kept a hawk’s eye on the state budget through many administrations and maintained the best sources in town, letting the public in on the questionable dealings that too often percolate in state government.

He was a great reporter and a real pro, the highest compliment I can pay. But mostly he was a friend dating all the way back to the University of Kentucky days in the 1970s. This one hurts, folks. This one hurts.

Washington correspondent Bill Straub served 11 years as the Frankfort Bureau chief for The Kentucky Post. He also is the former White House/political correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service. A member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, he currently resides in Silver Spring, Maryland, and writes frequently about the federal government and politics. Email him at williamgstraub@gmail.com.