Donald J. Trump began his first day as president listening to a favorite Baptist preacher, Robert Jeffress, who has suggested that the Catholic Church was led astray by Satan, that Mormonism and Islam both “came from the pit of hell,” that gay people lead a “miserable” and “filthy” lifestyle, that Mr. Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, was “paving the way” for the Antichrist — and that God Himself made Mr. Trump president.
.. a day in which our new vice president, Mike Pence, refused to even shake the hand of the defeated presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.
.. For Mr. Trump, there are no real American friends in the world, just countries that steal our jobs and our money, while letting us dangerously deplete our military and leave our borders undefended. (He did, ominously, promise us “new” alliances.)
.. Here at home, we are no longer the active and able citizens of a proud democracy at its zenith, but a collection of miserable victims, beleaguered by an “American carnage” of poverty, welfare, “rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation,” crime, drug addiction and the appeasers of those evil foreigners.
.. The commentators just kept talking about how at least this was “a peaceful transfer of power.” How low our expectations have become.
Shades of Modi
She was referring to our soon-to-be prime minister, Narendra Modi, who was running a campaign that skillfully melded the appeal of an outsider (he had once been a tea seller, he claimed) to the established order with the language of Hindu majoritarian politics, tapping in to existing prejudices against India’s Muslim minority.
.. When I heard Mr. Trump’s speech today in New Delhi, it was difficult to escape the echo of what we have already witnessed in India. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Modi talked of pulling the poor of India out of poverty. Many pundits, quick to look for hope where there was none, said that Mr. Modi’s speech reflected a new inclusiveness after the hatred of the campaign.
More than two years later, nothing has changed for the poor of India, but the bigotry that helped Mr. Modi ride to power has flourished.
The Conservative Plan to Tackle Poverty
House Speaker Paul Ryan says that improving the lives of low-income Americans is a top priority. To do that, the GOP plans to help businesses first.
.. In Ryan’s oft-touted policy agenda, “A Better Way,” he argues that social services may help Americans cope with poverty, but they do little to eliminate it. That’s why it’s no surprise that in the GOP’s anti-poverty plan, the welfare system—also called the “entitlement” system, depending on who you ask—is to be a main target for cutbacks.
.. But Ryan made it clear during his speech that altering policies specifically aimed at reducing poverty won’t be an immediate priority. Instead, the GOP will focus on tweaking policies they think will help businesses grow and provide more opportunities for low-income Americans: removing business regulations and cutting taxes, classic conservative solutions for jumpstarting economic growth.
.. Cutting taxes comes next and will most likely ease the tax burden on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Under his proposals, top individual income tax rates would drop from 39 percent to 33 percent, and corporate tax rates would fall from 35 to 20 percent.
.. The problem for Ryan’s approach is that even if the economy does grow from removing business regulations and cutting taxes, it’s not clear that that growth will come in the form of wages for the poorest Americans. More than half of the country’s income growth in the last decade went to the wealthiest 1 percent of American families.
.. That means the traditional Republican plan of spurring growth in order to boost the economic standing of the poorest Americans won’t do much to end poverty unless they can also ensure the money is going to those who need it most.
For Melinda Gates, Birth Control Is Women’s Way Out of Poverty
we not only believe in, we use in the United States — more than 93 percent of married Catholic women report using contraceptives
.. What would be the payoff if you can get to 120 million women?
You’d start to break the cycle of poverty. Women in the United States, when we were finally able to really use contraceptives, look what it did to women going into the work force. All over Africa, young girls getting pregnant early when they don’t want to keeps them out of school. So you’d keep more girls in school, and then you’d have educated girls who would go into the work force.
And we know that when a girl or woman has economic means in her own hands, it shifts the whole power dynamic in the family, whether it’s with her mother-in-law or her husband. It’s the beginning thing that unlocks a woman’s potential.