Does anybody remember the plot of Ghostbusters II? I haven’t seen it in a long time, but there was this really evil force in Manhattan, (more evil than Donald Trump, even!), who was trying to unlock this portal to hell and unleash demons on an unsuspecting public. And this evil force was manifested in some sort of ectoplasmic goo that, as soon as it touched people, caused them to have horrible feelings of anger and rage and made them do the most heinous things to each other. (It’s possible that I’m getting the plot of Ghostbusters II confused with Cocoon, and the goo with Steve Guttenberg.) Anyhoo. My point is that, in the movie, (at least how I remember it), this evil just kind of built up gradually, imperceptibly, touching a random person here or there until it surrounded the public and was almost impossible to stop. (At the climactic scene where hell is about the be unleashed on earth, cue the Ghostbuster’s theme song, Bill Murray saves the day, end credits.)

I think in today’s tough economic times, the Republican Party is Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II, and the goo that is being spread is this angry, hurtful myth that lower taxes and less government regulation reduce poverty and lead to greater economic wealth for the general public. If Bill Murray doesn’t step in soon, it’s only a matter of time before hell is unleashed on earth.

I think it would be easier for Marcus Bachmann to admit that he is gay than it would be for most people to talk about poverty. No one likes to think about it. Certainly no one wants to admit that in a country as great as ours it even exists. Hell, the only way I seem to be capable of talking about it is to act like it is some hidden away problem that isn’t anything my friends suffer from. Republicans take advantage of this. Because there is this reluctance to discuss the subject, because there is so much shame attached to the concept of poverty, conservative aggressively attack the issue by questioning its existence, demonizing the poor and doing everything they can to further reduce government assistance to them. What makes the conservative attitude more appalling right now is that they are being this aggressive towards the poor while we are suffering through the Second Great Depression.

But, let’s start from the beginning. What exactly is poverty?

I think that we can all agree that, as far as we know, thanks to the government subsidized cheap commodities of corn and soy, America is not teeming with famine-ravaged refugees streaming across the border to Mexico for help, as they are streaming into Kenya from Somalia. So, yay Team America! You’re not Somalia. But is that it? Is that the standard? “Sally Struthers isn’t trying to airlift you food, so quit complaining, you’re not poor?”

There is, of course, more to it than that, especially in a country with a standard of living as high as ours.

Even though we are not starving in the streets, there are homeless, working poor parents with children in this country. There are people lining up by the thousands hours in advance to apply for housing vouchers in this country. There are people dying because of a lack of access to dental care. There are people waiting for hours to attend free clinics to get their teeth cleaned or the blood pressure checked because, even though they work three jobs, they can’t afford health insurance. So. What is poor? Are only homeless people poor? If you can afford rent, if you can make a car payment, if you can pay your electric bill, does that mean that you are not poor? To some on the right, that is exactly what that means. If you have an obese child or you own a cellphone, you clearly can afford to eat and you can afford luxuries. So, you’re not poor, you’re just horrible with money. If you only budgeted with a little bit more discipline, you’d be able to climb up the economic ladder. Your failure to get ahead is your own fault.

Now, in my mind, I define being poor as a level of economic hardship that limits a family’s opportunities. So, a person who has straight A high school children but who cannot afford to send them to college, that person is poor, as their dreams for a better life are limited not by their intellectual abilities but by the size of their wallet. A person who lives paycheck to paycheck, who cannot afford to set any money aside for retirement, that person is poor. They are at the complete mercy of economic tides that they have no ability to protect themselves against. A person who is forced into bankruptcy or forced to sell their house because of unexpected medical bills is also poor. And, of course, people who suffer from even more economic hardship than that: the women who work 40 hours a week for $8.00 an hour but who have to file for food stamps and Medicaid because their wages are not enough to live on. Elderly people with no savings, homeless people, the mentally ill, people who have no ability to support themselves with a trade or an occupation, the list goes on and on. I believe the US Census estimates that about 15% of Americans, or about 45,000,000 people, live in poverty. And, in my mind, I can see that. I see them every time I go to Dollar Store or a Wal-Mart. I can only imagine what I would see if I looked in places that truly terrified me.

Of course, all of the people I’ve described above would probably be considered middle class in a country such as Somalia or Kazakhstan. But that false comparison doesn’t erase the fact that in this country they are on wobbly rungs of the economic ladder and they have no social mobility. They are poor in this country, even if they own relatively cheap, abundant electronic devices, such as answering machines or DVD players.

Here’s the arrogance of anti-government assistance advocates: they actually argue, in public, no less, that if you have a refrigerator and a VCR or any one of dozens of other cheaply made, readily available electronic devices, (such as a coffee maker), you are not poor. If you were poor, you wouldn’t own the $150 window air conditioning unit. In other words, according to some policy makers on the right, if you’re not living in a thatch hut pounding kava root into mush with a mortar and pestle while flies lay eggs on the mucus membranes of your malnourished children, then you’re wealthier than the richest people on the planet were 100 years ago.

Anyone who has studied American history is vaguely familiar with the phrases “A chicken in every pot” or “40 acres and mule,” even if they have no idea what historical events those phrases are associated with. (The first was the campaign slogan of Herbert Hoover in the year before the first (!) Great Depression, and the second stemmed from promises of slave reparations General Sherman made during his March to the Sea at the end of the Civil War.) And, of course, this is the Land of Milk and Honey, where the streets are paved with gold. America’s identity is replete with references to wealth, and dreams, and freedom, and opportunity. So. DOES the United States have an obligation to create, at the very least, a minimum standard of living?

This is where liberals veer one way and conservatives veer straight into the outstretched arms of Vigo the Carpathian.

As best as I can tell, Republicans claim that they want every citizen, (and they DO mean citizen–you illegal “aliens,” as they so compassionately call you, can go fuck yourselves. Preferably across the border.), to achieve the American dream. And they strongly argue that the ONLY way every American is going to achieve their potential is if taxes are ridiculously low and there is no government interference with personal attempts to create business whatsoever. If the government would only stop being an oppressive overlord, making unnecessary demands on its citizenry merely to suppress their freedoms and make itself more powerful, people would get back to work, incomes would rise, and Jesus himself would return to earth to pass out free passes to Disneyland to Jew and Gentile alike.

The problem with that belief is that it is complete bullshit.

Capitalism in the multi-national corporate industrial sense in which we know it today hasn’t been around for very long. It wasn’t very long ago in our history, you may remember, when we had people like Vic Morrow telling people like Levar Burton, “I do say, my good sir, would you mind picking that cotton and placing it in that basket for me? Why, thank you very much.” And so, while the idealized vision of the country held by a typical conservative seems wonderful and simple and rooted in basic truths, it really has no basis in fact.

First and foremost, let me simply state the obvious: Taxation is necessary to run a country effectively. We didn’t rebel against England because they were taxing us. We rebelled against them because we didn’t have a say in how they were taxing us. This current anger we feel about high federal taxes only serves to make the top one percent of our population wealthier. The only real purpose of keeping taxes at historical lows is to ensure that the wealthy hold onto more of their money and the government has even less of it to do their job effectively. (Their job, of course, being to protect the public good and maintain the health and well-being of its citizenry.) I know, that’s pretty obvious, but I had to get that out there.

Second, the economic system that we love in this country, capitalism, creates poverty. It just does. If it didn’t, it would be called socialism or communism. Capitalism is not designed to spread wealth among all people. It is designed to funnel wealth to people at the very top of the pyramid. The people on the bottom who do not possess enough ambition, ingenuity, luck, or connections invariably are left with nothing. They live on the barest of wages, if they are lucky enough to find work at all. And, in this modern industrial world, they cannot even lay claim to small plots of land on which to grow food for survival. In fact, as corporations grow in power and capital is even more concentrated at the top, it is only government regulation, anti-trust laws, laws against unfair trading practices, etc., that prevents them from taking it all. If we didn’t have public-minded government policies put in place to protect us against the greed of corporate interests, our society would more closely resemble feudal Russia, with its handful of aristocrats and millions of serfs than it would the rosy, middle-class, robust, democratic, (as long as you weren’t black or another minority!), society of America in the 1940’s & ’50’s. (Not that the Republicans aren’t working hard to destroy even those few remaining barriers to complete oligarchy, mind you. They are.)

Unfortunately, poverty is going to exist regardless of how much we work to alleviate it. That is an unpleasant, hard truth. The question is, even though we cannot eradicate it entirely as if it were smallpox, does our government have a moral obligation to assist the poor? Should government do as much as it can to offer them pathways to upward mobility? Does government assistance help people improve their circumstances, thereby reducing the number of poverty-stricken people? Is there a point when government should throw up its hands, say “Oh, this isn’t working,” and completely disown the poor? Is the government exaggerating how many poor people there are in this country? Why on earth would it? Should they stop wasting taxpayer dollars on programs designed to help the poor, as studies show that almost all of them own refrigerators, (something not even Louis XIV owned in France, and he was a KING!), so it is obvious that they’re doing fine? Wouldn’t it be better for all taxpayers, in fact, if we just executed the poor if they can’t pay their bills? Do we really have to worry about poor people, when it is so patently obvious that they don’t care about themselves? If they’re not strong enough to survive on their own even when things are incredibly desperate, does the government have the legal authority to kill them? After all, they’re not really helping anyone, right? And their drain of society’s resources is the sole reason why our economy is in decline and why our deficits are so massive.

Sorry about those last few questions. No Republican talking head or policymaker has posed questions about the sensibility of executing poor people en masse…yet. I simply got carried away, carrying Republicans’ heartless views of the lower classes to their logical conclusions. I probably have a little of that Ghostbusters II goo on me. Ever since Ronald Reagan and his “government IS the problem” message has infected the public, we’ve become a greedier, more self-interested society. Not surprisingly, in that time, corporations have become wealthier and more powerful while average Americans have slipped deeper into poverty. And the further we slip into poverty, the harder Republicans come out arguing whether or not poverty even exists and aren’t we in fact making a big deal out of nothing?

They are better educated than most. They certainly have more money, and they have access to more resources. Not only that, but they can continue to pound their message into the American psyche while the rest of us have to work two or three jobs just to keep from sliding one more rung down the ladder. So Vigo & Friends are definitely winning, even though their arguments are outright lies and make no sense.

If Bill Murray doesn’t show up soon, y’all, we’re totally screwed.