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On February 4th, Bill Nye will debate Creation Museum founder Ken Ham at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The question: “Is creation a viable model of origins?” Ham explains why he set up the event:

Because our ministry theme for 2013 and for 2014 is “Standing Our Ground, Rescuing Our Kids,” our staff thought that a debate on creation vs. evolution with a man who has influenced so many children to believe in evolution would be a good idea. Now, those of you who know me realize that I don’t relish public debates, so please pray for me. But this debate will help highlight the fact that so many young people are dismissing the Bible because of evolution, and even many young people who had grown up in the church decided to leave the church because they saw evolution as showing the Bible could not be trusted.

Jerry Coyne thinks Nye should stay away:

My worries are these. First, Nye is likely helping fund the Creation Museum and its mission to teach children Biblically based untruths about the origin and diversity of life. Had I been Nye, I would have suggested some other recipient of the money. Not only that, but why hold such debates in a Temple of Ignorance instead of on neutral ground? Second, Nye, by his very appearance, is giving some credibility to Ham and his views. After all, The Science Guy is known and beloved by many Americans as a popularizer of science. Why debase himself this way? My third worry, then, is this will look great on Ham’s curriculum vitae, but not so good on Nye’s. It is my practice not to debate creationists for reasons #2 and #3. Nye can attack creationism in his own talks and writings, as he has been doing with great effectiveness. Debates are not the way to help people accept evolution.

Tyler Francke is also strongly against Nye’s participation:

[A]ny modern-day public debate over the fundamental tenets of creationism is a sham, a mockery of real discourse. That’s because there is no scientific debate to be had over whether the earth is billions of years old, or whether life shows strong evidence of common descent, or whether a global flood occurred within the memory of modern man. These questions (particularly the first and third) were settled by the experts who are paid to study such matters long before any of the would-be “debaters” were even born.

Joe Hanson agrees the premise of the debate is flawed:

[W]ho is this going to convince?

Are there large numbers of people who are on the fence about whether evolution or creationism is the One True Way? And I mean really, truly “on the fence” in the sense that they could be tipped to one side by the words of either a hero of their elementary school afternoons and Tumblr memes and bow-tie-shipping, or … that other guy?

Chaplain Mike predicts the debate “will only serve to further separate a segment of very vocal Christians into their little cubbyhole of biblicism and obscurantism”:

By holding this “debate,” Ham continues to attempt to reinforce the impression that his opinion is the Christian worldview, that his organization is engaged in serious interaction with scientists, and that the way Christians should “engage and impact the culture” is through trying to defeat them publicly with arguments. And if you can stack the deck, hold the debate on your home field, and raise a lot of money for your cause in the meantime, all the better! Christianity’s reputation for hucksterism is taking a giant step forward with this event.

But James Kirk Wall thinks “the people against the debate are wrong”:

Bill Nye is absolutely right in doing this, and here’s why. If someone had a belief that human babies came from storks, we wouldn’t need a debate. If one third of the adults in this country believed that babies came from storks, as insane as it sounds, yes, we need to have the debate. And that’s where we are. … Bill Nye has an opportunity to valiantly promote science over creationist nonsense. I expect Bill is going to do very well.

Ham’s response to Nye’s video at the top of the page is here.

Just before Christmas, Ross Douthat wrote a column (NYT) wondering how scientific materialism and its account of “a purely physical and purposeless universe” could provide the basis for liberal egalitarianism. Jerry Coyne took the bait:

I’m not sure what Douthat means when he says “cosmology does not harmonize at all” with the moral picture of secularism. Cosmology doesn’t give one iota of evidence for a purpose (it could!) or for God. Most of the universe is cold, bleak, airless, and uninhabitable. In fact, such a cosmology harmonizes far better with a secular moral picture than a religious one. Secularists see a universe without apparent purpose and realize that we must forge our own purposes and ethics, not derive them from a God for which there’s no evidence.

Yes, secularism does propose a physical and purposeless universe, and many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion. But although the universe is purposeless, our lives aren’t. This conflation of a purposeless universe (i.e., one not created by a transcendent being for a specific reason) with purposeless human lives is a trick that the faithful use to make atheism seem dark and nihilistic. But we make our own purposes, and they’re real.

Douthat counters by noting that “if the only real thing is matter in motion, and the only legitimate method of discernment the scientific method, you’ll never get to an absolute ‘thou shalt not murder’  (or “thou shalt risk your life on behalf of your Jewish neighbor”)”:

I don’t think those of us who still embrace the traditional Western idea of God are crazy to suggest that our cosmology has at least a surface compatibility with moral realism that the materialist conception of the universe’s (nonexistent) purposes seems to lack.

So if you’re going to defend both materialism and modern rights-based liberalism, you have to actually address this point head-on. Make a case for a more limited, non-metaphysical form of moral realism, make a more thoroughgoing attempt to discern some sort of moral teleology in the Darwinian story (though of course Coyne has denounced efforts along these lines as “creationism for liberals”), go full relativist and make a purely aesthetic case for cosmopolitanism, I don’t care what — but give me something that doesn’t either beg the question (“we should help people because it helps people!”) or pretend that there are actually solid selfish reasons for the most costly, heroic, and plainly self-sacrificial forms of non-self-interested behavior.

Coyne goes another round:

I’ve often said that I don’t know how much of human morality comes from natural selection’s instilling in us certain behaviors and feelings, and how much is due to reason. But I am virtually certain that none of it is due to God.

I want to live in a world where people are treated fairly and in which, were I  disadvantaged, people would try to help me. For it is only an accident of biology and history that has made me better off than others. I want to live in a world where people promote the well-being of our fellows. That is what I see as “moral” behavior. This kind of morality is justified by its results, but one thing it is not is circular. (Indeed, it is Douthat’s morality that is circular, for it ultimately rests on what he thinks God wants, and unless Douthat can further justify why God wants such behavior, that’s the end of the road.) Like all nonreligious brands of morality, mine comes down to a justified preference: a judgment call.

But it’s better to make a judgment call based on science, observation, and reason than on the dictates of an imaginary being.

Millman steps in and examines Douthat’s original question:

[W]hy be moral? If the universe has no point, and human beings are not here for a reason, why not be a hedonist? Or worse – a sociopath?

I’m always mystified by this question from theists. Douthat complains that Coyne’s argument is circular: “If my question is ‘what’s the justification for your rights-based egalitarianism?’ saying, ‘because it’s egalitarian!’ is not much of an answer.” But his own argument is equally circular: secular liberalism is “unjustified” because it lacks a foundation in belief in God, but a belief in God is “justified” because without it you don’t have a foundation for morality! I don’t know about Douthat, but I suspect that, at least some of the time, what I’m really hearing with this kind of argument is a species of Straussianism. To whit: yes, I know, and you know, that there isn’t really any arguing with a cold and empty cosmos. But most people can’t handle that kind of truth; they need to believe that there’s an objective meaning to their lives. So, for the sake of the greater good, we have to affirm publicly that there is such a thing, that God is the foundation of morality. I’ve always suspected that Strauss would have got on just fine with the Grand Inquisitor; in any event I’ve never liked this line of argument.

More readers join the thread:

I guess you could say I “divorced” my sister. My dad was a sociopath. Rage was his default emotion, and it was terrifying. There wasn’t a week from age 2 through 15 when I wasn’t threatened. He was a drunk. He’d beat me, my mom, and my brother occasionally. Real violence was less frequent, but the threat was constant. I grew up being called lazy, stupid, effeminate, abnormal, and dishonest. He was convinced I was lying and hiding things. One afternoon while reading in bed in my first-floor bedroom, I looked up to see him staring at me through the window.

His personality estranged him from friends and relatives, and caused him to lose jobs frequently. As a result we moved a lot and I went to many schools. He finally set up a business in trucking, operating on the margins of legality. He kept a gun at the office, and pulled it out more than once during disagreements. As I got older, the abuse became more subtle – snide, underhanded sleights, mocking, and so forth. That continued until he died.

As a young man, my father had fought and put people in the hospital. He and his friends used to attack gay men. As you can imagine, he wasn’t thrilled to learn I was gay. He threatened to kill me, and I was kicked out of the house.

My older sister was his biggest supporter. She was always there to tell him things were my fault, run interference, provide alibis and negative gossip, shift blame, and question me as to why I didn’t like dad. Once he was almost ready to quit drinking after another drunken car wreck. I took him to his first AA meeting. She intervened, encouraging him to drink and providing a running commentary on why he had no problem.

After he died, I disowned her.

I have misgivings. She didn’t actively abuse me, my brother, or my mom. But she took sides and facilitated a horribly painful situation. Did I do the right thing? I think so. But I wonder. My reservations are mainly cognitive. From an emotional standpoint my decision feels right. I am happy to be done with her machinations. But there are times when I wonder if I was heartless to cut her off so completely.

Another reader:

For about 13 years, when I was 25 to about 38, my brother went into a serious depression and essentially disappeared from our lives. I spent those years working very hard to maintain any kind of contact with him and to support my parents in their pain. It was exhausting. And then, suddenly, my brother decided he was cured and ready to be back in our lives. I never understood the sudden change and was always leery to let him back in too much. I felt like he would just leave at any second again.

But he didn’t leave this time. I did. From his life, anyway.

Why? Once my brother got married and had a baby, all of his memories of childhood trauma returned to him and he started treating my parents and me terribly. After 13 years of trying so hard to make sure he knew he had a sister who loved him and cared about him no matter what, I just no longer have the energy to keep running after him.

Am I sad about that? Definitely. He’s my only sibling. I have no kids myself. My family was already small and now it’s two people smaller – the brother I no longer have and the nephew I’ll never know and who will never know me. Two years since the “divorce,” I still cry frequently about it.

But I’ll also never forget the incredible relief I felt when I decided I wouldn’t be calling him back after the last phone call of abuse. To know I was no longer going to run after him, reassuring him of my love and our bond as siblings who’d suffered through a tough childhood together was like dropping the weight of a dead body I’d been carrying on my shoulders for decades. That’s really what it was. An illusion of a life and a connection and a bond that was only alive in my imagination.

Another story has a much happier ending:

You’ve probably had too many of these already, but I had to throw in my two cents. One of your readers spoke of our society’s fixation with “blood,” as in blood relations. My father left us on Christmas morning when I was seven years old and never had much to do with us after that. Worse, he believed that he was owed visits from his children because he believed that’s what children were supposed to do (never mind that he couldn’t care less about us). The following years were torturous – living with an abusive, manic and damaged mother and watching each of my siblings drift into their own protective cocoons. In short, home life with my immediate family was a disaster.

Somewhere along the line I was unofficially adopted by the family of my best friend in high school. I spent more time there than I can remember and have long considered them my “real” family. Later, I married my friend’s sister and took on her three-year-old daughter as my own. I don’t think I’ve ever loved another human being more than my girl (she’s 16 now!).

I don’t know why I was destined to become a parent in this way. Perhaps I needed to close the loop and undo the damage my father did all those years ago. In any case, the discussion of blood resonated greatly with me. Blood is nothing. Love is everything.

Amanda Hess chronicles the vitriolic and often violent rhetoric aimed at her and other female journalists by anonymous commenters. She warns that “no matter how hard we attempt to ignore it, this type of gendered harassment—and the sheer volume of it—has severe implications for women’s status on the Internet”:

According to a 2005 report by the Pew Research Center, which has been tracking the online lives of Americans for more than a decade, women and men have been logging on in equal numbers since 2000, but the vilest communications are still disproportionately lobbed at women. We are more likely to report being stalked and harassed on the Internet—of the 3,787 people who reported harassing incidents from 2000 to 2012 to the volunteer organization Working to Halt Online Abuse, 72.5 percent were female. Sometimes, the abuse can get physical: A Pew survey reported that five percent of women who used the Internet said “something happened online” that led them into “physical danger.” And it starts young: Teenage girls are significantly more likely to be cyberbullied than boys. Just appearing as a woman online, it seems, can be enough to inspire abuse. In 2006, researchers from the University of Maryland set up a bunch of fake online accounts and then dispatched them into chat rooms. Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7. …

But for many women, steering clear of the Internet isn’t an option. We use our devices to find supportive communities, make a living, and construct safety nets. For a woman like me, who lives alone, the Internet isn’t a fun diversion—it is a necessary resource for work and interfacing with friends, family, and, sometimes, law enforcement officers in an effort to feel safer from both online and offline violence.

Friedersdorf changed his view of the matter after reading McArdle’s inbox during a guest-blogging stint:

Even as someone who’d previously blogged about immigration in California’s Inland Empire, fielding insults and aggressive invective as vile as any I could imagine, I was shocked by a subset of her blog’s correspondence. To this day, I don’t know if I was experiencing a typical or atypical week. Perhaps in the abstract, there isn’t any threat more extreme than the death threats I’d received and brushed off as unserious. But I read emails and comments addressed at McArdle that expanded my notion of how disturbing online vitriol could be. And it took my actually reading them for my perspective to change.  … Lots of women thrived as bloggers despite this extra obstacle, but I am fairly certain that it caused many others to self-select out of journalism or certain sorts of journalism.

Kilgore calls Hess’s article a “must-read”:

The tendency of men to view this sort of exposure to communications that would be clearly criminal if delivered in person or by mail or phone as obnoxious but tolerable if deployed online is a big part of the problem, particularly given the predominance of men in the law enforcement and digital communities that are the sole recourse for victims. (Ignorance is also a problem, at least for law enforcement: Hess recounts making a 911 call after a battery of extremely disturbing death-tweets by someone who seemed to know how to find her; the officer who responded asked, “What is Twitter?”).

Timothy B. Lee wonders about the legal issues raised in the article:

Hess cites the work of Danielle Citron, a legal scholar who has argued that the hostile reception women receive online should be viewed through the lens of the civil rights movement. In her view, online harassment discriminates against women online in much the same way sexual harassment creates a hostile environment in the workplace. Thinking about the issue in those terms might motivate people to action, but actually extending civil rights law to cover online harassment could be a legal quagmire. The courts are likely to hold that some online harassment is constitutionally protected speech. And Congress had good reasons to exempt intermediaries such as Twitter from liability for the vile comments of their users.

Meanwhile, Nicholas Tufnell notes that two people in the UK pleaded guilty to sending menacing tweets to feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez:

One abusive tweet from [Isabella] Sorley, sent in July after it was announced that Jane Austen would replace Charles Darwin on the £10 note, encouraged Criado-Perez to “go kill [herself]”, before telling her to “Die you worthless piece of crap.” In a comparable deluge of abusive messages, [John] Nimmo threatened Criado-Perez, telling her to “shut up” and warning her “I will find you”. Nimmo also targeted Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow with similar threats. Nimmo was arrested on 30 July after evidence was handed into the police by the BBC’s Newsnight programme. Sorley was arrested on 22 October after police discovered she had created three anonymous Twitter accounts for the purposes of abuse.

A doctoral student writes:

The only reason why there’s a glut of PhD graduates without jobs is that the availability of full-time tenure-track professorships has declined. Why is that? It’s not because of demand. There’s no shortage of students applying and going to college. The problem is on the supply side. Instead of filling tenure-track jobs with new tenure tracks, large universities have switched to using adjuncts.

He says many universities have no good reason to cut tenure-track positions:

At a time in which endowments, enrollment, tuition, and campus-building (including cruise-ship-quality dorms) are on the rise, it’s an absolute canard to say that universities do not have the money to create full-time professorships.  For example, my school just announced that it is halfway to its $4-billion fundraising goal – to be added to its already multi-billion-dollar endowment – and it has opened or restored a new building almost every year that I have been here. Yet they say there is no money to expand the full-time faculty and are in the process of cutting enrollments under the justification of raising student stipends.

I am a sixth-year student on the verge of graduating. We were told the first year that the demographics of higher education – the fact that a large number of tenured professors were at or near retirement age – meant that we would have jobs available once we graduated. I have no doubt that these faculties are indeed retiring, but they aren’t being replaced.

The view from the other side:

I am a recently tenured professor of history at a liberal arts college; my previous experience includes a tenure-track position at a second-tier state research university. I agree with McArdle that part of the problem is the proliferation of doctoral programs at institutions that arguably should not have them. My previous employer provides a good example.

Even the very best doctoral students from that program have had to settle, by and large, for the types of exploitative positions that McArdle and others rightly decry, even though in my opinion they would have made very fine faculty members at just about any institution that might have hired them. One young woman had substantial teaching experience, had presented at several major conferences, published articles in two first-rate journals, and already had a contract from Oxford University Press to turn her dissertation into a book. It took her almost a decade to land a tenure-track position.

That points to deeper systemic issues. Having served on a number of faculty search committees, academia is no less prone to the lure of the brand name than the rest of society. More than once I have sat in a room when a colleague argued – vehemently – for an Ivy League candidate who clearly didn’t fit the job description at the expense of other candidates who did, even ones from other top-25 programs.

The tenured prof continues by identifying another problem:

Administrators at R-1 universities tend to allocate resources, and peers tend to rank programs (back to brand-naming, again) based on the number of PhDs a department churns out, often with little regard to the actual employment outcomes for the students themselves. A lack of administrative imagination and a lack of any sense of real responsibility to the students a university has produced is a cultural problem for which I am at a loss to answer.

Any responsible faculty member should worry more about making sure those who would embark on the journey (or enter the tournament, to use McArdle’s description) do so with their eyes wide open. It is the one thing we can do in the face of a variety of factors utterly beyond our control as faculty members.

A tenure-track professor sounds off:

While I recognize that there is a major jobs crisis in academia, I don’t think that McArdle grasps the consequences and severity of what she’s proposing. Reducing the number of grad students means reducing the number of graduate seminars. Academic disciplines are dependent upon grad seminars, because grad seminars allow research-oriented professors to put their research in the classroom in ways not possible when teaching undergraduates.

The way I see it, reducing the number of grad students would have to encompass an across-the-board de-emphasis on academic research. Yet most universities are going the opposite direction: research and publications are prioritized even above committee service and teaching. As for the needs of grad students on the job market? That is the lowest priority of all.

A self-described “physics graduate-school refugee” reminds everyone that the picture looks very different for budding scientists:

In the STEM disciplines, graduate students and postdocs can easily drop out of academia and quickly be financially secure in technology industries. McArdle’s assumption that graduate school is only preparation for academia or other long-odds tournaments does not apply in these disciplines.

Lastly, a reader emphasizes the personal benefits of doctoral study:

People do not get PhDs only to be professors. For many of them, even if they hope to enter academia, the enormous personal value they gain from the education makes the experience worthwhile. As for their careers: these people are not going to be unemployable, even if their professorships do not pan out. They have skills that are easily transferrable in other directions. As a long-time professor – now aged 63 and still a visiting prof on year-to-year contracts who must say yes to whatever my college asks me to do and is certain to be the first one out if the college finances go downhill  – getting a PhD was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Kevin D. Williamson visits Owsley County, Kentucky, which he describes as “not the land of moonshine and hill lore, but that of families of four clutching $40 worth of lotto scratchers and crushing the springs on their beaten-down Camry while getting dinner from a Phillips 66 station.” Among his many depressing findings:

[I]t turns out that the local economy runs on black-market soda the way Baghdad ran on contraband crude during the days of sanctions. It works like this:

Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1:1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription-drug economy is about $12.99 at Walmart prices.

Dreher shakes his head:

What do you do with people like that? Many of us — conservatives and liberals both — are outraged at the idea that there is nothing that can realistically be done to ease their estate, to deliver them from this kind of grinding suffering. But what if, for some people, it’s true? What if the reality of the situation defeats idealism? What do you do then? Can you do anything that matters? I’m not asking rhetorically; I mean it.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzJ6RfcDato%5D

Asawin Suebsaeng and Chris Mooney compile a list of movies that have been shown to influence people’s political views. Among their discoveries:

The Cider House Rules turned you pro-choice.

In the Academy Award-winning 1999 film (directed by Lasse Hallström and starring Tobey Maguire and Charlize Theron), Michael Caine portrays Wilbur Larch, an ether-addicted abortionist. The movie is set in Maine during World War II, when the state was under a hugely restrictive abortion ban. The compassionate doctor performs the procedure for young women in dire straits. When screenwriter and author John Irving won the Oscar for penning the film’s script, he thanked “everyone at Planned Parenthood” and NARAL at the end of his acceptance speech.

So it’s not too surprising that a 2011 study by Kenneth Mulligan and Philip Habel at Southern Illinois University found that the “fictional framing” of the abortion issue in The Cider House Rules made audiences more supportive of safe and legal abortion. “[P]articipants who were randomly assigned to watch [The Cider House Rules] were more favorable toward legalized abortion in the case of incest than those in the control group,” the authors wrote.

A reader puts the hiring of Sasheer Zamata – the fifth-ever black female cast member – into perspective:

Complaints about the lack of talent may be legitimate, since only about 10-15% of comedians are female. Assume that rate holds constant among the 12.6% of Americans who are black and you end up with about 1.5% of comedians being black women. With 137 cast members in SNL’s history, the 15 black performers and 4 black women is more or less what you’d expect if they simply cast the funniest applicant available. You could try to change the ratios to improve diversity somewhat, but at the end of the day you can only find so much elite talent from just 1.5% of any population.

Tanner Colby looks back at the history of black comedians on SNL. He separates them into three categories: “a) The disgruntleds, the washouts, and the walk-offs. b) The ones who stuck around. c) Eddie Murphy”:

The disgruntleds and the washouts are the largest group.

Black performers who joined the show, never found their niche, and typically left in very short order or on not-great terms. Most of these players—Yvonne Hudson, Danitra Vance, Dean Edwards, Jerry Minor, Finesse Mitchell—barely even lasted long enough to make an impression before fading from cultural memory. White cultural memory, at any rate. Two of these performers, Damon Wayans and Chris Rock, went on to great fame elsewhere after chafing at the racial confines of the show’s characters and subject matter. Wayans was famously fired after ad-libbing in sketches against the express wishes of an enraged Lorne Michaels, and Rock left after two seasons as a main cast member, having never hit the stride he would find later as a stand-up.

Ellen Cleghorne [seen in the above video], the only black actress to last more than one season before Maya Rudolph, may have had the rockiest tenure of all. Hailing from the black housing projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn, Cleghorne endured the show at the height not just of its whiteness but of its frattiness, going up against the sophomoric boys club of David Spade, Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, et al. After four seasons on the show, Cleghorne notched just one entry in the entire index of Live From New York, a reference from Molly Shannon simply noting the fact that Cleghorne was, in fact, part of cast.

Carolyn Edgar hopes that SNL’s 0ther new black women have a real impact:

The addition of [LaKendra] Tookes and [Leslie] Jones to the “SNL” writing staff is a positive sign that, despite the clumsy way “SNL” has handled criticism of its hiring practices, the show is looking to do more than just silence its critics. The importance of diversity in the writing room cannot be overstated. As wonderful as Kerry Washington’s recent guest host turn was, the Miss Universe sketch  – in which Washington played Miss Uganda, relying on broad African stereotypes and a terrible Ugandan accent – might not have left the writers’ room had writers of color been there. One of the most damning critiques of “SNL” is that it is stale and unfunny. If Tookes and Jones are permitted to have full voice in the writing room to offer a diversity of perspectives on comic situations – and are not dismissed as mere “diversity hires,” the show as a whole will be better off for it.

Beinart appreciates that the GOP is at least starting to focus on the problem of poverty but he’s still far from impressed:

[T]aken together, the new Republican anti-poverty speeches have a depressingly theological quality. They usually begin with a catechism: Washington can’t effectively fight poverty. “After 50 years, isn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure?” Rubio declared in a warm-up video for his speech. “What Detroit needs to thrive,” added Paul, “is not Washington’s domineering hand but freedom from big government’s mastery.”

Rarely is serious evidence offered for these assertions, because they are not statements of fact; they are declarations of faith. In truth, there’s ample evidence that some Washington programs significantly reduce poverty. A 2011 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, for instance, found that Social Security “reduces deep poverty” among the elderly and disabled “almost to zero.” In 2011, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (food stamps) together lifted almost 10 million Americans above the poverty line. That doesn’t mean Washington doesn’t waste money. But by denouncing federal-government programs per se, folks like Paul declare an entire category of anti-poverty tools illegitimate. It’s like beginning a speech on national defense by affirming your doctrinal opposition to tanks.

Sharon Parrott criticizes Rubio’s block-grant proposal:

[N]o block-grant proposal has ever been designed for these programs that provides a full, prompt, counter-cyclical response; a block grant simply cannot do that.  As a consequence, under the Rubio proposal, hardship would inevitably rise in many areas during recessions — likely by substantial amounts. The Rubio proposal also would wipe away important protections in current law that ensure, for example, that all poor children have access to nutrition assistance and health coverage.  States could shift federal funds from less popular groups to groups with more political clout, such as from very poor families to families with moderate incomes. In addition, block-granting key safety net programs could very well lead to funding cuts over time.  Politically, it’s much easier for policymakers to shrink a block grant that supports a vast array of purposes spread across 50 states — and claim that states can compensate by improving efficiency or rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse” — than to cut specific types of assistance for specific groups of people such as low-income children, seniors, or people with disabilities. The history of recent decades bears this out.  Funding for most major block grants focused on low-income households has eroded in inflation-adjusted terms, often by large amounts.

Jared Bernstein argues that Rubio’s plan would undermine the whole point of the safety net:

“Revenue neutrality” may sound technical and inoffensive, if not fiscally sound, but what it really means is the safety net will be unable to expand in recessions.  Let’s see the details, but typically under these arrangements, states will be unable to tap the Feds for unemployment benefits, nutritional assistance, and all the other functions that must expand to meet need when the market fails.  This would be a huge step backwards, essentially enshrining poverty-inducing austerity in place of literally decades of policy advancements to meet demand contractions with temporary spending expansions.

Pareene thinks the GOP’s poverty agenda is a scam:

Poverty is … a subject about which it’s incredibly easy to bamboozle most of the mainstream political press. You can get swell coverage merely for saying you care about the poor, as Paul Ryan recently has. Because political reporters are unable and unwilling to analyze policy, and curiously reluctant to speak to anyone who can, you can also claim any program at all will lessen poverty or help the unemployed. And for Ryan, “caring about the poor” is a good way to reestablish Seriousness: He becomes one of the Few Serious Republicans with plans to help the poor. Poverty is a better subject for this act than most other liberal issues — like, say, the environment — because Republicans are at least allowed to acknowledge that it is bad that some people are poor.

Finally, Patrick J. Egan explains why formulating a Republican poverty agenda is so difficult:

[T]herein lies the problem for Republican leaders seeking to claim ownership of the poverty issue: their voters aren’t particularly concerned about poverty.  Every January since 1997, the Pew Research Center has asked Americans to rate a series of issues as national priorities for the upcoming year.  …  Year in and year out, Democratic voters don’t just prioritize fighting poverty more than Republicans; it’s generally the issue on which Democratic enthusiasm is most likely to be higher — by 20 to 30 percentage points — than Republican enthusiasm.

This commitment gap between the two parties’ rank-and-file members will be difficult to close.  To begin to do so, GOP leaders like Ryan, Rubio and Paul will need messages that appeal to one of their toughest audiences when it comes to caring about poverty: Republican voters.

Earlier Dish on the GOP’s anti-poverty push here and here.