Fuel on the fire

Last updated on: February 23, 2006 at 9:22 am by Fred Clark

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Fuel on the fire 2006-02-23T09:22:47-05:00 Fred Clark

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I'm repeating myself here, but what's the point of having a blog if you don't allow yourself to harp on your personal hobbyhorses …

In the previous post, I mentioned the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, a government subsidy program that enables poor families to buy heating fuel. This is a good program and a necessary one — heat is a necessity, not an option. But then so again is food. And many low-income American families cannot afford both without some help. LIHEAP keeps them from having to choose.

Many families who qualify for LIHEAP assistance don't get it. This is partly because, as with many antipoverty programs, we're not trying to get all these families to apply. It's cheaper when not everybody who qualifies for assistance knows that they do. And it's partly because the program has never been fully funded such that every qualifying family could receive LIHEAP.

This makes no sense to me. This is not a partisan issue. There's no reason everybody in Washington shouldn't be for fully funding LIHEAP. And not just because it's the Right Thing To Do.

Liberals should support LIHEAP because it helps poor people, and we're all about that.

Keynesians should like this idea, since LIHEAP is an incredibly efficient mechanism for pumping out cash to stimulate the economy. Every dollar in the program is 100-percent guaranteed to be spent, within weeks, circulating back into the economy. That's far more efficient than the supply siders' tax-cut "stimulus" plans, which ought to even win some of them over to the idea. If we relabeled LIHEAP funds as "refundable tax credits" we could probably win over the rest.

Deficit hawks and fiscally responsible lawmakers … well, there aren't actually any of those left. But even if there were, none could argue that LIHEAP constitutes wasteful spending.

But here's my main point: Corporate capitalists of the Bush/Cheney/Joe Barton school should support LIHEAP because all that money it funnels to poor families is really funneled through those families on its way to its actual destination: Energy companies. These guys could toss a little gratitude back to their corporate donors by throwing another $100 million into LIHEAP, a tasty lagniappe for the folks at ExxonMobil that nobody is going to condemn you for. The fact that this money would also keep poor American families from shivering through the winter probably rankles Cheney, but it's an unavoidable side-effect of an otherwise very efficient piece of corporate welfare. And it helps Mike Gerson pretend that his boss really is a "compassionate conservative."

What other constituencies are there? The religious right? Just tell them that Jesus commanded them to care for the least of these people without heating fuel might be tempted to resort to gay sex to stay warm.

I'm betting that even fervent, "all-taxation-is-theft" Internet libertarians are willing to take a walk on this one. Sure, they'll go through the motions, but their heart won't be in it. "You want to coercively redistribute wealth, with the implied threat of military force and imprisonment, in order to … aw, hell, it's not like I like the idea of poor families freezing to death …"

This ought to be a no-brainer.

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NOTE: The comments thread to the previous post is primarily occupied with Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela who sometimes behaves in ways that cause some to question his full commitment to democratic principles. Chavez is often characterized as anti-American, which isn't accurate. He seems to like America, he just doesn't like the Bush administration — which might have a little something to do with that administration's premature celebration of the undemocratic coup that briefly removed Chavez from office. (A coup that the Bush administration and the CIA absolutely, certainly, may have had nothing to do with.) What strikes me as odd is that none of the complaints about Chavez and Citgo are also being made about Vladimir Putin and Lukoil. It seems to me that to the extent that any of these arguments about Chavez/Citgo are legitimate, they are a fortiori true for Putin/Lukoil. But then while Putin may actually be antidemocratic and even anti-American, he likes George W. Bush.

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