This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
A Facebook friend writes:
"You'd think the kind of guy who resents having to give free stuff to 'poorer Americans' would be strongly in favor of said Americans investing in a single, portable item that delivers access to education and information, to the contemporary world's equivalent of the 'want ads,' and a stable point of contact via email, text and voice to someone who may have no other stability in life; heck, making them reachable by employers!
"Apparently Mr. Chaffetz simultaneously fails to understand health care, poverty and networked technology. Quite the trifecta!"
Everybody was all over poor Jason Chaffetz last week. The congressman from Utah uttered a spectacularly ill-advised crack about how people who lose their health insurance when his fellow Republicans finally kill Obamacare should just suck it up and not buy the latest iPhone.
Facebook and Twitter were, as is their nature, immediate and relentless. The idea that anyone could afford a year's worth of health insurance, or even a week's worth of chemo, for the price of a 6S was so laughable that the tweetstorm quickly became a tsunami.
Stephen Colbert pounced with great glee. Conan O'Brien's shop turned a quick video (something I need to learn how to do) about how people can meet all their health-care needs with Apple products — suturing up your own wound with a set of ear buds, asking Siri if that tumor is malignant.
But Chaffetz's gaffe provided a useful opportunity to once again examine, for the purpose of once again trying to finally discredit, the idea that society and its servant the government need not care for people with little money and few prospects because their sad situation is their own fault.
It goes back to at least Ronald Reagan who, despite his often sunny disposition, seemed truly offended by the idea that some "welfare queen" in Detroit might actually be able to tool about in a clunker Cadillac, or that "young bucks" on the dole were eating T-bone steaks.
How dare they?
As my friend the international tech expert points out above, a device like a smartphone can be a marvelous tool for getting oneself out of poverty, not a weight for getting trapped in it.
It can link people without a big computer, without a landline, without a permanent mailing address, to education and jobs. It is a point of contact where potential employers can find you, even if you are living in your car.
Chaffetz's dismissal of a poor person's need for a smartphone is just a higher-tech version of the deep offense taken by folks such as Bill O'Reilly of Fox News when it is established that most poor folks actually have refrigerators, stoves, even — oh, the humanity — microwaves.
Fox friends are so wrapped up in their dudgeon that they don't remember that such things are not only the floor of a decent 21st century life, but also make it possible for people to eat at home. Which is conducive to saving money, building family life and, at least in theory, eating well instead of filling up on junk.
This long-standing resentment of the poor by the not-so-poor was the wind beneath the wings of the new president's campaign. Only now are some people figuring out that, in trying to deny the benefits of, say, Obamacare to "those people" — i.e. the poor, i.e. black people and immigrants — they are about to lose their own coverage.
This animosity toward the poor, stoked by the rich and self-defeatingly adopted by just enough of the industrial white middle class to turn the last election, was one of the less commendable aspects of American exceptionalism. Meaning that it wasn't shared by Conservatives, Christian Democrats, etc., in Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Europe.
The fact that America is becoming less exceptional about this — that is, European democracies are starting to feel it, too — is most obviously, and sadly, explained by the fact that it is harder to resent the poor when they all look like you, easier when they are a different shade, different religion, different language.
Something liberals and conservatives should, and often do, agree on is that it would be good if people who are poor now became less so over time. Or, at least, that the children of the poor climb above their parents.
Utah lawmakers properly bemoan "intergenerational poverty," but prove that they don't really care when they torpedo the Medicaid expansion that the Affordable Care Act would have provided.
Lacking health care is one of those handicaps that leave poor families struggling so much to keep it together from day to day that improving anyone's lot is just more than most humans can handle. Some scientists compare being weighed down by poverty to losing 13 IQ points. Which is not the same as being poor because you have a low IQ.
Here, so-called conservatives like Chaffetz and House Speaker Paul Ryan seem deliberately ignorant of what health insurance — private, public or a mix — does. It frees people. And, for some reason, they don't want that to happen.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, uses his beloved iPhone 4S to catch up on Star Wars gossip and read the comments on his columns.