Nebraska’s State Auditor Mike Foley recently commented during a speech to the notoriously conservative group Americans for Prosperity that “if you are a low-income person, you’re probably not managing your money very well anyway.  Sorry to stereotype, that that’s true.”  Foley was soon criticized for blaming the poor for being poor and soon issued an apology.

In it Foley acknowledged that many poor people are ‘hardworking, play by the rules and pay their taxes.’  Foley added that people of all income levels can manage their money poorly and that many low-income Nebraskans “do an exemplary job” of ‘raising their families and contributing to society.’

Foley went on to observe that “Our dignity as human persons is never to be measured by the size of our incomes or quantity of our assets, and many of us are only a serious medical incident or employment-downsizing away from severe financial stress that justifies public assistance.”

I commend Foley for stepping away from stereotyping the poor to acknowledging the complexities that force people to seek public assistance.  If only more Republicans could understand that given the increasingly uneven economic playing field, the problem of poverty is more a reflection on the character failings of the rich than of the poor.  Since the days of Ronald Reagan the rich have been getting richer while everyone else has lost economic ground.  And this is no accident – it is the direct result of Republican economic policies designed to shift wealth away from America’s workers and the Middle Class.

At the moment Republicans are focused on cutting Food Stamps.  Yet survey data just released by the Associated Press indicates that a full 80% of adults “struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives,” meaning 4 out of 5 Americans have or will need nutritional assistance. This astounding percentage is blamed on several factors, including “the widening gap between rich and poor.”  “It’s time that America comes to understand that many of the nation’s biggest disparities, from education and life expectancy to poverty, are increasingly due to economic class position,” said William Julius Wilson, a Harvard professor who specializes in race and poverty.

It’s clear that Americans today are struggling.  People blame President Obama for a lot of this but need to remember how much effort Republicans in Congress have put into blocking every effort the White House has made to turn the economy around.  Republicans seem quite happy to keep millions of Americans unemployed, impoverished and without medical care in order to stymie the efforts of America’s first black president to reverse the economic tailspin our country has been in since the Bush years.

Though traditionally known as the party of the wealthy, the GOP had done a masterful job of attracting low-income whites to their ranks by focusing on issues like abortion, guns and gay marriage.  As a result many of these whites vote against their own economic interest by voting Republican.  But more and more it’s catching up with them.

While statistically minorities have higher rates of poverty, in terms of actual numbers, the majority of poor people today are white.  Professor Wilson believes “There is the real possibility that white alienation will increase if steps are not taken to highlight and address inequality on a broad front.”  If impoverished white people ever do start turning away from helping enrich already wealthy Republicans, the party may implode.  And judging by what’s going on in Washington, that may be the only way this country can start moving forward again.