America doesn't have a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" problem, we have an issue with how we perceive human worth.

I've been thinking about this a lot ever since I saw that clip (link to CNN news article removed due to mods) of Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) talking about how low income children should work if they want to eat. It made me reconsider if people like him and I are even operating within the same moral framework. Allowing a child to starve under any circumstance seems like it should be unacceptable to anyone, but it clearly isn't, and that mindset goes far beyond children's lunches.

The hatred of the poor from the right wing is a common topic here on reddit. Just about any discussion about it will see a solid handful of comments wondering if right wingers are stupid, how could they possibly be defending rich people on things like tax cuts for the wealthy, while government assistance programs face gutting/closure- when they're poor like the rest of us. You'll see the line "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" trotted out over and over as a way to explain it. The logic goes something like, "well they think they'll be rich one day, that's why they support the wealthy while actively hating the poor, they're just delusional".

I don't buy it.

They aren't temporarily embarrassed millionaires and they never thought they were. They simply bought into the lie that human worth is based on extrinsic factors, rather than intrinsic. If you talk to lefties you'll notice a lot of our political stances are based on peoples inherent value as humans. Everyone deserves to eat, be educated, have food/water, have a place to live, and the opportunity to pursue happiness. Right wingers do not think that way. They base a humans value on economic output primarily, and conformity to their perception of the ideal human (straight, white, god fearing republican) secondarily. Basically, what you get in life should be proportional to your economic output, modified by your conformity. Don't or can't work? Then you shouldn't get to eat or have healthcare, the logic goes. It makes them extremely vulnerable to propaganda, because if you don't believe in the inherent value of people, you can be persuaded that certain people or classes of people don't have value at all- based on external things like wealth or skin color or political affiliation.

It's a heartless way of viewing the world, and it shows. That's why they want to cut social security for example. They don't see the elderly as people who deserve to have a little financial security after working their whole life, they see the elderly as workers who switched from producing economic output, to consuming it. The same goes for the disabled, for immigrants, for veterans on VA disability, for anyone they perceive (or their propaganda machine has labeled) as a takers and non conformists. These are people to be discarded, because their economic output/conformity isn't high enough to justify their existence.

That isn't how poor people normally think, that's how oligarchs and the wealthy think. The only value we have to them lies in how much economic output they can extract from us, and when we're used up, we're tossed aside. Somehow an entire political party adopted that mindset as their primary directive, and now here we are wondering why we're taking food away from hungry children.