Next on the chopping block

[Bgno64]

http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/264917">Smart Remarks:

There's a great rhetorical War on the Poor being waged in this country, with armies of struggling middle-class conservatives who think that our nation's economy is faltering specifically because we've been too generous to the indigent. I received yet another e-mail to this effect last week:

"Austerity for some people, like those on welfare, would be to have to give up their taxpayer provided cell phones and iPods, damn, that would be tough, eh?"

Apparently, to qualify for public assistance you should rely on a land line. Or perhaps you should have no phone at all; perhaps you should be dirt poor, struggling to pull your family out of the ditch before society deigns to toss a few shekels your way.

For this attitude — along with so much else — I think we need to "thank" Ronald Reagan. It was Reagan who famously invoked the "welfare queen" during his 1976 primary run, tapping into a great well of middle-class resentment for the poor. Reagan articulated the impression that welfare recipients are lazy, unmotivated cheats.

You know what? Maybe some are. But a lot of people want to believe that this is the norm. The conservative media fans this flame incessantly; it's the welfare state, we're told, that has undermined our great free-market utopia. Fox fans eat this up, and most of their enthusiasm, I'm convinced, is rooted in fear. These middle-class citizens seem to think that by throwing the poor overboard, they can keep the ship of state upright. And if they keep it upright, then they can hang onto what they've got.

Guess what? That's not going to happen.

[JuniperLea]

1. Anyone have info on the percentage of our tax dollars that go to welfare recipients?

It used to be pathetically puny, back in the day of W.

They want to take all those pennies and use them to kill brown people... and keep brown people from coming to our uber white nation... you know, the one we stole from the "red" man?

I was in a play a long time ago... my favorite line (paraphrased):

War is the white man sending the black man to kill the yellow man to defend the land that he stole from the red man. Tell me, who do you love?