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 The Way We Discuss Welfare Recipients (1)

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IAmSparticus(1516) pic



The Way We Discuss Welfare Recipients

Welfare (colloquially meaning several different social safety net programs) and its recipients are often a point of serious contention when it comes to political debates, with many people, usually on the right, claiming that many able bodied people are "on the doll" because they don't want to work.

Despite this perception, information from the Office of Management and Budget, U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Labor, and the U.S. Census Bureau show that about 91% of welfare recipients are the elderly, the disabled, and the *working* poor, with most of the remaining 9% goes to unemployment insurance (which you need a substantial work record in order to receive), Social Security survivor benefits (for the families in question) and Social Security benefits for individuals up to 4 years younger than the retirement age.

http://www.cbpp.org/research/contrary-to-entitlement-society-rhetoric-over-nine-tenths-of-entitlement-benefits-go-to?fa=view&id=3677#_ftnref1

So why is there such a disconnect between the nature of actual welfare recipients and how we discuss them as a group?
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The people who mis-characterize the constituency of the welfare recipients don't care about accuracy, they only care about spinning a narrative which makes it easier to justify cuts in the future.

It's the same way with the education system in which politicians constantly rail against incompetent teachers. It's not really that an army of lazy incompetent teachers are getting fat on our public dime, it's just excuses to make it easier to slam the public school budgets again.

The more a group of critics stick to a simplified and unflattering narrative of what's going on the more we need to question them and their motives. If they were really interested in understanding and fixing the problem they would leave some open mind for better understanding what the real problems are. But no, instead they have a simple hit it with a hammer plan, because it never was about fixing it. It was just about their own money, their own power, they already got theirs or they don't need whatever it is, so screw everyone else and just cut cut cut.