Myths That Are Destroying America
Myth #2: It’s Vital That We Stop Politicians From Giving Our Money Away To Lazy Losers
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
All across the country working-class and middle-class people have this illusion that hordes of drug-addict losers, mostly either black or illegal-immigrant Hispanics, are wandering around decaying slums smiling while they pocket those sweet, sweet federal welfare checks.
“They’re coming for your money,” the right-wing politicians tell them. “You have to elect us to protect you from the lazy losers who want to steal your money.”
It’s all a lie, but it works. They get elected.
See my post: How The Republicans Captured The Middle Class
When times are hard, when everything you have seems to be slipping away, when you see that there’s no future for your kids, you become very protective of what little you have left. You get frightened that someone, probably the Democrats, are going to take that away from you and waste it on those people who don’t deserve it.
The more the middle class is squeezed, the more the working class sees their lives getting even harder, the more they become terrified of losing what little they have left to the bogey-men lazy losers to whom they are told the Democrats want to give a free ride.
If you’re a thirty-something couple with two kids who are working your asses off and still living paycheck to paycheck and you’re terrified that what little money you have left is going disappear down the rat hole of free everything for illegal immigrants and unemployable alcoholics and drug addicts and welfare mothers with seven kids and no fathers, the power of this myth is obvious.
It’s a myth that without the right-wing politicians to protect you, decent people’s taxes will all go down the rat hole of a free ride for lazy losers.
The fact is that the big federal expense, about half of all the income taxes collected, is the military and that none, not one penny, of the social security and medicare payments come from income taxes at all.
The politics of fear and anger — Fear of others who aren’t “like us.” Fear of “those people” who are going to take our stuff. Anger at the “bad people” who supposedly want to get free stuff without working for it, have been very successful.
And it’s all a lie.
Food Stamps
15% of the adult population receives food stamps but less than 5% of work force is unemployed. The fact is that most of the people on food stamps have jobs that don’t pay them enough feed themselves.
These are not welfare cheats. They are working people who cannot earn enough to feed their families.
Nobody wants to have to feed their kids with food stamps.
46 million Americans regularly use food banks to feed themselves and their children.
That means that more than 14% of all Americans have to resort to food banks to live.
Do you really think that all those imaginary, ghetto crack heads and alcoholics and welfare cheats are happily tramping down to their local food banks every week because they don’t want to get a job?
Do you think that anybody wants to have to feed their kids with random donated food? Do you really think that this is a choice that people are making because they just don’t want to work?
Those 46 MILLION Americans who are feeding their families from food banks every week are not lazy losers looking for a free ride.
Medicaid
Over 73 million Americans get Medicaid out of a population of about 324 million. That means that the only access at least 22.5% of the entire U.S. population has to medical care is from Medicaid.
22% of the entire population is not a bunch of lazy, welfare losers looking for a free medical care because they don’t want to get a job.
America has about 200 million people between the ages of 21 and 65. About 36 million of them are on Medicaid or about 18% of the adult population under 65 has to get medical care from Medicaid.
18% of the entire working-age adult population are not lazy, welfare losers looking for a free medical care as some kind of a scam.
Less than 5% of the workforce is unemployed. That means that over 70% of the adults receiving Medicaid have jobs that don’t pay them enough to get medical care.
If you think people are getting medical care under Medicaid as some great plan to scam the system then you should have a kidney stone and see how many weeks or months you’re going to have to live in terrible pain before you will be able to get it removed under Medicaid.
Be prepared to wait a long time for any tests, procedures or appointments beyond emergency first aid.
Nobody wants to have to be sick or in pain and have to deal with the delays of the Medicaid system. It’s not a choice. It’s a necessity.
Who Benefits From The Lazy Loser Myth?
Right-wing politicians benefit.
The people who believe this Lazy Loser myth have this vision of all these horrible people trying to steal their money because they don’t want to work.
The people with this delusion keep electing more and more right-wing politicians who tell them that if the government would just get rid of food stamps and Medicaid and the like then all these lazy losers would wake up, say, “Oh, gee, I guess now I’ll have to get a job” and everything would be fine.
But they’re not lazy losers who don’t want to work. They not only want to work, most of the people on food stamps and Medicaid are actually ALREADY working.
The reality behind this Lazy Loser myth is that there are almost no living-wage jobs left for average, ordinary Joe Sixpack, high-school-graduate Americans.
The Republicans’ Plan — Ignore Ordinary People And They Will Just Go Away
The Republicans and the voters to whom they sell this myth think that if they ignore the bottom 20%-40% of the population long enough that they will just disappear, evaporate.
They think that if the social safety net is removed that these inconvenient people will just go somewhere where they won’t be any trouble.
They see the tent cities growing in every urban center and their response is “Tear them down. Run them off.”
To where? The next block? The other side of town? Where are they going to go?
The fact is that if the people who believe this Lazy Loser myth could push a button and make all the people on Medicaid and food stamps instantly disappear from the face of the earth, they would do it.
They just want all these unskilled, ordinary, inconvenient, poor people to disappear.
The conservative Republicans wish that they could just move them all to a desert island or that they would quietly die, but they can’t figure out how to get away with doing that so their fallback position is to just stop feeding, housing and medically treating them in the hope that somehow, magically, they will go away, someplace else, on their own.
In their hearts they’re convinced that the bottom 20% -40% of the population has just chosen to be unskilled and poor and that with enough of an incentive that they will somehow figure out how to earn enough to feed themselves and get medical care on their own.
The Republicans “ignore them and they will somehow go away” policy for the bottom 20% — 40% of the country is like a person who has an open wound and doesn’t want to spend the money to disinfect it, convinced that it will heal on its own.
Then they’re surprised and angry when it gets infected and poisons them the way quicksand poverty and lack of living-wage jobs is poisoning America.
– David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
