It is always amusing to listen to the teajadis and their bleats about socialism or redistributing wealth — especially since you know that most of them are some of the biggest beneficiaries of government handouts on the planet. Now we can see exactly how much redistribution Americans take advantage of and we don’t even *know* that these are government programs:
This is from a paper “Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era,” by Cornell’s Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions Suzanne Mettler, who used this chart to document the fact that Americans who tell you they are not taking advantage of any social programs really, really are. Americans keep being told that the Government Is Bad For You, yet no one wants to remind people that there are plenty of Americans who would not have the lives they lead without the kind of government supports shown in that chart. It also makes you wonder what the so-called political divide might look like if someone used these programs that so many people take advantage of and made a full-throated *defense* of government supports for middle and working class families.
H/t for this from BoingBoing, who note:
It’s the “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” phenomena writ large: a society of people who subsist on mutual aid and redistributive policies who’ve been conned (and conned themselves) into thinking that they are rugged individualists and that everyone else is a parasite.
Indeed.