Regarding the map, if I understand the OP’s point, we’re seeing a strong correlation between the high government benefit concentration and “red states,” correct? But my perception of one of the conservative objections to government benefits is that there is a glut of people “living off the government’s tit” rather than “making it on their own.”
Wouldn’t it stand to reason that if you’re seeing more of a dynamic you think is unhealthy, it would sharpen your aversion to that dynamic? Or to put it another way, doesn’t it make sense that there is a loose correlation?
I think the OP is trying to say that the same people complaining about people sucking off the public teat are, themselves, the suckers. If you know what I mean. However, there is a key missing step in getting to that conclusion, as I noted in my first post in this thread. It could be correct, but the data presented doesn’t prove it.
Twenty minutes of searching for studies regarding the political affiliation of welfare recipients turned up nothing. The plurality of minority beneficiaries of programs everyone thinks of as welfare (TANF, food stamps, and the like) suggests that a plurality are Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters.
However, if you take unemployment, Social Security, and all similar transfer payments (as opposed to deductions, which I think is stretching the definition) into account, I suspect the numbers are roughly equal or even reversed.
John, would you agree that many of the people sucking off the public teat are the ones bitching about it? Frankly, it doesn’t matter if it’s most of them.
But it’s not just the people who directly receive those benefits in their names that, well, benefit. The money has a multiplier effect: someone spends food stamps at the grocery store, and the owner and the employees of the store all benefit. They then have more money to use down the street at the coffee shop, where the owner and employees of that business all benefit as well…etc.
The economic effect if the federal government followed the wishes of the Tea Party types would be to pull a lot of money out of (mostly) red states, which would flow back to (mostly) blue states that wouldn’t donate as much in taxation (here I’m referring to the kind of map **Dangerosa **posted). The states that see a net loss to the federal government when you subtract the federal taxes they pay from the federal benefits they receive are mostly Democratic-leaning states. I think that’s worth at least the raise of an eyebrow.
Similarly, the states that are protesting the loudest against ObamaCare are the ones who need it the most due to their high percentage of uninsured and their overall dismal health statistics. And the same is true for education and infrastructure and on and on. If the blue states were anywhere near as selfish as right wing rich people are, they’d cut off the spigot and tell the red states to go rot.
But it would be the right thing to do, and if I owned a baseball team I would direct my manager to do so. Same as I would direct my manager to decline to show up for regular season interleague games. And if I owned an AL team I would direct my manager to put the pitchers in the batting lineup.
Who am I kidding? If I owned an American League team, I’d sell it as fast as I could.
The point is that there are a sizable number of folks who vote for conservative candidates who, if the candidates had their way, would end up reducing or eliminating a number of social programs that are critically important to the livelihood of those same voters. However, the voters don’t seem to understand the irony of the fact that they are, in a sense, voting against their own self-interest. That’s a nicer way of phrasing that Howard Dean gaffe from several years ago, something about guys who own trucks with Confederate flags have the most to benefit from a national healthcare system. Dean’s statement was true, only it was put in the most insensitive, inflammatory terms possible.
I am not blaming the voters for being dumb, or anything like that. It’s just a disconnect between political views (and I freely note that one’s vote is determined by many other factors than just how much in benefits one candidate will give to that person) and the actual facts of just where some people think their safety net comes from.
There have been Democratic politicians in the past who have managed to turn this irony on its head and use it to political advantage. Take Senator Byrd: he represented a pretty conservative state and built a political empire because of all the earmarks and government spending that he could get for West Virginia. Even today, I’d bet that there are a lot of very conservative voters in West Virginia that are very glad that Byrd was successful in building the Byrd Highway, the Byrd Overpass, the Byrd Expressway, the Byrd Tunnel, the Byrd Thoroughfare, etc. The romantic and idealistic notion of small government crumbled in the minds of voters once they realized how much more difficult their lives would be without things like good roads to promote economic development, guarantees for pensions and Social Security for the working class, rural health care programs for children and the elderly, and so on.
Is it your contention the people should always vote for what is in their own economic self-interest above everything else? Isn’t that what most progressives on this MB deplore?
I don’t know about you, but I often vote against my own economic self-interest.
I used to run into this back when I was working. I worked in a prison, so I was a government employee. Prison guards tend to be a pretty conservative group (in some case, extremely conservative) so when there was talk about the government, the usual consensus was like this:
Somebody: “We pay too much taxes. I have a solution. We should just cut all government spending by twenty percent. Right across the board.”
Me: “You’d be willing to take a cut in pay like that?”
Somebody: “Huh?”
Me: “You said we should cut all government spending by twenty percent. We’re employees of the government. Our salaries are a government expense. So you’re saying you’d be willing to take a twenty percent cut in pay?”
Somebody: “Hell, no, that’s different. I earned that money. In fact, I should get a raise. I’m just saying we should cut government spending.”
I think the point is that people should make the connection between their own self-interest and the existence of the programs. It’s reasonable for somebody to say “I like receiving money from the government so I think we should have programs that hand out money to people.” And it’s reasonable for people to say “I’m opposed to programs that hand out money to people so I don’t think the government should have any programs like that.”
But what is unreasonable is for somebody to say “I’m opposed to the government giving out money in general but I want the government to give money to me specifically.”
It is traditional Republican judo: tell the middle class that all their problems would go away if only the gummint quit giving away all their money to the poor and lazy. It works, has worked, and they will do it again.
Trouble this time is that the problem is so pervasive, almost everybody knows somebody, or is somebody, who is in deep kim chee through no fault of their own. Its a bit harder to get comfortable people to be hatin’ on the poor when the poor is their brother in law, their cousin, their parents. They will try it, of course, because they don’t have a lot of imagination.
That’s not the angle I was coming from-- more a question about what seem to be a glaring contradiction. But I’ll tell you what… when you eschew any and all references to hypocrisy in debates, the rest of will, too. In fact, this entire thread is premised on conservative hypocrisy. Not you’re thread, but if you’re concerned about the overuse of hypocrisy on this MB, there are more bountiful harvest than you’ll find in my posts.
Wouldn’t dream of it, old top! You are equipped with the +10 Mace Shield of Non-Partisan! How could you be hypocritical about principles you don’t have?
Are you trying to be difficult? To use different terms to describe what the OP is talking about, he’s discussing a “wedge issue.”
To use seventh grade language here, sometimes political observers find that people who often vote for one type of candidates may actually turn their vote against that candidate because of one issue on which they do not agree.
The OP is saying that if conservative candidates are successful in dismantling social safety net programs, they might piss off a number of their constituents who actually depend on those programs without understanding that they are programs that are under attack. The unspoken (but totally obvious) corollary to that is that Democrats could turn this into a “wedge issue,” or a means to separate certain conservative Americans from their typical voting patterns. Is that really such a difficult line of reasoning to parse?
“Wedge issue.” If you use the term three times, then it is yours.
Whenever I’m being hypocritical, you’re welcomed to call me on it. Non-partisan is your characterization, not mine. It’s like the Methodists and the Catholics snickering at the atheists for not taking sides. We libertarians are largely outside the bounds of these discussions. The conservatives want to tell you what you can and cannot do in the bedroom and the liberals want to tell you what you can and cannot do in when you’re shopping. We happy to let you roll however you roll in the bedroom, and buy whatever you want in the market.
I feel like there is some self awareness of this phenomenon in Ohio, where John Kasich was swept into office in 2010 with promises of cutting the state budget. The recent hullaboo about Issue 2 revealed lots of conservatives who felt that police, fire, and schools were things that they actually wanted to have around. To some degree I feel like Kasich is still in the doghouse, even though he only did exactly what he was voted in to do.
Whenever the whole stupid “mandatory drug tests for welfare recipients” thing comes up I advocate that we should also test people who claim a mortgage deduction. Sadly, I’ve never seen it change anyone’s mind.