How many farmers get subsidies?
How many politicians get allowances up and beyond what they personally spend?
How many tax breaks are available for the ‘ruling class’ that are not available for a regular worker?
I’m with you. Accusations of “conservatives use the welfare system” remind me a bit of accusations like “I love how you’re tweeting about socialism from your iPhone”.
(Other variants are, of course, open to such accusations. Like when conservatives claim that liberals are just welfare sponges.)
Wait, so giving someone govt funds should, in effect, buy their loyalty to the programs? This sounds familiar.
It’s not hypocritical to accept money from programs you want to see abolished.
If I, a Dirty Hippie, think “Rich Guy Tax Cut” shouldn’t have been passed, but it was passed anyway, I’m taking every penny of that cut that applies to me. If some Conservative Jerk thinks that SNAP shouldn’t be funded, but it is anyway, it’s fine for him to take every penny he is entitled to through the program.
Now, if that SNAP using CJ decides to speak out against the program by saying the people taking SNAP monies are dirty, lazy scumbags suckling at the teat of actual productive members of society, such as himself, THEN he’s a hypocrite.
Start here. A lot of of working class whites get SNAP benefits, use ACA and other such things.
My job has me regularly interacting with claimants for Social Security disability benefits. My impression is that a good percentage of such claimants vote Republican. I felt that way even more strongly when I worked in a more conservative portion of a red state. Yet they give the impression that they believe THEY are deserving, but it is all the other guys who are not.
And make no mistake - there is A GREAT DEAL of generational entitlement in the reddest of regions. Plenty of extended households all living off of whatever benefit check someone receives, while braying their love of guns and hatred of immigrants.
You keep using the word “impression”. Do you have facts to back up these “impressions”?
FYI, this article talks about that, focusing on Harlan County, Kentucky, which is safely Republican and voted for Trump. And yet, “54 percent of the income of the county’s roughly 26,000 residents came from programs like Social Security and Medicaid, food stamps — formally known as SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — and the earned-income tax credit.”
Didn’t Ayn Rand criticize Social Security but still draw it anyway?
Anyway, as Bone says, someone can criticize something and still benefit it anyway. An anarchist might say there should be no TSA, yet still benefit from the safety of flying aboard airplanes that are gun-free/knife-free/bomb-free.
Keep using it? Where? In this thread?
But yeah, there is plenty of statistical evidence establishing that folk identifying as Republican make up a huge percentage of entitlement recipients.
And yeah - my political radar is certainly not infallible. But I’d be surprised if most of us were not able to make guesses with SOME degree of accuracy based on a person’s attire, education, economic status, their attire, and how they present/express themselves during a 30-60 minute conversation. And yeah - during those conversations and in their records, folk express what they watch on TV, what they think of as recent events or famous people, who they associate with…
Phrased another way, inner city persons of color and well educated professionals are by no means the majority of disability claimants.
Maybe you disagree, but I’m very comfortable with the assumption that if you take a sample out of rural Iowa, and a sample from inner city Detroit, the political leanings of the members will differ in some predictable ways. Of course, that assures no accuracy WRT any individual.
There are also a lot of people who advocate for the ending of all governmental aid programs except for the ones that they, personally, happen to benefit from. Now, it’s possible that a person drawing, say, unemployment checks sincerely believes that unemployment checks are a reasonable, proper, and efficient use of tax dollars, but that all of the other programs are unreasonable, improper, and inefficient, and that he would continue to feel this same way even if he, personally, weren’t on unemployment, but it seems a lot more likely that there’s a causative relationship there.
There was the amusing case of Craig T. Nelson who was upset about paying taxes. Nobody helped him when he was on foodstamps and welfare, so why should he help anyone else.
Since this is Great Debates, do you have a cite for that?
Oops, my bad that link showed up on my phone this morning.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/gop-base-poverty-snap-social-security/516861/
You’re thinking of conservatives as a monolithic block. You might be interested in checking out “The Three Kinds of Conservatism” published by Karen Stenner based on her research. She asserts that some, she calls them status quo, conservatives are mostly motivated by relative stability over time. They don’t like change. There’s a group she call authoritarians. They prefer oneness and sameness. Then there’s the lassez-faire economics conservatives. That’s mostly the group that doesn’t like lots of government intervention like benefits.
Conservatism is more a coalition than a group with broad agreement about goals.
This is the one I came in to post, some of them are just too stupid to realize that they are getting assistance.
Exactly. I call this the “Designated Hitter Logical Fallacy”.
It’s possible, yes. But it requires putting forth a claim. The null hypothesis is that, if you advocate against something, you don’t do it yourself. That is why we as a society label anything else to be “hypocrisy.”
To survive a claim of hypocrisy, you have to make a special argument for why you need to use it now, but you wouldn’t need to use it if nobody else needed to use it.
I see no such argument with welfare*. If you will be able to go without that welfare once it is eliminated, then you should be able to go without it now. If you find you need it now, then you’ll be in trouble once it is eliminated.
As such, if you use welfare, it makes no sense to advocate against its use for everyone. And that is why we encounter exactly what Chronos describes above: people only supporting the benefits they use.
I find such to be selfish, but it at least it makes sense to support what you use. Such is rational–though their reasons for why those programs need to exist but not the others may not be.
*shorthand for whatever public benefits are under discussion.
I seem to remember this idea going back to a single case, when someone asked Warren Buffet why he doesn’t voluntarily pay more tax. There you have an argument. He can argue that, to remain competitive as a business, he can’t pay more than other people. He can argue that the increased taxes must apply to everyone, or to no one, with no in between.
But that’s a special argument. It is not the default. It was entirely a valid question asking him why he doesn’t voluntarily pay more taxes, given that he advocates for higher taxes.
As I stated above, I can see no such argument when it comes to accepting welfare. Can any of you think of one?
So people who complied with the requirement to purchase health insurance under the PPACA despite thinking the law was flawed and should not have been implemented are hypocrites for filing an insurance claim or going for their annual physical? They paid for it because they had to. They should get the benefit of it, IMHO. Same basic logic applies to government provided benefits.