Welfare queen
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“”[It's] a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency
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| —Paul Ryan... who paid for his university education by living off his father's Social Security benefits. |
"Welfare queen" was a term out of many other dumb terms coined by Saint Reagan, this time to refer to people who scam the government through the welfare system to live easy on taxpayer money without trying to work. Reagan gave a very memorable speech in 1976 which described a welfare queen drawing an easy living by scamming veteran's and Social Security benefits from four (fake) dead husbands, as well as using eighty different aliases. The closest case to the one he described was of a single woman who scammed the government out of $8,000,[1] and who, upon further investigation, wasn't emblematic of welfare users in general.[2] Whoops.
Today, "welfare queen" has evolved into a more general version of dog whistle politics against the new evil of "entitlements."
It plays very well into pitting people of different classes and races against each other. Race resentments very much factor into this, since only certain kinds of people (disadvantaged minorities) are portrayed living on welfare.[3] Many opponents of welfare use the welfare queen stereotype as a way to rile up members of the lower middle class and working poor against those on welfare/unemployment/Social Security/Medicaid benefits. This is by making wild claims that welfare queens are living "high on the hog" while the poor folks have to work hard to barely scrape by.[4]
One argument that popped up in the health care debate[5][6] is that people on Medicaid get free medical care on your dime, using purely the example of the documented rates of "plastic surgery" for Medicaid patients, while poor folks pay an arm and a leg to wait forever to see a general practitioner. What was not said is that the term "plastic surgery" in a hospital contains covered procedures for the replacement of skin for burn patients and rebuilding of parts removed for cancer surgery (such as mastectomies). Medicaid (and every other insurance) has never covered any purely cosmetic surgery, and you'll find the same around the world[7] — but apparently it's difficult for Republicans to do research.
Stereotyping welfare recipients is an easy way to get voters to get rid of these programs. It also has the benefit of manipulating the very people who benefit from these programs the most into getting rid of them.
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[edit] Pull out your irony meters, folks!
The vast majority of welfare recipients live in red states.[8]
[edit] Even more irony
Putting Reagan's Hollywood past into perspective, for some reason conservatives have really taken a liking to the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off,[9] despite the movie's entire premise being a teenager who weasels out of an education, breaks the law, and ruins his rich friend's car just because he wants to.[10]
[edit] It's actually the opposite
Observational evidence indicates that increasing state welfare support through increased spending is associated with increased social engagement, and, in particular, increased desire and willingness to work.[11].
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ The Mendacity Index, Washington Monthly
- ↑ The Welfare Queen, Slate
- ↑ Soccer Moms, Welfare Queens, Waitress Moms, and Super Moms: Myths of Motherhood in State Media Coverage of Child Care, Emory University
- ↑ For instance, a Daily Mail front page from April 3, 2013, as reported by Digital Spy
- ↑ The return of the welfare queen, Salon
- ↑ WHY REPEAL OBAMACARE? (Interesting name for a blog, too.)
- ↑ Take Canada, for example.
- ↑ Republican-Heavy Counties Eat Up Most Food-Stamp Growth, Bloomberg
- ↑ No, seriously
- ↑ 5 Horrible Life Lessons Learned from Teen Movies, Cracked
- ↑ The bigger the worse? A comparative study of the welfare state and employment commitment, Kjetil A van der Wel, Work Employment & Society February 2015 vol. 29 no. 1