[ExI] rugged individualists

[GLivick]

Tax credits for dependents is government aide?  Insurance that the government requires us to purchase from them is aide when it pays out?
Medicare is insurance, Social Security is insurance.  FOOD STAMPS are aide!!  Couched in the words of the leftists, federal student loans, which are actually only guarantees, are bailouts, not aide.

Good grief.

Nevertheless, it's a good thing we have all this stuff.  Government isn't all, or even mostly, bad.

FutureMan



On 7/12/2011 12:43 PM, Damien Broderick wrote:
> Far from the whole story, but worth considering (since we've been 
> discussing political perceptions):
> ==========================
> Half of Americans Who Get Govt Aid Say They Don’t
> KRISTINA CHEW
>
> <Half of Americans who receive government aid in the form of social 
> services believe that they have not 'used a government social 
> program.” These include:
>
> 53.3 percent of those who’ve received federal student loans
> 51.7 percent of those who’ve received child and dependent care tax 
> credits
> 43 percent of those who’ve received unemployment insurance
> 39.8 of those who’ve received Medicare
> 28.7 of those who’ve received Social Security Disability
> 25.4 of those who’ve received food stamps
>
> As Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing comments,
>
> 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.
>
> [...]
>
> On GOOD magazine, Nona Willis Aronowitz - after pointing to reports of 
> Michele Bachmann’s husband getting farm subsidies and also, 
> reportedly, $137,000 in Medicaid money - makes a thoughtful point 
> about what the above figures say about our culture of 'rugged 
> individualism”:
>
> …the point isn’t really whether or not these people are hypocrites or 
> uneducated or ungrateful; more compelling is why they’d see themselves 
> as exceptions. Shame about government help is ingrained into our 
> culture, and so is the narrative of the 'culture of dependence.” It’s 
> not only rightwingers and deficit hawks who feel this way. When my 
> contract position ended temporarily, it didn’t even occur to me to 
> apply for unemployment to fill the gap until my father suggested it to 
> me. When I waved him off, feeling embarrassed, he balked. 'Are you 
> kidding?” he replied. 'That’s what those deductions on your paychecks 
> were for.”
>
> We’re on the verge of forgetting (if we haven’t already) that our 
> government isn’t just taking our tax dollars for 'its own” purposes. 
> 'Its own” purposes are ours - we just prefer not to remember until 
> we’re really in need. >
> ==============================
> To which I add: Medicare is not, of course, "aid"--it's supposed to be 
> an investment people are obliged to make. The fact that the money has 
> been (mis)used for other purposes (wars, subsidies for the very 
> wealthy, etc) does not change this implied contract.
>
> Damien Broderick
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