Teabaggers On Welfare Against Welfare...

By DUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ
The Paz Files

HARLINGEN, Texas - The rallying cry of most of today's angry Republicans is this thing about the poor taking more than their share of entitlements from the federal government, goodies such as unemployment, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security benefits. They like to think that it is the insatiable poor abusing those social programs, not any of them.

They can think it, but it's not true.

Recent studies, one by professor Suzanne Mettler of Cornell University, show that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare believe they "have not used a government program."

Among those are a large group of Tea Party Movement followers who continue to crow long and loud for a reduction in federal entitlement programs (known now as the social safety net), presumably complaining only about what the poor receive. It is a confusion on their part being used skillfully by Republican political candidates quick to isolate government assistance recipients to the myth that is this; that, really, it is only Blacks and Hispanics who abuse the system.

Nevermind that much of the government's aid goes to children and the elderly, some of the latter somehow enticed into the Teabagger movement that only makes them look like unabashed retards. Would they endorse a candidate out to sink their social security monthly check? Of course not. But they show up at rallies and spout inanities that could very well turn around and hurt them.

Medicare is something most Americans enroll in at age 65, if only to help defray the high cost of medicine, drugs and examinations and surgeries. Only, don't tell a Teabagger he or she is part of the entitlement world. They are openly oblivious, quicker to point the finger at the urban centers and at the poorer neighborhoods. But they also file for unemployment and food stamps and every other "entitlement" program that will get them a check at month's end. Hypocrisy? Yes.

In his effort to avail every American a fair shot at healthcare, President Obama has endured an avalanche of lies from this particular group, yet he has not turned away from his desire that even Teabaggers enjoy the fruits of his work. Obama is condemned daily by the GOP's current crop of hardly-presidential presidential aspirants for not taking-on entitlement programs, yet they attack him for cutting Medicare.

Interestingly, the surveys also show that a large number of Americans residing in so-called Red States (Republican strongholds) are enrolled in some sort of federal aid or another, from food stamps to college tuition assistance. The bottom line is that the president has not expanded the safety net for poor Americans as much as it has been expanded by the nature of the country's sluggish economy, in large part the result of the former president's ineptitude, Republican George W. Bush. More unemployed workers equals longer lines at the welfare office.

In his report, Aaron Carroll of Indiana University, notes that, in 2010, residents of the nation's "most conservative" states got 21.2 percent of their income in government transfers. During the same period he studied, Carroll found that residents of the "most liberal" states only got 17.1 percent of the same benefits.

The studies are eye-opening, and one is left with the realization that those government moochers in the Red States are either too dumb to see that they also lap-up to the food stamps office or maybe the myth that White people simply hate to know that others are getting anything is very real...

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