People who get food stamps, disability benefits, and other government assistance are lazy, unmotivated, and don’t want to work. They’d rather live on handouts, paid for by you and me. Or so the talking point, propagated by the conservative noise machine and endlessly repeated by dittoheads, goes.
The truth is far different. The vast majority of government welfare assistance goes to the working poor, made necessary in no small part because of the Republican aversion to paying workers a living wage:
“According to a new study from researchers at the University of California-Berkeley, the government spends $152.8 billion a year to support working families. In a research brief released Monday, Ken Jacobs, Ian Perry, and Jenifer MacGillvary find that 73% of enrollees in public support programs – such as food stamps – are members of working families, which the study defines as families with at least one member working 27 or more weeks per year and 10 hours or more per week. The researchers blame low wages for this need, writing: ‘Real hourly wages of the median American worker were just 5% higher in 2013 than they were in 1979, while the wages of the bottom decile of earners were 5% lower in 2013 than in 1979. Trends since the early 2000s are even more pronounced. Inflation-adjusted wage growth from 2003 to 2013 was either flat or negative for the entire bottom 70% of the wage distribution.'”
What all of this welfare really amounts to is a huge taxpayer subsidy of cheapskate employers’ labor costs. But don’t expect conservatives to acknowledge this reality, even when confronted with hard facts. The comments under this news story are full of jibes at low-income workers who, the commenters assert, choose to work part-time so they won’t lose their government benefits. Inside their bubble, employers don’t how much work is available or schedule work hours. The only time they talk about this is when they’re blaming Obamacare for full-time jobs being replaced by part-time jobs.
During the recent minimum wage debates, I occasionally saw a conservative commenter argue that the “market” should determine wages, and if workers couldn’t live on them, the government should provide income support, not require employers to pay subsistence wages. But these same people then turn around and fight to kick the stool from under income support programs.
Cheap-labor conservatives would scream bloody murder if they had to sell goods or services for below-cost in their businesses. So where do they get off by demanding that workers sell their labor for less than it costs them to live and provide their labor? And where do those railing against the “welfare state” get off by asking taxpayers to support their employees so they don’t have to pay a subsistence wage? Neither greed nor hypocrisy knows any boundaries. (Click on image at left to enlarge.)