The next time you hear a conservative say welfare enables
freeloaders to bilk taxpayers out of their hard-earned cash, show them this.
The next time you hear a conservative say welfare enables
freeloaders to bilk taxpayers out of their hard-earned cash, show them this.
Here’s 6 Common Welfare
Myths We All Need to Stop Believing
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Debunked.
Myth #1: Welfare encourages people to not work.This Thanksgiving, if one of your right-wing relatives starts mouthing off at the dinner table about the welfare system and how it enables freeloaders to bilk the taxpayers out of their hard-earned cash, show them this article.
Some of the more persistent myths about welfare recipients and the welfare system have been thoroughly debunked thanks to economic research. Busting these offensive and insensitive myths can help us better understand how to simultaneously help impoverished families become economically stable and save taxpayers’ money.
One popular right-wing talking point is that there are all these jobs that aren’t being taken because people would rather take a welfare check than get a job. But an overwhelming majority of welfare recipients work—according to a 2014 study by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 73 percentof welfare recipients are working at least part-time.
When looking at the numbers by industry, half of the nation’s fast food workers and nearly half of America’s home health care providers are receiving public assistance either in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or the Earned Income Tax Credit. 46 percent of childcare workers rely on welfare, as do one-fourth of adjunct college professors.
The real issue is low wages: Since 1979, costs of living have steadily increased, yet wages have stagnated and even declined. The Economic Policy Institute found that the average low-wage worker is actually earning 5 percent less today than they were in 1979.
Myth #2: Welfare recipients can milk the system indefinitely.
Contrary to popular belief among conservatives, the welfare system is actually extremely rigid for recipients. Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which replaced the Aid for Families with Dependent Children program during the Clinton administration, has a federal lifetime limit of five years. If a family were to use TANF for 5 years, during, say, a severe recession or depression, that family could never again receive welfare benefits were they to fall on hard times again.
In one of the richest countries in the history of the world, the social safety net has essentially been completely cut out from under the nation’s most vulnerable populations. In addition to the rigidity of federal welfare programs, welfare recipients also have to deal with conservative bureaucrats heading welfare offices who are all too happy to withhold assistance from the needyfor arbitrary reasons.
Myth #3: Undocumented immigrants abuse the welfare system.
Conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly once said immigration reform would push undocumented immigrants “on the welfare entitlement train” while explaining his opposition to the bill. But O’Reilly and his audience are ignoring the fact that it’s literally impossible for an undocumented immigrant to qualify for any form of public assistance. Even food stamps are only available for immigrants of legal status, and only if they are under 18 years old, are receiving disability insurance, or if they’ve lived in the US for 5 years. Clinton’s TANF bill allows states unprecedented leeway to give out benefits however they see fit, even if that means barring access to all immigrants, legal or not.
Myth #4: The welfare system is full of loopholes that get exploited at the taxpayers’ expense.
Ronald Reagan was famous for busting the air traffic controllers’ union in 1980 and ushering in a 28 percent tax rate for the richest citizens, beginning a decades-long decline of organized labor and the slow rise of income inequality that has reached an all-time high today.
But perhaps the most damaging thing Reagan did was before he was even elected. During his first presidential campaign in 1976, Ronald Reagan used the story of Linda Taylor — a Cadillac-driving Chicago woman who used multiple aliases and addresses to secure a tax-free income of $150,000 a year — to malign millions of American welfare recipients as potential frauds and cheats bleeding the taxpayers dry.
However, the truth about welfare benefits is starkly different than the false reality to which Reagan and his disciples subscribe. As mentioned before, TANF is only available for a lifetime total of 5 years, and other welfare programs like nutritional assistance for women, infants, and children (WIC) and the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP) make it clear that it’s illegal to use the program for personal monetary benefit. Nobody on welfare today can live extravagantly due to the strict criteria required to qualify for those programs.
Myth #5: Welfare recipients are bankrupting taxpayers.
The University of California at Berkeley calculated that federal welfare programs cost taxpayers roughly $152 billion per year — and as mentioned above, 73 percent of that is going to people with at least one part-time job. If workers were paid a living wage—$15 an hour or $31,200 a year assuming a 40-hour workweek—that amount would be significantly less.
In reality, the average monthly benefit paid out to SNAP recipients is a paltry$133 per person. TANF benefits averaged out to just $392 per household in 2010. And again, these benefits are only available for 5 years throughout a person’s lifetime. That isn’t exactly enough to break the budget of the largest economy in the world.
Even $152 billion pales in comparison to the welfare we already give to the fabulously wealthy. As I wrote last month for US Uncut, American taxpayers spend $1.5 trillion each year on welfare for the pharmaceutical industry, the fossil fuel industry, too-big-to-fail banks, performance-based bonuses for corporate CEOs, corporate jets, and other superfluous programs that run on the taxpayer dime. That’s ten times as much as the figure cited by UC Berkeley. If your right-wing relative is looking for a scapegoat, tell them to direct their anger at those programs.
Myth #6: Most welfare recipients are minorities.
During his short-lived 2012 presidential campaign, former Pennsylvania US Senator Rick Santorum famously said he was against welfare for black people(Santorum later tried to backtrack those comments insisting he said “blah people” instead). Watch the actual clip of his remarks here:
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