Don't respond to Romney by denying you are poor
I don't think the problem with what Mitt said is that he somehow defamed "us" by suggesting we are losers on welfare. People on welfare aren't losers and maybe some of us have been on welfare. Why wouldn't people that have needed help be part of our coalition?
What he is doing is dividing us. We should protest that, and respond by showing solidarity.
= new reply since forum marked as read
well said
Last edited Mon Aug 27, 2012, 07:37 PM - Edit history (1)
it never ceases to amaze me how the Republican Party can unfairly project their biases and prejudices onto others.
It matters not to me that a probable majority (given the poor, rural whites who voted for McCain) of the poor white people on welfare actually voted Republican in 2008. I want to live in a country that helps everyone who needs it.
But to hear this help be twisted into an in accurate diatribe against black people and unfairly paint them as "poor" welfare recipients is an outrageously offensive dog whistle (read: "lazy"
on top of a projection.
Romney is bad mouthing his own base, and they are too selfish and entitled to realize it. It's okay for them to be poor and on welfare, but not for "you people".
Edited to clarify I should have written food stamp recipients, not welfare- food stamps being a part of welfare, but not the entire sum of the programs
The issue is there are less and less job with living wage opportunities for a increasingly larger segment of Americans. While investors continue to rake in an increasing amount of wealth from the national GDP, that is not being realized by the majority of those citizens who need to work for a living.
Who is the employer of last resort when private employers no longer hire or pay living wages? Who holds the social safety net for those who aren't capable of working the fewer jobs that are out there - for whatever reason?
"Charity", which can make it's own rules on whether or not an applicant is "deserving" enough to get help or how the charity is administered, can be dependent on outside sources and influences to the community, and can turn one away for any reason?
Or the government, who is required by law to live by transparent administrative rules, serve each citizen equally and without judgment as to race, gender, age, politics, religion, or physical capability and to at least provide a minimum level of sustainability because each able bodied citizen pays taxes to support it?
Charity might get you a job, but it won't be a job with a living wage in which you can save or invest for a future, because the nature of Charity is that it is a hand-out from the patrons of that charity, and one is supposed to be mindful of the "bonds of gratitude" that the charity is even there.
The government is truly the entity of last resort. The difference is that while charity is based on giving excess wealth to feel good or "pay back" for something, government has a vested interest to invest in it's citizenry and ensure that everyone who is able to work can work and sustain not only themselves but provide for common services that would be unimaginably expensive if not spread over the population at large.
Take that away, and the half of your citizenry that needs a helping hand up (rather than a "hand out" to survive falls through the cracks and ends up on the street. Historically, such an unregulated, predatory underground economy as the street creates a growing corruption in the society at large as the poor and sinking worker classes fight each other to survive, and it looks as if we as a nation are going to have to re-learn that lesson without a frontier to send our "excess" population of now a couple-dozen million citizens to either thrive or die trying.
In the Gilded Age, even those who thought themselves wealthy plutocrats weren't immune to the corruption of the unregulated street economies. They would have continued to eat their own if Pres. T. Roosevelt hadn't started regulating and reining in their pampered, self-entitled asses.
Haele
