Ouch "The reason why I’m a conservative is because I’ve been on public assistance my whole life"
https://twitter.com/chrislhayes
= new reply since forum marked as read
He was on food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, etc, and his family didn't starve. Now he's a Cruz guy and he's embarrassed that he was on assistance. I told him he's a hypocrite and full of self-hatred. I told him he's ok that he got assistance but doesn't want anyone else to have it. He also believes Reagan was some kind of god that inherited a "much worse economy than Obama" and his policies saved the world. He actually showed me his tax figures and said he was better off working less because his net income would be the same if he made $71,000 a year or $50,000 a year. Something about a $6,000 government benefit he got that would disappear if he made more. It makes my head hurt to talk to him. Fundie, also. Hates the gays and immigrants. 
40% on assistance don't even realize it, and either think they were "born on third base and hit a triple" and think they can do even better without taxes and regulations (suburbia's full of these types--also the PQ) or they're snowjobbed into thinking that they're being sponged off by the big cities (Duck Dynasty's comments in Louisiana)
and of course they're set up to feel immensely guilty and to hate anyone on the dole, so they compensate psychologically by hating "welfare queens" even harder and more loudly, and pretending that theirs is a special circumstance, or "forgetting" where their money comes from
that's another big shift the campaign's bringing--reveal rather than conceal what Washington's doing for you: take Amtrak (please!): the GOP always screams to the rafters that it's not profitable (while pilfering from even the Fed to pay for freeways) and that it's breaking the bank--but the least-profitable parts are the transcons (because the trains run longer, meaning more overhead) and you can't touch a single stop because states with Red Senators have little enough infrastructure as it is and the voters depend on Amtrak: they want more service each way, they want trains TX-CO, TX-IL, they want the Desert Wind, the Pioneer, the Hiawatha, the Gulf Breeze, the Hawkeye--touch Amtrak and there's gonna be 48 of the rightiest rightists demanding the Acela riders pay for their commuters
this is like Cruz and his "Federal aid for TX only!" attitude (also lets them take credit and efface Washington's involvement, that it's just their state's due, some people paid by a mysterious source cleaning up your area)
if they admit that the government is helping them out, then they're outing themselves as the "taker states" they scream about so much, just as how poor whites are the biggest number of welfare cases
the end of such mushroom politics is ending, where pols flatter and fascitize their voters by reversing reality
And when the state does it, we should be reminded of how ashamed we are that goodwill exists even at that level. 
I sometimes get so depressed for GOPers and their inability to connect the world's dots. That kind of existence is sad in so many different ways.
