Leeches!

My wingnut Right correspondent sent me an article starting with this factoid:

63.7 million Americans received either welfare benefits, Social Security, or support for higher education

 

I think the point is a riff on the "47%" meme, that too many Americans are sucking off the government teet.  But there are a few problems with this line of reasoning:

Social Security benefits come from the SS Trust Fund, which is funded by.... wait for it.... Social Security taxes, not regular federal income taxes. As the original author of this factoid must know, many more than 53% of Americans pay SS taxes.

So including Social Security benefits in that riff makes no sense.  Next, we're talking about support for higher education.  So now conservatives are suggesting that the government should not be helping low income students go to college? Let's break that down a little:

I know the far Right sees poor people in menial jobs as leeches sucking off the teet of the rest of us. I don't agree that the person who cleans toilets should be apologizing to her boss for not paying enough taxes, but let's leave that aside for the moment. Now let's say this toilet cleaning lady has a son, who wants to get an education so he can contribute more taxes to society and make a life for himself. As we know, people without a college education have very little chance of climbing out of poverty. As we also know, college tuitions are MUCH higher than they were in the old days, completely unaffordable for all but the wealthy.

Now let's say the cleaning lady's son is a nice kid and a hard-working person, but not a genius. He's not smart enough to get a scholarship to a prestigious place, and of course his mother couldn't send him to Costa Rica for cool service projects to pad his resume, so he can only get into a low level state school or a private school with no scholarship aid.

Here's my question for anyone trying to defend this line of reasoning: what is this kid supposed to do if he can't get a government loan or grant to help him go to college? There are tens of millions of kids like that, and they can't all get private charity and they're not all geniuses who can get scholarships to Yale.  Is there some other suggestion for kids like that? If his mother contributes $5 in taxes, would that make anyone feel better?

My conservative correspondent hates it when I call him and his kind heartless bastards, but here they are telling me that people getting government help for education are screwing the rest of us. The apparent solution is for this kid to flip burgers his whole life, or work hard until he's assistant manager of McDonald's, which is as far as he'll get without college. And then they'll still spit on him because he won't be paying much in taxes, but they won't give him another way out.

Everyone can't be rich, after all.  It seems like the new right wing won't be satisfied until we've recreated pre-revolutionary France with a permanent underclass and a permanent ruling and wealthy class.  I don't particularly like the way that society ended.