Why Aren’t Americans Receiving Food Stamps Ashamed?
May 31, 2012 6 Comments
There used to be a time in America when it was shameful to be on welfare or other forms of government assistance. (think food stamps, WIC, etc) These days we have tens of millions on food stamps but of course if you point out the massive increase since Obama took office you’re a racist. The problem in part is that it’s far to easy to get on food stamps. The bigger problem though is that there isn’t any shame in being dependent on a government welfare program. People flaunt being on welfare, even the government encourages people to take advantage of all the tax money available to the “poor.”
That’s right, the government is encouraging people to get on welfare. There have been a number of ads encouraging people to take advantage of food stamps. This includes an obnoxious ad aimed at seniors which glorifies food stamps as something not only acceptable but something that will make one fit and healthy. In short, the government is telling seniors and anyone else listening that it’s perfectly normal, even noble to be on public welfare. There are several other similar ads, aimed at different groups of people. Food stamps aren’t the only Federal welfare program with radio ads. There’s a free cell phone (with 250 free nationwide minutes per month) ad that’s been running locally the last few weeks.
Food stamps cost taxpayers a fortune. We’ve seen about 20 million added to the food stamp rolls since 2007. The problem with all of this is that we know the poor aren’t living poor. In other words, they’re still consuming consumer luxuries like cable television, cell phones (when government doesn’t provide them) and other non-essentials while receiving handouts like food stamps. The state tells us we’re subsidizing their food but in reality we’re subsidizing their creature comforts and other middle class goods. Make no mistake, most of the people on food stamps would buy food before they bought luxury items. So if we took away their food stamps, they wouldn’t starve. They would simply be without the Real Housewives, a text messaging cell phone and a handful of other consumer goods.
What’s most galling though is that Americans seem to have lost the shame that should be associated with being on the public dole. People almost proudly declare that they’re on public assistance. That the government runs ads glorifying welfare, taking away the stigma from it should disturb us all. It’s becoming almost normal to be on the dole, something that isn’t shameful in the least. That should concern everyone.
If you’re on the dole, you shouldn’t be talking about it like it’s something wonderful you’ve done. The government shouldn’t be promoting welfare. We need to return to a time when it was shameful to be on public assistance, when it was something people did silently and in secret. It was also something reserved for people in truly dire situations, whether the charity was being handed out by government or the church. These days we have middle class people, even with jobs and a home, qualifying for welfare. It’s far to easy to get on the dole and once dependent on the state it’s very difficult to get off. After all, the state isn’t subsidizing these people’s food, they’re subsidizing their consumer lifestyle. Shame is a good thing and if you’re on welfare you should feel it. The feeling of shame should be strong enough that you’ll do anything to get off.
About Steven
There have been a couple of times when my family had to receive food assistance from the Cherokee Nation. It was something that had to be done at the time, but I can still remember the shame I felt at having to do it. As soon as we were able, we stopped going to get their food. It is much better for a family to be able to provide for themselves.
I know of some families who seem to think the smartest thing for them to do is have baby after baby. That allows them more leeway on the assistance they can receive from the government. The attitude and way of thinking this generation has about this is completely opposite than it used to be, or the way it should be.
I would prefer that government get out of the business of charity. Food assistance is really something the church should be providing. Either way, those who find themsleves truly without should strive to get off of assistance as soon as possible. You’re absolutely right, this is the way it used to be. There was shame in being dependant on someone else to provide basic necessity. These days, the government doesn’t want anyone to feel shame, they want them to rejoice in dependancy.
The definition of “loot” is: “spoils or plunder taken by pillaging, as in war.” Could it be that Americans and those who have come to America (legally or illegally) have almost come to see the USA as a conquered nation being plundered
Perhaps some illegals view things that way. The bigger problem is that government has made people feel entitled to the fruits of others labor. Work is viewed negatively, while leisure and entitlement is viewed positively. Go back a few generations or go back to the founding the country and there was no entitlement. Leisure was the fruit only of hard work and was limited. As we’ve moved further and further away from our Christian roots, we’ve seen entitlement take hold. That’s why people today think nothing of being on public assistance, whether it’s WIC, food stamps or other forms of welfare. They’re basically stealing from others via forced taxation.
We aren’t talking about the truly poor here, Americans simply don’t fit the definition. There are a billion people living on less than a dollar a day, another two billion live on less than two dollars a day. Those are the poor scripture talks about. Not these rich Americans who are “poor” only in comparisson to middle and upper class Americans.
David Ropeik
So You Think You Can Think? Think Again!
A paper in this week’s Nature Climate Change reinforces a really important insight about the limits of our ability to reason and think rationally. It’s another blow to the crumbling ramparts of the belief that the Enlightenment, as Kant put it, was “Mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error.” Sorry, Emmanuel but we have a long way to go.
In “The Polarizing Impact of Science Literacy and Numeracy on Perceived Climate Change Risks,” Dan Kahan and colleagues demonstrate how greater science literacy leads those who deny climate change to deny it even more. And the more educated the deniers of were, the more polarizing the facts — neutral, spin-free facts — became! What’s revealing here is not that the deniers didn’t become believers. It’s not even about climate change. It’s how information that overwhelming shows one thing reinforces and strengthens denial of that evidence in those predisposed to see things that way. “Ignorance and error” are not resolved with more facts and knowledge.
Kahan’s paper reinforces several current bodies of research that try to understand human cognition more holistically. First, it supports Kahan’s own work on cultural cognition theory, which finds that though we employ facts as weapons in our battles over issues and ideas, the real war is about tribal identity and cohesion. We interpret the facts — no matter how many of them we have at our disposal — so that our views agree with the groups with which we most closely identify. And we fiercely defend the views of our group because our own identity, and even our personal safety, rely, to a great degree, on being in good standing with the tribe of which we are a member.
Kahan’s paper also reinforces the case made by Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier to explain why our ability to reason developed in the first place. Sorry again, Enlightenment fans, but it wasn’t to figure things out and get them “right.” Sperber and Mercier posit that reasoning was a tool by which social animals could win arguments and persuade others to see the facts in some particular way, what Sperber and Mercier call argumentative reasoning. No, this was not so we’d all be great lawyers. Sperber and Mercier argue it was adaptive, good for our survival.
As the tribe tried to figure out some new plant or animal or way of hunting and various interpretations and ideas were offered, the most effective reasoning produced the most persuasive interpretation, which produced general agreement on the “truth.” Argumentative reasoning helped bounce various interpretations off each other until one became the consensus view, and persuading everybody to get on board with that view was socially cohesive and protective, regardless of whether the consensus view matched all the evidence.
This would explain what Kahan found, that if you provide a climate denier with more facts in the Enlightenment expectation that the evidence will change their minds, it’s more likely that they’ll apply their powers of reasoning to reinforce and defend their tribal consensus and identity. Cultural cognition and argumentative reasoning also help explain why the stronger people feel about an issue and the more their identity is connected with those views, the more the facts only reinforce how they feel, even if those facts conflict with their views. In Kahan’s study, after being provided with neutral information, the denial of climate change grew most among those who denied it the most in the first place.
This is frustrating news for Enlightenment rationalists, but perhaps there is hope in what psychologists have learned about human cognition, that there are two major components of the overall system, System One and Two. While System One subconsciously applies all sorts of instinctive mental shortcuts and emotional cues to quickly come up with how we feel, System Two uses slower, conscious, purposeful reasoning to methodically figure things out. Yes, we can think, and reason, but only so much. Paraphrasing Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, the brain is only the organ with which we think we think.
Kahan’s paper reinforces the dangerous naïveté of placing too much faith in System Two. The problem is that the two systems aren’t separate. They interact, and as they do, System One usually has the upper hand, or, as pioneering psychologist Daniel Kahneman recently put it, “[M]ost of the time System Two acts as a spokesperson for System One. System One makes suggestions and System Two explains them, or rationalizes them.” The reasoning system often only serves to argue the case. Something much deeper is figuring out how we feel about the case to begin with.
This is not good news in our post-industrial/technological/information age, as we face complex issues like climate change or nuclear power or genetically modified food, issues fraught with important details and long-term tradeoffs that demand more careful evidence-based analysis and conscious reasoning. We seem condemned to the perils of what Andy Revkin has called an “inconvenient mind,” which evolved to handle less complicated threats and challenges. But maybe in all this seemingly depressing evidence lies the answer, an answer that would please the pioneers of the Enlightenment ideals themselves.
The Enlightenment project believed that we could apply the new institution of science to answer difficult questions and make more intelligent choices, as individuals and as society. This new work on cognition is just a part of the science that can help us move toward those choices. We can use our System Two powers of reason to apply that knowledge to the challenge of thinking about things more carefully. We just have let go of the hubris of thinking that the sort of rational thinking the Enlightenment pioneers had in mind is the kind of thinking we actually do.
i have one word to say. Greece.