New Data Show Many Americans Have No Idea They Receive Government Benefits

[XanaDUer]

Idiocracy By the Numbers: New Data Show Many Americans Have No Idea They Receive Government Benefits

How aggressively stupid is America when it comes to our debates over taxes, budgets and the size of government? That's been difficult to answer with any precision, beyond simply citing the Tea Partier who famously told his congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare." But now we have some hard numbers to tell us how deep this ignorance really goes.

According to new data crunched by Cornell University's Suzanne Mettler, large numbers of Americans who receive benefits from government social programs nonetheless tell pollsters they "have not used a government social program." And when I mean large, I mean large. For example, a majority of those who have received federally subsidized student loans, 44 percent of Social Security beneficiaries and 40 percent of G.I. bill recipients say they have not used a government social program.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/david-sirota/34311/idiocracy-by-the-numbers-new-data-show-many-americans-have-no-idea-they-receive-government-benefits

[pulledpork]

1. They have been conditioned to believe these equations

All Government Benefits = Welfare

Welfare = Lazy People

Lazy People = Not Me!

Propaganda works best keeping it simple, and repeating often so that it sinks in as "true".

[Poboy]

2. Welcome...and correct.

[pulledpork]

5. Thank you n/t

[JVS]

3. Students are not the ones who benefit from federally subsidized loans, banks do.

[Mist]

4. Yes, good point. nt

[MisterP]

6. some may use this to argue that we just need to change the "messaging" or "framing" and the scales

will fall from their eyes and everyone will vote Dem--no; for that, we'd need Dems who actually believed in positive government involvement, instead of neoliberalism and slashing Social Security
also, you can't prop up the insurance mandate by educating Americans on how government helps them, since that's the opposite of government aid