Number of the Week: Half of U.S. Lives in Household Getting Benefits. The post is a push for austerity and changes to Social Security and Medicare (which everyone knows full well means privatizing them) and fearmongering over letting the Bush tax cuts expire.
All in all, this segment was pretty misleading because they're using a statistic which says half of the population lives in a household where at least one person receives some sort of government benefit. Then they try to twist that into half of all Americans receiving some sort of government benefit. Well, that's not the same thing. Without a much more detailed breakdown of those numbers, what benefits, what percentage of Americans as a whole are receiving any particular benefit, the numbers they're citing here are pretty meaningless and don't tell us a whole lot.
The recession has meant a whole lot more people receiving unemployment benefits, food stamps and people who might not otherwise have done so applying for disability and more people qualifying for Medicaid benefits. And with an aging population, we've got more people going on Social Security and Medicare.
What's never discussed is the fact that conservatives would just rather have our citizens die than for us to take care of each other. They've blocked and filibustered and obstructed any attempt to get more Americans back to work, praising those who are shipping jobs overseas. They're union busters who want to see a race to the bottom on wages and benefits, but they're the first ones to start screaming about dependence on the government, as if those things all have nothing to do with each other.
Maybe if they'd quit pushing for a race to the bottom for all of America (other than the 1 percent they're protecting at every turn), we'd have a few less people relying on the government. Maybe if we raised the minimum wage and quit letting Walmart use the taxpayers to subsidize their workers' salaries who aren't making a living wage, we'd have a lot fewer of the working poor applying for Medicaid benefits.
You won't ever hear that discussion from Megyn Kelly -- or anyone else on Fox, or most of our corporate media.
