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I have a woman who works for me (Well, for GloboCorp. I'm her manager.) 30yo single mom of two. The state provides her and her kids with free healthcare, Section 8 housing assistance, and more besides. Her kids go to school in one town, do sports in another, and she talks about moving their school district based on petty annoyances. Residency requirements are not a problem because she has told me that you can just lie on them. She was hired as a full-timer, but is down to 15ish hours per week due to latenesses and shrinking availability and callouts. She was actively scouted for promotions at one point (DEI considerations were involved), but she has no interest because making more money might impact how much she collects in transfers from the government. She takes two vacations a year, one usually international.
You're not wrong that she is less of a societal problem than some violent thug committing violent crimes.
But there's a similar theme of standards at play for the both of them. A huge part of the problem with crime is that too many people are sympathetic to the criminals. They believe it would be mean to judge someone just for being a feral rapist. And how many people have ever openly judged my employee for using the system like that? None, of course. We more functional citizens maintain a facade of social equality, no matter how many years we spend watching a perfectly healthy person decline to do more than the barest minimum, because doing more would cut into her TikTok time.
I hit my lowest point fifteen years ago. I dropped out of college after my girlfriend "accidentally" got pregnant to take a construction job with my dad. That was during the GFC, so all the construction work fueled by cheap, bad mortgages dried up until he had no work to offer me. I was getting windmill slammed by male post-partum depression and flirting with total personality collapse (What the fuck even am I if I'm not The Smart Guy? Smart Guys go to college. I'm not in college. What the fuck even am I?). And there came a day when the mother of my children brought me to a government office to apply for welfare.
And that moment, seared into my memory, of sitting in a cubicle while a nice man in business casual asked if I knew how to read... That was the single most humiliating moment of my life. If I hadn't had an infant child I would have preferred to just kill myself. It was so bad it broke through the depression and sparked enough agency to go get a job, any job, no matter how shit. Because a complete downward revision of my life expectations was still preferable to that.
What would my life be like if I hadn't suffered the sin of pride? What would my children's lives be like? How easy would it be to just slip into the permanent underclass? It looks like our society makes that pretty damn easy.
Maybe we should add more friction. Maybe we should hold people to a higher standard. Maybe we should spit at criminals and sneer at welfare recipients, and then do the same to their
retardedgentle-hearted defenders.Maybe we're not being "manipulated to hate".
Maybe we're being reminded to have some basic fucking standards.
From an emotional point of view, I understand. It's easier to get angry at Welfare Mom than Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex. It's a lot more personal when you meet the parasites and see how they live their worthless lives.
From an economic point of view, though, it really does seem like Global Lobbying Government Siphoning Industrial Complex would like to distract us with ragebait about welfare moms.
The economic point of view is valid and important, of course.
But the other POV is ruinous to a nation. Allowing people to live off of others' backs without contributing, or while merely pretending to contribute, requires harsh sanction and should not be structurally possible in the first place. Public no-strings-attached welfare is a dead end of social evolution. What does this make of people?
I'm fine with addressing both, but most people only want to address the thing that makes them angry in the moment.
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Somehow the people who say that "X doesnt matter, dont be distracted from our great overlords" are never willing to give in on X to get the overlords. It always only doesnt matter in the way where you should do what I want.
Indeed, people who say X doesn't matter would be making a poor argument.
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Transfer payments are the largest Federal expenditures. Granted, most of this is old people and not single welfare moms, but single welfare moms are a not-at-all-insignificant part, and pointing to some nebulous group is just a distraction.
Is a "distraction" a thing @The_Nybbler does not care about, as opposed to things @The_Nybbler does care about?
I can be angry at single welfare moms while also noticing how much money we sunk into Afghanistan and the billions we're sending to Argentina. Our transfer payments, as you point out, are mostly to old people, and if you want to cut them to the point they are no longer our greatest federal expenditure, you won't just be booting single moms off the rolls.
No, a "distraction" is an attempt to prevent something from being examined by pointing to something else.
Distractions. Social Security was over $1.5 trillion in 2024. Including over $200B not due to the old-age program.
While many people on disability are there fraudulently, it's almost certainly impossible to sort through and get mostly fraud cases pushed out.
Alexander of Macedon had a solution to that sort of thing.
There's lots of possible solutions, they're just all unpalatable. Disability isn't going to get taken away from anyone but the most severe and obvious fraud cases and you know it. Politicians won't suddenly declare that the genuinely disabled aren't getting taken care of, that's not going to happen.
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Without numbers, I'm not convinced there actually are larger problems. All I know is that the overwhelming majority of the federal budget goes to welfare of one sort or another, and not corporate bailouts or foreign adventures. Even if the undeserving only amounted to 10%, that's 10% of a staggeringly large sum.
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Sometimes it seems like the main thing keeping me from doing the "exploit every handout and assistance program the government offers" thing is the capacity to feel shame.
Yeah, somebody in the gooning thread said a huge problem with modern America is that we lack the ability to utilize or feel shame.
I think that's true, but only for certain groups...
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