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Nothing you say is wrong on its face. Bill and Shelley are boomers milking the system in all the legal ways they were told they could. Oscar and his wife are a young dumb couple who, as you noted, are far from the worse Caleb has had on his show. They're only making the culture war rounds because they're illegals. They're also young enough that it's hard to declare they are going to be lifetime parasites--at least Oscar is working!
I can't get too worked up about them after watching all those bodycam and parole hearing videos I mentioned. The people who are really a "parasitical" class are not boomers crying that their health insurance is going up or a DREAMER couple who will probably declare bankruptcy. It's the people who will never be gainfully employed, will probably spend most of their lives on the street or in prison, and prey on society in much more literal ways than making your insurance premiums go up.
Insurance sucks and seems to be unfixable, yup. But how dare government workers collect pensions and how dare old people demand expensive medical care? These aren't the worst parasites out there.
Government has always been a cow to be milked, and under the old patronage systems the corruption was far worse. How many bailouts has the government shoveled money into to rescue failing businesses and failing industries? How much money did we spend on Afghanistan over 20+ years to achieve literally fuck-all in the end? We could also talk about Iraq, and Ukraine, and Israel, and Argentina, all can be plausibly defended as providing some value to American interests, but fuck that's a lot of money we're giving to non-Americans.
You may or may not have seen the latest trend in ragebait: all the (mostly black) people screaming on TikTok about how their EBT is about to get cut off if the government shutdown doesn't end. The comments are the usual: noticing how many expensive braids and fake nails and tattoos and the like these people wear, asking why Single Mom of 6 does not have a father in the picture, etc. Lots of nutpicking with juicy videos from welfare defenders openly telling poor people to steal from Walmart, single moms haughtily declaring they "don't want to work," etc. Numbers thrown around like $4000-$6000/month in welfare (which I seriously doubt).
These stories are understandably infuriating. They make for very easy ragebait to amp up working Americans who see a bunch of lazy, shiftless people getting fat on their tax dollars. I won't lie and say I would not enjoy seeing some of these "parasites" get made to work or go hungry as much as any Randian.
But ultimately I think you are being manipulated to hate the easily hateable. If you are really concerned about the government spigot and all the parasites bleeding the beast... well, like I said, there's much bigger bleeding to rage at.
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.
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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