THE REAL WELFARE CHISELERS
Sheahan, Al
THE REAL WELFARE CHISELERS ALSHEAHEN Able-bodied but lazy loafers who drive Cadillacs? Which is worse? A, welfare chiseler, or a rich man who uses legal loopholes to pay little or no taxes? In a...
...If you run the Los Angeles Times, you headline: "WELFARE COSTS SKYROCKET," citing the an-nual welfare cost rise to $16.3 billion...
...By comparison, farm subsidies cost the U.S...
...This need to see justice done causes us unbearable stress if the victim is be-yond help, or if the person inflicting the suffering is too powerful to resist...
...But God help the victim if we can't-we're likely to decide that he richly deserves everything that is happening to him...
...to find a sacrificial lamb...
...Government surveys also show that less than one percent of welfare recipients are able-bodied, unemployed males...
...The average German citizen could then go about his daily life secure in the belief that his government, his world, was just...
...Yet we are indifferent or even pleased when the villain finally gets his just desserts...
...And that bothers us...
...We have convinced ourselves that the typical welfare recipient is dishonest, lazy, untrust-worthy...
...Years ago the American people really didn't know the extent of poverty in this country...
...Teamster official Nicholas Kisburg says "one reason why blue-collar guys hate welfare so much is that they feel, psychologically, that it threatens them...
...They wanted to believe that they lived in a world governed by law and order...
...Dr...
...A Texas University survey found that 84 percent of people believe "too many people who should be work-ing are on welfare...
...They know there is a thousand times more chiseling and sheer waste in gov-ernment and business than in the entire welfare pro-gram...
...It's orchestrated at the highest levels of government...
...To some degree, the same process is at work in America today...
...that the good are rewarded and the bad are punished...
...Welfare is the "good life" only to those who have never experienced trying to live on 18-cent lunches...
...We all have a need to believe that our world is just...
...We can tell ourselves that they deserve what they're getting...
...So it's not difficult to see how the public is regu-larly deluded into believing that welfare costs and wel-fare chiselers are the cause of rising taxes, and that the poor of America are richly getting what they de-serve...
...Given the temptation, given that a few dollars more or less welfare money may be a matter of survival, the pre-vailing honesty of welfare recipients-their fidelity to the rules of die very system which keeps them poor- is, to say the least, remarkable...
...to direct the anger of the many against a few, so as to divert people's attention from the real problems...
...The truth is that the av-erage monthly payment to a welfare recipient is only $65.52...
...The 1971 Grammy-award winning country and west-ern song, "When You're Hot, You're Hot" has the lyric: "I gotta go down and pick up my welfare check...
...the workingman against the downtrodden...
...Bruno Bettelheim noticed this process in the way many Germans living under the Nazis first re-acted to the concentration camps...
...How is this done...
...One of the oldest, yet most effective, political tricks is to blame a country's problems on one segment of the population...
...Yet the "welfare chiseler" has become a kind of "folk-villain" in America today...
...You bury the story on the inside pages...
...Most Americans believe the poor are themselves responsible for their plight and society is not to blame...
...To maintain their sense of justice, if not their sanity, Germans convinced themselves that those who were sent to the concentration camps must have really de-served their fate...
...But," says Lerner, "we feel miserable and under stress when the hero-the good person-suffers...
...Richard Nixon once requested the song "Welfare Cadillac" at a formal White House event: "We get peanut butter and cheese and, man, ' They give us flour by the sack...
...It's not difficult...
...A government investigation of fraud determined that O.4 percent-4 out of every 1,000--of all welfare cases were fraudulent...
...Later you are found to be "running roughshod over the rights of welfare recipients" and your charges totally un-founded by the Federal District Court in Las Vegas...
...But the truth never quite catches up with the head-fine...
...It's not only psychological...
...Oil import quotas cost Americans $7.2 billion a year, or $114 per family...
...To a lesser degree, the U.S...
...Working, bringing home the check each week, is one way of establishing their supremacy, to themselves and their families...
...Melvin Lerner, in Psychology Today, writes: "If we can help a victim, we are inclined to do so...
...Politicians who angle for headlines and votes by blaming "welfare chiselers" for rising taxes are lying and they know they are lying...
...Behind the Myth The facts, of course, are different...
...If you're then-President Richard Nixon, you go on national television and you tell the American people: "The thing that is demeaning is for a man to refuse Work and then ask someone else who works to pay taxes to keep him on welfare...
...4.2 billion a year, or $66 per family...
...Then when the government announces its latest survey showing that welfare fraud is less than 1 percent, you ignore the story completely...
...How do you manipulate people to believe that welfare fraud is rampant when, in fact, it is 0.4 percent...
...Course them welfare checks, they meet The payments on this new Cadillac...
...28 percent voted for the welfare chiseler...
...We are thus able to live with the fact that millions of our fellow Americans are living and, in-deed, dying in squalor...
...Work is the one thing they have...
...The truth is that since the total annual welfare costs-federal, state and local combined*-are $16.3 bil-lion, and the fraud rate is 0.4 percent, we can calcu-late that welfare fraud costs the U.S...
...But a few days later you virtually ignore the U.S...
...In a recent Lou Harris poll, 58 percent felt the rich man was worse...
...Another reason is guilt...
...Welfare fraud is a tiny fraction of the massive, calculated chiseling which goes on daily in this coun-try...
...So it's become the old story of turning one group-the taxpayers-against another group-the poor...
...They were criminals of some kind and the government was merely protecting all -good Ger-mans from this criminal element...
...Defense spending will cost each family $1,230 this year...
...You don't even print it...
...If the people seized by the Nazi police and put into camps were truly innocent, as they appeared to be, then their govern-ment was extremely unjust...
...While the traditional American folk-hero has been the self-made, rags-ttv riches man, as deeply ingrained into the American sys-tem is the belief in a folk-villain, the self-made poor man, lazy, immoral and irresponsible...
...65 million an-nually, or $1.03 per family per year, or two cents a week...
...The work ethic is one reason why...
...Most people are not in-different to the suffering of others...
...This conclusion was too frightening for most Germans to accept, in spite of what they saw directly...
...Senate's voting of $21 billion for military procurements...
...They have no money . . . no prestige...
...Most beneficiaries are children, the aged, the disabled and mothers...
...The idea of welfare recipients driving around in Cadillacs is a peculiar myth, but obviously a popular one...
...Now we know, but we don't seem to be able to do anything about it...
...Applause) If you're the State Welfare Director of Nevada, you make the front page by charging that: "50% OF WEL-FARE RECIPIENTS CAUGHT CHEATING...
...Another government survey showed that only 0.7 percent of welfare recipients were even suspected of cheating, and that only 0.06 percent-6 out of every 10,000-were ever prosecuted by law enforcement agencies...
...But a lot of people are unaware of, or don't want to believe, the figures...
...no political clout...
...government has done it with the poor...
...Twenty-four million Americans still live in the depths of poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world...
...For those who do, welfare payments can be de-scribed as guaranteed annual poverty...
...So I can make the payment on my Cadillac...
...When they see a guy getting a check for doing nothing, they go crazy...
...In a series of experiments, Lerner found that most people get emotionally upset whenever they see in-nocent suffering, and any sense of responsibility for the suffering increases our pain...
...For us to worry about some poor guy on welfare, who can't make it through life, chiseling us out of a few nickels and dimes, seems ludicrous...
...They're the most vulnerable...
...The vote was surprising, since millions of sincere Americans still seem to believe that the welfare sys-tem is loaded with able-bodied but lazy loafers who get rich and drive Cadillacs while the rest of us work and pay taxes to support them...
...We care deeply about jus-tice for ourselves and others...
...The national interest on government debt, mostly war-created, will cost $24.7 billion in 1974, or $389 out of the pocket of the average American taxpaying family...
...They know -that this country could easily provide a guaranteed adequate income to all the people simply by cutting the defense budget by only 25 per-cent, or by closing a third of the tax loopholes...
...In fact, just the reverse is probably true-we are extremely vulnerable to the suffering of others...
...If you run a San Diego newspaper, you devote a 5-column, 50-inch story to then-Governor of California Ronald Reagan's blast at rising welfare costs, while in the same issue, you put the latest poverty figures on an inside page in a two-inch story...
...Defense cost overruns in the past few: years cost each of us $527...
...Hitler did it in the 1930s against the Jews...
...Only half of America's poor receive any welfare at all...
...Tax loopholes are plugged by the rest of us to the tune of $907 per year...
...So the myth of the "welfare cbiseler" per-sists...
Vol. 103 • February 1976 • No. 4
