During the 2012 presidential campaign, Lauren Feeney wrote a column for the Moyers & company website titled “Who Cares If It’s True? It Works.” The column refers to an ad from Republican Mitt Romney’s campaign that stated, “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check.”
Romney’s official website had more ads about welfare than any other issue. Two Romney insiders offered the following insight. “Our most effective ad is our welfare ad,” said Ashley O’Connor, a top Romney ad strategist, at a Republican National Committee forum in August 2012. The ads target white working-class voters, a crucial demographic, who have in the past harbored deep resentment toward welfare recipients. “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” added campaign pollster Neil Newhouse at an August 2012 panel discussion in Florida organized by ABC News.
Gov. Paul LePage is following the same strategy with respect to using “welfare” to garner votes. Consider how often the word “welfare” has been used by the governor. It is a soundbite intended to pit Mainers against Mainers competing for a smaller share of total income and ever more limited public services.
Whether one agrees with the governor regarding welfare, consider the following. We have no control over where and to whom we are born; it is an accident of nature. Some are born into better situations than others. Some fall into the trappings of assumed preferential entitlement because of their wealth while others drop into the abyss of self-pity entitlement because of their poverty. How does one climb down from a perch of inherited wealth to understand the accident of birth and his good fortune? How does one climb up from the depths of inherited poverty to understand the accident of birth is not always fair, but that one has to persevere?
What happens if the motivation is not at home and a child is not raised to understand responsibility or understand her good fortune? Children have no control over the family setting they are born into. In turn they may need help or course correction when they become adults. This becomes increasingly difficult as one gets older.
No one wants to be poor. We all rationalize actions to satisfy physical cravings of food, drink, shelter and sex and emotional yearnings of recognition and validation. Our actions vary based on intellectual and emotional abilities, principles and character. Whether our actions are considered morally or ethically acceptable is based on individual and societal experience and perception.
When someone makes improper use of a safety net, many of those viewing this behavior feel they’ve had their noses rubbed in it. They’ve experienced first-hand the touch, smell and appearance of the cracks in the welfare system. To those who witness the improper use of the safety net, it is disgusting, it is vile, and no doubt unbearable at times not letting such experiences build into deep-seeded anger and outrage.
Yet why don’t the same outrage and anger occur when someone reads about the 80 largest corporations in America receiving “corporate welfare” in the form of a total taxpayer bailout of more than $2.5 trillion? Where is the disgust for those companies having avoided at least $34.5 billion in taxes by setting up more than 600 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda and other offshore tax havens since 2008?
Where is the anger when a dozen of these companies paid no corporate income taxes in at least one year since 2008 while receiving more than $6.4 billion in tax refunds from the IRS? Haven’t the individuals and smaller corporations paying taxes had their noses rubbed in it?
Is it disgusting, is it vile? It depends. It’s ironic that those individuals’ “working” the cracks in the welfare system are considered lazy, cheats, crooks; while corporations “working” the cracks in our tax system — cracks that they created through lobbying efforts — are often considered shrewd, hard-working and savvy.
Who has the more significant economic impact on the greater good, the individual or the corporate welfare abuser? Unless someone can show me data that demonstrates individual welfare abuse exceeds the abuse documented above, corporate welfare abusers have had the greatest negative economic impact on society.
Society has been manipulated to focus on the individual welfare abuser through our emotions fueled by our senses. Isn’t it ironic that jails are filled with so many petty criminals, while the real bad guys, the real welfare abusers, are the corporations running the government?
Thomas Czyz of Falmouth works for the University of New England.