@QMS

And just as Ryan, who received help from social security growing up, both of them now have disdain for anyone that reminds them of that. A few politicians have taken the food stamps challenge and could only stay on it for 1-2 weeks instead of the month they signed up for. To their credit, they did try to get the food stamps budget increased.

“I wonder how many of these politicians have ever visited poor areas, let alone spoken to those who dwell there.”

the blood suckers can't be bothered by social needs. wake up america.

@Mark from Queens

“intergenerational welfare”

Funny how "inter-corporational welfare" is never discussed. Walmart has been sucking off the government since its inception. First by getting tax breaks to build in cities, then their other tax breaks from the government. Each Walmart store costs almost $1 million each because of their paying workers such low wages they qualify for food stamps and Medicaid. Then there's all the subsidies that so many other corporations receive. Why? How about the pharmaceutical industry? They get money for research. How about..... the $16 TRILLION that the banks received after they crashed the global economy? The government sure found a way to dole out that money.

There is no reason that our government can't fund all programs as the essay states.

Hatch said the same thing when he was talking about funding CHIP. "I have a rough time spending billions and billions and trillions of dollars on people who won't help themselves!"
Why can't he fund the program? "Because there isn't any money to do it."

Listen to his befuddled speaking before he gets to the point. It's way past time for him to retire.

is this one by Pro Publica writer Alec Magillis published in Nov. of 2015, called "Who Turned My Blue State Red?
Why poor areas vote for politicians who want to slash the safety net."

Man, lemme just say I had to dig and dig to find this not recalling enough specifics about the piece (and maybe using DuckDuckGo exclusively?). But it was worth it.

He starts off with some context:

It is one of the central political puzzles of our time: Parts of the country that depend on the safety-net programs supported by Democrats are increasingly voting for Republicans who favor shredding that net.

In his successful bid for the Senate in 2010, the libertarian Rand Paul railed against “intergenerational welfare” and said that “the culture of dependency on government destroys people’s spirits,” yet racked up winning margins in eastern Kentucky, a former Democratic stronghold that is heavily dependent on public benefits. Last year, Paul R. LePage, the fiercely anti-welfare Republican governor of Maine, was re-elected despite a highly erratic first term — with strong support in struggling towns where many rely on public assistance. And earlier this month, Kentucky elected as governor a conservative Republican who had vowed to largely undo the Medicaid expansion that had given the state the country’s largest decrease in the uninsured under Obamacare, with roughly one in 10 residents gaining coverage.

If you're poor and on Medicare, you don't vote. If you're making a little more than your neighbors, then you vote Repub.

In eastern Kentucky and other former Democratic bastions that have swung Republican in the past several decades, the people who most rely on the safety-net programs secured by Democrats are, by and large, not voting against their own interests by electing Republicans. Rather, they are not voting, period. They have, as voting data, surveys and my own reporting suggest, become profoundly disconnected from the political process.

The people in these communities who are voting Republican in larger proportions are those who are a notch or two up the economic ladder — the sheriff’s deputy, the teacher, the highway worker, the motel clerk, the gas station owner and the coal miner. And their growing allegiance to the Republicans is, in part, a reaction against what they perceive, among those below them on the economic ladder, as a growing dependency on the safety net, the most visible manifestation of downward mobility in their declining towns.

Then gives an example of a person who votes against her own interest, out of resentment.

In a lengthy conversation, Dougherty talked candidly about how she had benefited from government support. After having her first child as a teenager, marrying young and divorcing, Dougherty had faced bleak prospects. But she had gotten safety-net support — most crucially, taxpayer-funded tuition breaks to attend community college, where she’d earned her nursing degree.

She landed a steady job at a nearby dialysis center and remarried. But this didn’t make her a lasting supporter of safety-net programs like those that helped her. Instead, Dougherty had become a staunch opponent of them. She was reacting, she said, against the sense of entitlement she saw on display at the dialysis center...

“People waltz in when they want to,” she said, explaining that, in her opinion, there was too little asked of patients. There was nothing that said “‘You’re getting a great benefit here, why not put in a little bit yourself.’” At least when she got her tuition help, she said, she had to keep up her grades. “When you’re getting assistance, there should be hoops to jump through so that you’re paying a price for your behavior,” she said. “What’s wrong with that?”

RW talk radio and think tank propaganda gobbled down about lazy moochers looking for hand-outs, while those who work resent that:

I’ve heard variations on this theme all over the country: people railing against the guy across the street who is collecting disability payments but is well enough to go fishing, the families using their food assistance to indulge in steaks. In Pineville, W.Va., in the state’s deeply depressed southern end, I watched in 2013 as a discussion with Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat, quickly turned from gun control to the area’s reliance on government benefits, its high rate of opiate addiction, and whether people on assistance should be tested for drugs. Playing to the room, Senator Manchin declared, “If you’re on a public check, you should be subjected to a random check.”

It’s much the same across the border in eastern Kentucky, which, like southern West Virginia, has been devastated by the collapse of the area’s coal industry.

Temporarily embarrassed millionaires:

Meanwhile, researchers such as Kathryn Edin, of Johns Hopkins University, have pinpointed a tendency by Americans in the second lowest quintile of the income ladder — the working or lower-middle class — to dissociate themselves from those at the bottom, where many once resided. “There’s this virulent social distancing — suddenly, you’re a worker and anyone who is not a worker is a bad person,” said Edin. “They’re playing to the middle fifth and saying, ‘I’m not those people.’ ”

Meanwhile, many people who in fact most use and need social benefits are simply not voting at all. Voter participation is low among the poorest Americans, and in many parts of the country that have moved red, the rates have fallen off the charts. West Virginia ranked 50th for turnout in 2012; also in the bottom 10 were other states that have shifted sharply red in recent years, including Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee.

Don't want those non-Property Owners voting, or those minorities:

In the early 1990s, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky freely cited the desirability of having a more select electorate when he opposed an effort to expand voter registration. And this fall, Scott Jennings, a longtime McConnell adviser, reportedly said low turnout by poor Kentuckians explained why the state’s Obamacare gains wouldn’t help Democrats. “I remember being in the room when Jennings was asked whether or not Republicans were afraid of the electoral consequences of displacing 400,000–500,000 people who have insurance,” State Auditor Adam Edelen, a Democrat who lost his re-election bid this year, told Joe Sonka, a Louisville journalist. “And he simply said, ‘People on Medicaid don’t vote.’ ”