[dfxm12]

What is missing from this point of view are individual responsibility and willingness to contribute.

This sentiment you're speaking of is basically a racket created by conservative politicians and the media, designed to, as dang would say, "activate" the parts of the voter base. Since Reagan and probably before, they have hammered home catch phrases about "welfare queens" or whatever the buzzword of the day is with no substance behind it. It works for the base because they don't really know or make an attempt to know anyone being "othered" by the media or the politicians in this way.

In reality, it's people like Musk who get tons of tax payer money, privatize all of their gains and then contribute nothing back. They will then have the temerity to cry foul whenever someone tries to make them pay income tax, and they get their way, too, not because they work hard, but because they already have the capital.

[throwforfeds]

Maybe a decade or so ago I saw some right wing news posts on Facebook that were talking about welfare recipients in Maine and how much it was costing the state. All the photos used in the article were of black people. This is in a state where 94% of the population is white and was right at the beginning of the influx of African asylum seekers, so the population of black people was still something like only 1.5%.

Clearly the article had a racist agenda and the comments were filled with people that had never heard of empathy. It didn't occur to anyone that a huge percentage of people in Maine receiving these benefits looked exactly like them. That was the day I deleted Facebook.