CHAPTER 12
Why Don’t the People Who Benefit Most from Government Help Seem to Appreciate It?
BY 2008, my father-in-law was in bad shape. His dementia was so advanced that my
mother-in-law sorely needed some respite. We found a day care program and suggested
she inquire whether government subsidies were available to help cover the cost. A
lifelong Democrat, she initially dismissed the suggestion out of hand. “It’s not worth it.
The government doesn’t care about people like us, who have worked all their lives. They
only care about the poor.”
She asked, though, and—quickly and efficiently—Medicare covered the costs.
Since then I’ve been on a quiet rampage. When she received a new energy-efficient
refrigerator that, to her delight, cost her only $100, I pointed out that it was compliments
of the Obama stimulus program.^223 When fire fighters came to her house to check her
smoke alarms and make sure the house was safe, I gently pointed out that that, too, was a
government benefit. When she marveled one day that she had a full meal at the senior
center for only $3, again I mentioned that the bounty she’s enjoying comes from her
government.
This should not be a one-woman campaign.
In Suzanne Mettler’s must-read book The Submerged State , she points out that most
Americans don’t know about the subsidies and benefits they receive from their
government. In 2008, a survey asked Americans whether they had “ever used a
government social program, or not.” Of those surveyed, 56.5% said they never had. In
fact, 91.6% had.^224
For the working class, the most valuable and least discussed social program is the system
of disability payments to those deemed unable to work (formally known as Social
Security Disability Insurance). Chana Joffe-Walt’s reporting, which has received
shockingly little attention, documented that the federal government spends more on cash
payments for disability than on food stamps and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families
(aka “welfare”) combined.^225 Nearly 40% of men aged 21–64 were on disability in the
rural California community Sherman studied.^226
Joffe-Walt documents the steep increase in the costs of the disability program and its link
to the disappearance of blue-collar jobs. She spoke with a doctor who, when deciding
- Why Don’t the People Who Benefit Most from Government Help Seem to Appreciate It?