New US Report Finds $153 Billion In Corporate Welfare – Majority Of Taxpayer Funded Public Assistance Goes To People Who Are Employed

By Michael Krieger: Over the past few weeks, I’ve focused on the many dangerous myths people are encouraged to tell themselves by the various power structures. These myths prevent critical thinking and make people far more malleable and passive. I’ve discussed the stock market myth and the Hillary Clinton myth in some detail, but today I want to expound upon the public welfare, i.e., food stamp myth.
This myth has two components to it, which work brilliantly to manipulate two different segments of the U.S. population. On the one hand, the wealthy and upper middle classes who do not need public assistance have generally bought into either one of two notions about it.
 
1) That their tax dollars are actually helping out the poor, and they are happy to pay their share of it. ...or
2) That those on public assistance are intellectually and professionally inferior to themselves, and that these people are just lazy deadbeats who should get off the couch.
Interestingly, neither of these perspectives are accurate, but they serve the corporate-state perfectly.
The reason is that by dividing the affluent classes into two false memes they never actually see the issue for what it really is. At the same time, public assistance is actually padding corporate profit margins at the expense of society.
I discussed this a couple of years ago in the post, McDonald’s Math: You Can’t Survive Working for Us. Here are a few excerpts:

The key point I want to hammer into people is that food stamps are corporate welfare. They actually are not welfare for the workers themselves, who undoubtably don’t have wonderful lives.
What ends up happening is that because the government comes in and supplements egregiously low wages with benefits like food stamps, the companies don’t have to pay living wages. So in effect, your tax money is being used to support corporate margins. Even better, many of these folks who get the food stamp benefits then turn around and spend them at the very companies which refuse to pay them decent wages. Who benefits? CEOs and shareholders. Who loses? Society.
Guess what would happen if these companies failed to pay high enough wages and food stamps didn’t exist? There would be massive employee organizing and ultimately the companies would have to change tack. This of course doesn’t happen when the taxpayer makes up the difference, and that is exactly what they want. 

So as discussed, public assistance is actually padding corporate profits (just look at the stock market), while doing very little to improve the lives of the tens of millions who receive them.
This is actually brilliant in so many ways from a corporate-statist control perspective. It provides just enough to get by. Just enough so they don’t get out into the streets, yet not enough to be content, sovereign and proud. This is extraordinarily important, but before we get to that, let’s look at some excerpts from a recent Washington Post article titled, When Companies Pay Low Wages, Taxpayers End Up With the Rest of the Bill:
Nicole Beth Wallenbrock has a PhD in French literature and a part-time job teaching at the City University of New York, but her wages barely cover the cost of living for her and her son. She has been on food stamps for six months, she told PBS in February, and relies on help from her family and public assistance programs to get by.
“I have to accept whatever I can get,” she said. “It’s depressing. It makes me feel like a failure in a lot of ways.”
Wallenbrock is among millions of working Americans whose low wages are supplemented by government support. Families in which at least one member is working now make up the vast majority of those enrolled in major public-assistance programs like Medicaid and food stamps, according to a new study. It’s a “hidden cost” of low-wage work, researchers say, and it costs taxpayers about $153 billion a year.
According to researchers, this is the first time anyone has calculated how much is spent providing assistance to workers whose wages don’t cover their families’ expenses. The study, from the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education, found that most spending on public assistance goes not to the unemployed but to members of working families.
 According to the report, wages for the bottom 10 percent of workers are 5 percent lower than they were in 1979, once adjusted for inflation. Between 2003 and 2013, inflation-adjusted wages haven’t increased for anyone in the bottom 70 percent of earners. 

Working families — defined as a family in which at least one member works 10 or more hours per week for more than half the weeks out of the year — make up 61 percent of Medicaid enrollment and 74 percent of Earned Income Tax Credit recipients (it’s worth noting that the EITC is aimed specifically at low-income workers). They also represent a sizable chunk of people on food stamps (36 percent) and those who receive cash welfare through the Temporary Aid to Needy Families program (32 percent).
Many of those who rely on government support to bridge the gap between what they’re paid and what they need to live are in service industries, according to the study. About half of people working in fast food, child care and home care receive public assistance. 

So basically the industries where most of the jobs in this embarrassing recovery have come from.

“We’re subsidizing the profits of Wal-Mart,” Pickus, whose union represents health care workers, told the Hartford Courant. “They’ve lived this way as if this is the way things are. It’s an amazing sense of corporate welfare.”

Earlier in this post I discussed how the affluent are manipulated when it comes to their perspective on public assistance. Yet it works in even more insidious ways on those who depend on it; particularly for those who are employed or highly educated, but still need food stamps to get by.
Let’s take the example noted in the Washington Post article of Nicole Beth Wallenbrock, who has a PhD in French literature. This person is obviously not a deadbeat, nor is she unintelligent. Yet she is on food stamps, just like so many other employed people are. Importantly, she claims: “It’s depressing. It makes me feel like a failure in a lot of ways.” 
Think about this for a second. A person who is highly educated and made to feel this way about themselves is less likely to become politically active because they spend so much of their energy feeling worthless.
Not only that, but is someone trapped in this sort of despondent, negative psychological state ever going to rebel against the state? The hand that (embarrassingly in their mind) helps feed them? No, this person is going to be politically and emotionally damaged and isolated, and that’s exactly how the power structure likes it.
This is why it’s so important to destroy this myth, and make people like Ms. Wallenbrock understand that it is not them that is the failure. Rather, her dependence is an deliberate weapon utilized against her by a failed system. She needs to stop feeling bad about herself, rediscover her pride, and then fight back against the forces intentionally doing this to her. Until this myth is busted forever, nothing will change.


In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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