Ben Hallman wrote on Huffington Post that some of the states that have embraced the extreme right-wing agenda against domestic government spending are those which get the most from federal spending. Contradicting the stupid and hateful rhetoric of South Carolina’s plethora of faux right-wing populist politicians, federal tax payers in that state get back almost $8.00 for every $1.00 they spend in federal taxes.
You remember borrowing a thought from the anti-democratic Ayn Rand, Mitt Romney was secretly taped saying that 47 percent of Americans are “Takers,” i.e. folks that don’t contribute and take from the government.
We all know that the real takers are the biggest employers in America, those who subsidize their employees with federal benefits and teach their employees how to access those federal subsidies.
The most well known of these employers is, of course, Walmart whose employees are the single most identifiable group that relies on Medicaid for healthcare. You may remember that Walmart, in contradiction to its own seeming self-interest, warned their employees to vote Republican in 2010.
South Carolina, with the greatest taking of any state, is the most contradictory and hypocritical of all. South Carolina’s Governor Nikki Haley recently said they didn’t want and would reject any union employers and/or jobs in her state. Never mind that union jobs pay well over the poverty line, and have health insurance that takes a huge load off Medicaid.
These politicians that rail against benefits for the poor–working poor–must either be the biggest hypocrites in human history or simply hate their own constituents. Former South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint is one of the worst. He has made a career hating on the working poor and unions, which are the quickest and cheapest way out of poverty. First, he built and refined his hate into a seat in the US Senate. Now he heads the Heritage Foundation, surely one of America’s most extremist foundations and bastions of hate for the working poor and unions.
And these folks thump their Bibles as if there is no admonition against oppression in those Bibles and no requirement to provide for the poor.
Photo source: DonkeyHotey on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)