‘Most of America’s rich think the poor have it easy’
9th January 2015
Another thumb-sucker from the Washington Post.
Most of America’s richest think poor people have it easy in this country, according to a new report released by the Pew Research Center. The center surveyed a nationally representative group of people this past fall, and found that the majority of the country’s most financially secure citizens (54 percent at the very top, and 57 percent just below) believe the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.” America’s least financially secure, meanwhile, vehemently disagree — nearly 70 percent say the poor have hard lives because the benefits “don’t go far enough.” Nationally, the population is almost evenly split.
Note that the poor think their lives are hard because they don’t have it easy enough. Cry me a river.
Why the surprising lack of compassion? It’s hard to say.
But he’s going to pull something out of his ass anyway, ignoring the plain truth that people who have to work for a living don’t have a lot of affection for those who don’t have to work for a living.
At the very top, the sentiment is likely tied to conservatism, which traditionally bemoans government programs that redistribute wealth, calling them safety nets.
Sorry, but ‘the very top’ are more likely to be liberal than conservative — look at political contributions and public utterances (but that would disturb The Narrative, so shhhh….) And don’t spend a lot of time trying to make sense of that sentence grammatically, because it can’t be done; ‘conservatism’ doesn’t call government attempts to redistribute wealth ‘safety nets’, but theft — it’s ‘progressivism’ that calls such programs ‘safety nets’, in order to escape the thought that they’re, you know, theft. (Maybe the author thinks people like Obama are conservative; that’s the only explanation that makes sense grammatically, if not intellectually.)
Some 40 percent of the financially secure are politically conservative, according to Pew.
Which means that 60% aren’t … there goes the ‘likely tied to conservatism’ canard. Really, does anybody read this stuff before it gets published?
And conservatives are even more likely to say the “poor have it easy” than the rich — a recent Pew survey found that more than three quarters of conservatives feel that way.
My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
More broadly, the prevalence of the view might reflect an inability to understand the plight of those who have no choice but to seek help from the government. A quarter of the country, after all, feels that the leading reason for inequality in America is that the poor don’t work hard enough.
‘No choice’? There’s an assumption you could drive a truck through, loaded with taxpayer dollars. And if a quarter of the country feels that the poor don’t work hard enough, then three-quarters of the country don’t feel that way, so another paragraph bites the dust.
I’ve seen more intellectual rigor come out of the Miss America contest.