MORE CLASS WARFARE

I made note below of an Arizona GOP state senator who wants to deprive people of food stamps and Medicaid if they have a beer and a cigarette and a couple of nights ago I heard John "5 in the noggin" Gibson complain that unemployment benefits last too long, something that glibertarian Megan McArdle has stated several times. This notion about unemployment seems to derive from one of the Austrians. Ludwing von Mises.

And then there's this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

In hard times, Americans blame the poor
By Alfred Lubrano
Inquirer Staff Writer
Posted on Mon, Feb. 15, 2010

Last month, Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer of South Carolina said that when the government helps the poor, it's like people feeding stray animals that continually "breed."

In June, conservative Rush Limbaugh denigrated food stamps, which hunger experts have said are vital to poor children.

With "food care," as Limbaugh put it, the "obese" poor "buy Twinkies, Milk Duds, potato chips, six-packs of Bud, then head home to watch the NFL on one of two color TVs and turn off their cell phones, and that's poverty in the U.S." (What he didn't say is that food stamps can't be used to buy alcoholic beverages.)

Some also believe that many welfare recipients cheat.

"The myth of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen" who defrauds the system lingers even though there's no proof of it, said Erin O'Brien, a poverty expert at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

In fact, welfare fraud among Philadelphia's 95,456 recipients is "minute," according to Peter Berson, assistant chief of the government fraud unit in the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office.

The 200 to 400 cases of welfare fraud in the city each year - down 50 percent since 2002 because of better enforcement and fewer recipients - are not nonworking women having babies to game the government, but working women receiving welfare and working at other jobs without reporting the income, Berson said.