Conservative think tanks have spawned a cottage industry churning out dubious studies purporting to show that poor families are living high on the hog on public benefits, a claim that anybody who has actually experienced poverty in America would find laughable.
Renee Adams, left, posing with her mother Irene Salyers and son Joseph, 4, at their produce stand in Council, Va. (AP Photo/Debra McCown)
These papers are then amplified by the right-wing media, forming the basis for calls to further eviscerate a social safety net that’s already been tattered and torn by 30 years of ascendant neoliberalism.
The latest addition to the genre is a study published this week by Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes at the CATO Institute. They calculated the maximum benefits of every federal anti-poverty program in which a single parent with two kids could participate, including things like tax credits for the working poor and supplemental nutrition and health benefits for pregnant women and young children, called it all “welfare” – a word that has long been unpopular to a public that otherwise supports measures to help the neediest – and used it to form the claim that “welfare” provides a perfectly decent quality of life.
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