Half of American social program beneficiaries believe that they ‘have not used a government social program’

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

A new paper by Cornell University's Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions Suzanne Mettler, Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era (PDF) features this remarkable chart showing that about half of American social program beneficiaries believe that they "have not used a government social program." That's cognitive dissonance.

"It's the 'Keep your government hands off my Medicare' phenomena writ large: a society of people who subsist on mutual aid and redistributive policies who've been conned (and conned themselves) into thinking that they are rugged individualists and that everyone else is a parasite." Half of US social program recipients believe they "have not used a government social program".