Public Teachers: America's New "Welfare Queens" http://www.truth-out.org/public-teachers-americas-new-welfare-queens68208
Sunday 06 March 2011 by: Adam Bessie, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis Public Teachers: America's New "Welfare Queens" Protesters in Tallahassee, Florida on February 26, 2011. (Photo: A Florida Studio) In 1976, on a failed campaign to the White House, Ronald Reagan coined one of his enduring linguistic legacies - the "welfare queen," a mythical, inner-city resident who wastes the public's hard-earned money on "welfare Cadillacs" and other luxuries she can't afford, and, thus, doesn't deserve. When Reagan finally succeeded in becoming president four years later, he waged war on these "welfare queens," redistributing money from the "least deserving" by cutting social services and public programs that helped the poor, and funneling it to the "most deserving," by providing generous tax cuts for the extremely rich, who had actually "earned" their money. Today, as a recent Gallup poll found that Americans were most likely to dub Reagan "the greatest president ever" (just above the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln), Reagan's battle against the "welfare queen" lives on - though she doesn't drive a Cadillac, but, perhaps, a fire engine, and has a Cadillac health care plan, as Jonathan Cohn presciently pointed out in "Public Employees Are the New Welfare Queens" last August in The New Republic. In the last few weeks, "public employee" has become a bad word, a symbol of greed and undeserved excess, one that is responsible for our crumbling budgets, and, by logic, our own struggling economy - just like the "welfare queens" of the 70's. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
