- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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Both sides are the same amirite?
I used to say that because I though “the left” was Putin and Xi Jinping
Lol, how did you get the idea Putin was a leftist?
Propaganda.
No idea. It was when I was 14 or something
Most of the far lefters I’ve seen around here are in the “both sides!” camp.
Yeah I came here to say the same. It’s the edgelords on the left that can’t bring themselves to vote to keep trump and friends from turning the country into a shit show
Americans really need to learn that most people aren’t from their country
To some extent I’m still a centrist mainly, because I think that dems have their own hypocrisies and are a little too naive. However I side more with democrats for the fact that republicans actively spew hateful, dangerous, ideals that actively put others in danger and hurt people. So I might not always agree with democrats I would most likely never agree with a republican
Don’t worry, most of us on the left hate the Democrats too, just less than the Republicans. This has been said a million times so sorry if I’m overstating it but the Democrats would be a center right wing party in most of the developed world.
The democrats are right wing
Thw democrats are considered “the left” in the us? As a foreigner i have always seen them as useless centrists.
The far left and far right are both bad. If in doubt, look at any country which has gone down either path.
Narrator: The left did not, in fact, get everyone’s basic needs met.
Both Democrats and Republicans have been moving steadily to the right for the last 40 years. So Democrats are now where Republicans were in the 1980s: friends of banks, insurance and pharmaceutical companies. And the right has moved all the way into an insane asylum.
Dictatorships are dictatorships, regardless of the political ideology. Both sides did horrible things, like purging intellectuals and anyone seen as a potential threat, mass murder of entire social groups, maintaining informant networks to instil fear etc.
Still waiting on that basic need.
Biden built entire wings onto for-profit hospitals during Covid, while ironically being against universal healthcare. Almost like his donors didn’t want it or something.
Who killed more Soviets? The far-right, or the far-left?
I’ll just take a pass on the far-anythings.
(Anyone who tries to paint this as pro Trump needs to reread it)
Independent here. Both parties are bat shit crazy in their own ways. Will I choose psycho #1 or psycho #2 to decide my fate? It is actually a very tough choice.
What has been psycho about the democratic party?
Ohhh idk “hey sit down Bernie, we’re going to suppress your campaign that actually has traction so we can run the lady who stole aid money from Haiti with her Iran-Contra involved husband, y’know, that lady literally everyone hates? Don’t worry, she’ll tell people to ‘Pokemon GO to the polls!’ so we got this.”
Not good enough? How about *gestures vaguely at their recent support of Israel*?
Centrism doesn’t mean that you can’t choose between democrats and republicans, it means that ideologically, you believe in a balance between capitalist ideas and socialist ideas. For example, you can believe in the Hayekian idea that the many interactions between individuals in the market is better at creating prosperity than a centralized government that distributes all goods and services. But you can also believe that the market can’t do everything on its own due to market failures like monopoly power, externalities, assymmetric information. There exists a compromise between the two that is negotiated through politics. A core necessity for this to happen is that democracy is maintained. Democracy is not maintained when elections are bought by companies.
What is happening in the US now is that politics has been taken over by the private market. No economist would have agreed with this (unless they were paid to). It is against everything that we know. This is not a left vs right stance. It’s a democracy vs autocracy stance. Autocracy can happen from both the right and left, and it doesn’t matter who.
The one thing I dislike about the idea of centrism is the idea that you can’t decide on everything because you remain agnostic about every issue. I think a much better idea to advocate for is pluralism: the idea that your opinion on specific issues is not dependent on your politcal stance. Every issue is unique and doesn’t automatically identify you with left or right. You can have different opinions on different issues.
I consider myself Centrist because I would rather eat 10 pounds of fried bugs than align myself with either absolute clown show of a party.
I’m a free agent, and the haters can’t stand that they can’t have me.
That doesn’t make you a centrist. Ya’ll seriously have lost your ability to see anything objectively it’s wild. The Democrats aren’t left wing except for a few people I could probably count on one hand but nearly the entire country, and its inability to pay attention even across its northern border, believes that the Democrats must be left wing since the Republicans are right wing.
You may very well not be a centrist, or maybe you are, but basing that on anything that suggests that the Democrats are left, and left to a point where they balance the extremism of the GOP, renders he whole thing worthless.
We’ve been screaming at the US for years to get a fuckin’ clue PLEASE just become moderately politically literate we are begging you.
I spent 4 years going into debt for a degree in political literacy. And then more for a related Master’s. I appreciate the frustration, but I can assure you I know exactly what I’m taking about.
Relative to the 1D spectrum of D to R in the US, I’m certainly in the middle ground, beyond the border of what falls enough into the D realm. From a global perspective, sure, the Dems are already a mess that overlaps the center some, but thats a fuzzy edge and not as fully held by the Dems as most moderately informed Europeans like to imply.
And yes, the lack of appropriate labels makes me more of a “Centrist” than anything else, but its barely an accurate term, as is using a 1D left/right binary to define anything can be. I’m against many types of government spending, which only a decade or two ago used to be such a quaint way to identify oneself politically, then everyone dropped the mask and it’s just a full-on Kleptocracy out there now. On a Nolan Chart, I’m squarely in the Centrist square. On a quadrant evaluation, I fall into the same zone as Thomas Jefferson and…Marianne Williamson, oddly enough.
Plus, Lemmy needs to hear opinions from outside the tankie echo chamber.
I’d love to hear about that “many types of government spending” because that’s kinda important here.
Any dipshit can barely pass classes and get a degree. I’ve worked with engineers who can’t even fucking count pillars in a picture and argue when you politely ask for a recount so you’re gunna need to do a lot more than leave incredibly important context up in the air while flapping around your basically worthless-until-proven-otherwise degree.
Trump went to a good school. He’s bad at everything he supposedly learned there. Many republicans have law degrees and some days you wonder if they’re even able to read a children’s book with any level of competency.
Yes, well I also hate typing out my political beliefs on mobile, but you raise a fair point. Even though in sure you’ll hate everything I say out of principle. Apologies in advance for typos.
In general, the GAO does a good job of enumerating wasteful spending. For example, there’s 133 individual programs over 15 Federal agencies intending to expand broadband coverage. FFS, consolidate that. So there’s statutory reforms and some streamlining to be done strategically across government. Not to balance spoons on a fork better than one can look at a spreadsheet, like some people.
My family has spent their carers in education, and for me there’s no love lost with the Dept of Education being eliminated. Even if you reduce it to a small grantmaking entity that funds state level systems, that’s a function that can be easily done from within DOI.
There’s a large number of farm and oil subsidies that are so old as to be the goal of the industry to exploit. But oh no, don’t touch farmers because you might undermine Monsanto’s bottom line. These poor people are human shields.
Earmarks, while a pittance on paper at only $15B in 2024, are a cultural artifact of the endemic problem in budget making. While not all spending is Earmarked, there’s plenty beyond that scope which is a personal or lobbyist-initiated favor. Innumerable examples exist for this, and neither side is willing to get rid of theirs in order to get rid of the other side’s favorites. Everyone is the problem here. Sure, at some level this is a balancimg act with the cost of politics and playing to constituents. But the fact that most Reps see it as their right is the problem.
Military spending is crazy bananas and no one will touch it. Regardless of what idiots Musk and Hegseth say. The whole infrastructure is based on the Cold War+Post9/11 add on.
My career is in international development, and as an industry, it very often achieved remarkably little other than things like gainfully employing 10% of the PhDs in a small country in Sub-Saharan Africa to do office work. Some programs were awesome and saved lives and made a difference. They were the rare exceptions to the rule. However, simply strangling USAID like has happened is the stupidest, most expensive way to accomplish chaos with nothing to show for it. Many programs that engaged in short-term behavior change frequently showed how ineffectual they were in their own final reports, yet the same companies still thought they did a great job because they had simply not failed to complete the contract.
And don’t get me started on how many contractors there are that charge 50% above market rate just because they can. Doesn’t matter the industry, it’s literal collusion across every contractor. I’ve written the budgets, and learned how to be only a “tiny” part of the problem. The reliance on contractors is a strategic disadvantage. Because money can solve that problem, it goes away temporarily over and over. That was a low-information environment in the past, ordering copier toner from a paper catalog. We need a new round of procurement reforms.
I can go on and on. In large part, there’s no one simple solution here. It’s a lot of statutory reforms, hard work, strategic planning, and doing less with less that had to be adopted over years, as was done in the 90s. But at a much higher rate, and with more urgency. The US is in a genuine debt crisis, and the people who ran on crashing the system won in part because the Dems ran on ignoring this among other problems.
To be honest, I agree with most of that. I’d love to hear more about the department of education but I also don’t wanna waste too much of your time and am aware that in the States it’s not entirely what it may seem to be. Personally I think it should be expanded to be more of what people believe it to be; leaving education so fully up to states doesn’t seem to do much besides make it easier for republicans to turn their base into even bigger drooling morons.
But anyway thanks for clarifying, and in such depth, too. I’m glad to hear that “streamlining” doesn’t seem to mean the classic right-wing nonsense around making government small enough that it can be easily controlled by awful people. I’m also not sure how centrist these points are, especially if you’re aiming to, for example, not rely on private contractors. Left-wing policies aren’t “spend blindly”, that’s just a right-wing attack angle so they can defund things, so if you have ways for the government to be able to do things well then I mean of course I’m all for it.
Reducing an individual to a single point on these charts is kinda a fool’s errand.
Far better to give yourself a series of points on stances you agree with and carve out a spread of your beliefs with an averaged point that represents you.
To say you are a centrist because your beliefs are purely in line with what society considers anodyne and ‘normal’ is far removed from a person that agrees with extreme positions on all sides of the compass.
Why do you think voting for a party aligns yourself with that party?
If two people want to attempt to unalive your mother with a 50% probability that they will succeed, and you have the chance to stop only one of them, reducing the chance to 25%. Does it mean that you align with whoever you do not choose?
Voting WITH a party is not the same thing as voting for a candidate that has openly identified as a member one party or the other because that is a barrier to entry or funding avenue for them.
I know it’s hard to accept, but the entire history of both parties hasn’t been “socialist utopia vs. Nazis.” For a century the Democrats didn’t eject all the Southern racists that declared they were Dems simply to be a counterpoint to Lincoln-to-MLK-era Republicans.
Even a cursory understanding of history should make anyone distrust all political parties forever.
But please tell me more about how the party that denied us a president Bernie Sanders (I) is worth my time.
But please tell me more about how the party that denied us a president Bernie Sanders (I) is worth my time.
Like Bernie has said, it is the only realistic vehicle to carry someone like him into the White House. The way the US political system is structured your movement needs to take over an existing party instead of trying to establish its own new party from the ground up if it wants any hope of success.
Why not vote for Bernie then? Better than nothing. At least it may give a lot of people or the democrats faith that he could potentially win in the future.
I’m not saying that you need to give them your time, I’m just saying that voting for them doesn’t mean that you stand for what they believe. You can vote them and at the same time advocate for a different voting system.
This only makes sense if you insist on reducing complex multidimensional concepts to a single scalar value. Even intuitively it doesn’t make sense. You place yourself in the centre between two philosophies you disagree with? What?
It actually makes more sense when you don’t reduce it. Look up a Nolan Chart, or quadrant-based political stance diagram. I fall squarely into the center of the Nolan Chart.
You think that reducing to two dimensions is significantly different than reducing to one. I disagree.
If americans could read, they would be very upset.
agnostic are agnostic because there is no foolproof evidence basis.
with politics you can clearly see how some stances have been done and their effects. and other instances you also have a basis even in the most unclear case
just had an issue with the negative connotation implied here talking about agnosistics :D
Yeah since people cannot be expected to have full knowledge of the evidence, you have to recognize you can be agnostic about some issues. It’s virtuous to seek evidence and knowledge, and you should make choices based on the best information you have.
I’m not advocating for independents btw. I think you should clearly pick a party to vote for, but the two party system is a horrible system for people who are pluralistic in their views.
I think we can all agree that adding religious parallels to anything is a waste of everyones time.
The boss: steal most of the profit
The worker: hey stop stealing, i’m the one working
Idiotic centrists: hEy MayBe You CaN JusT LeT Him SteaL A LittLe BiT
You can advocate for wealth taxes, unions, and other welfare measures within a capitalist system. I’m from one of the most egalitarian countries in the world and we are capitalist too.
What you’re from norway or canadian or something?
It’s easier to be egalitarian when your loaded with oil money, isn’t it?
Nope, but I’m from scandinavia, no oil money.
Edit: also, I dont like categorical descriptions, because reality is more complicated. But what is happening in the US is more specifically referred to as “rentier capitalism”. In Scandinavia, we have something like “welfare capitalism”.
You live in a wood, you genocided the samyz and forced sterilisation was still a thing a couple of decades ago
I’m not saying we don’t have things to work on, but it’s not black or white. Social injustice gets reduced over time in a democracy. Name a country that is not capitalist that has never done bad things.
Lately I’ve caught myself thinking differently. The left is progressive because they want to progress civil rights. The centerists are conservative because they just don’t want things to change. The right is regressive because they want to turn back the clock. Honestly I think we need to stop calling people on the right conservative and give them the new label regressives.
You have to see conservativism and “the conservatives” as separate things. One is a group that can hold many different views and another is a view point itself.
Conservatives want to go back to the days when mediocre white men were greatly rewarded just for being white.
As a mediocre white guy, I can confidently say that is today. Any white guy who is like “I never got any special treatment for being white” has gone though life and society with their eyes closed.
There’s still systematic racism with America. That being said, everyone’s quality of life other than the uber rich has gone down noticeably. That’s part of the reason populist lies from Trump work so well.
Ugh, market socialism exists.
Not all socialism has planned economies. That’s communism. A specific subset of socialism.
Capitalism doesn’t have a monopoly on market economies. badumtssh
Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it’s more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff it’s communism.
Right, but I see market socialism as an ideological compromise rather than inherent socialism. Im from scandinavia, and my country is a capitalist country with a strong welfare state.
You have “welfare capitalism” as they define it so that they get to still try to keep people tethered to capitalism. Capitalism is not just having money, it’s a system that prioritizes said money. Capitalism seeks to reduce regulation and separate the worker and owner class and basically by definition you don’t get to have a say if you don’t have money. Scandinavian countries are not finding a balance but are resisting capitalism while keeping its name and to make people not be afraid of not having it(for some fuckin’ reason people really want it I don’t get it).
If you have strong regulations, a government focused on taking care of people instead of relying on businesses to do it, and the people have fair power then you don’t have capitalism, just a system where private ownership exists but is not jerked-off at every turn like in the states. It was literally made up so the merchant class could keep all their money as monarchies were falling. It’s a not something you want to even associate with. Even the states hasn’t gone full capitalism because they know(knew) that it’s not a truly viable system.
I also want system with some level of private ownership, but I also don’t think private, for-profit power generation should be a thing and if a company under “capitalism” is too big to fail then at least a large part of it should be sold to the government, and at least have it’s executive board purged, not handed a bunch of money as they hold their employees’ jobs hostage.
It’s funny because from my European perspective there’s no (visible) left in the USA. Democrats are centrist. Sanders could be social democrat. Otherwise I fully agree with you.
I think this has only happened because of manipulation of the masses.
The US political spectrum has shifted so far. What is right in the US is far right in the EU, and what is left in the EU is far left in the US.
"Far Left: we’re going to force everyone into our micromanaged society and beliefs, because somehow that will fix everyone’s problems.
“Far Right: we’re going to keep things the way they were, and give people the freedom to do what they want.”
Alas, the way people see it depends a lot on what aspects you emphasise and caricature, and which you pass over. And how “far” you consider.
Far Right: You’re free to be poor, because who cares
Yes, which can be seen as “you’re free to be who you want” (and the rich are free to oppress you); Vs “you’re not free; the government will organise your life” (and I’m sure that goes well…)
This might sound controversial to you, but I don’t want the rich being able to oppress people.
(Historically, that went horribly. It’s still going horribly, in fact.)
I think you’re being disingenuously generous with your interpretation of far right policies.
It is controversial, I suppose. I also don’t want the rich being able to oppress people, and generally stand with you on most left-style policies talked about here on Lemmy. But restricting the power of the rich comes with downsides, and the extreme versions of it haven’t worked out well historically either.
restricting the power of the rich comes with downsides
Say, if I don’t believe there’s a good reason for a person’s wealth to reach Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk levels, if I say that’s not healthy for society, that we ought to implement heavier progressive tax and that people like him must pay it properly, can you explain what the downside would be?
How would you implement it? Given time and breadth, I expect one could find downsides.
But if it were really just that? Heavier progressive tax affecting the super-rich more, with enforcement on the rich to actually pay it? Sounds good to me.
I was going to say it’s not worth my time to think of downsides to that - but actually I can see two already. One is on principle, that wealth earned shouldn’t be penalised. Especially when there is real communal wealth generated by e.g. Amazon. I’ve even wondered, at times, if this sort of taxation provides a band-aid for avoiding the real work of stopping the injustice that leads to the wealth imbalance in the first place (like wage theft etc.).
The second is again how you implement it. I’ve seen a few fallacies in discussions of taxing the super-rich, around that complicated topic of what wealth really is when it includes company shares. You can shortcut that and say, well it’s definitely worth taxing Musk et al and anyhow they’ll have plenty of money left over - but if you do it slapdash like that, even if the effects don’t spill over to the poor, it’s still an injustice. And an injustice, even if hidden and apparently benign, is still a downside.
But yeah, tax the rich :-D. Please do!
The far right is the one not allowing people to be free to be who they want/are, inserting themselves into everyone’s bedrooms, and justifying it all with fear based propaganda.
What are you even talking about?
How about the freedom to own a place to live without being taxed for existing? The freedom to employ people based on what you think best for the company rather than to fulfil a race/gender quota? The freedom to educate your children the way you think best? The freedom to protect your children from disease the way you think best? The freedom to protect your family from illicit CIA experimentation by being borderline-paranoid? The freedom to make and sell the food you want, and drive the car you want?
Every one of these is restricted by government, and - if I’m not mistaken - traditionally more by Dems. Every one of these also has an upside to restricting! Mandatory vaccines. Standardised curriculums. Undoing oppression of blacks. Regulated food safety. But doing those upsides means restricting freedoms, and - as you might imagine - people disagree on the balance.
If you don’t understand the positive reasons why Republicans and others want their policies, then you lose the ability to help them see reason. You just sound smug and stuck in your political bigotry.
You are mistaken, both on what is actually restricted and who is doing the restricting.
The far right is, quite literally, removing the freedom for undesired people to do what they want. If a woman needs an abortion to survive a ectopic pregnancy or a trans person wants HRT, the far right says no.
There’s lots of things going on, and the Far Right is certainly doing evils. But so, I think, is the Far Left. And Centre. And people and politicians of all sorts.
My point is about perception. If you pick and choose your naïvete (and your lies, misunderstandings and oversimplifications), you can make it look like this meme for either side, and then wonder at people (like the centrists in this meme) who go against an extreme. How then can you understand anyone except your own echo chamber?
Sadly it undercuts your point too, to anyone outside your group who might be learning from you: because if you call people stupid for things they actually don’t mean, that turns them away from you.
If you want to see far right evils, all you need is to look at the news. The comment you replied to contains a straightforward example. Could you tell us which evils the far left is committing right now?
Are you off the opinion, then, that no evil is done by the Dems, or farther-left people and politicians? I’m not American, and I won’t now compare to the countries I have lived in. But from what I hear, for starters the Dems are much accused of taking money from big companies to influence policy - and the blocking of Sanders for presidential bid was suggested to be that. The pharmaceutical industry, whilst nobly providing the world with COVID vaccines and many other great things, is not exactly known for its honest policies. People more specifically? I don’t care to take the time to look at their lives, since I’m not part of your country and don’t vote for them. Will you claim to me that Bernie does no wrong? That Biden has no hypocrisy? That latter I remember a couple of notable incidents.
Yes the far right evil is plain and obvious these days. That will not mean the Left, or Centre, will do no wrong if in power. I think quite a small look at history will show that, but my experience is outside of America. Maybe the Dems in America are saintly and perfect? Loving and incorruptible? Putting their country first in every situation and caring for all people fairly, not letting money sway their interest? What lucky people you are, to have such a party! How strange, that so large a percentage of your countrymen could not see the perfection that shines in the Dems! How unnecessary, that every day I see on Lemmy pro-Dem propaganda that twists the truth and sensationalises the mundane; for with such a perfect party, you could stick plainly to the truth, and their goodness would shine out without problem.
It must be nice in America to know you have a political side entirely without evil. For such a side I have not seen in the world.
None of what you complained about is the far left, but rather the center/right of the Democratic party.
To be clear, the far left doesn’t have political representation in America, so you can’t give actual examples because those would require the far left actually had power.
But if you think Biden, a literal fucking segregationist, represents the far left, then you don’t actually know what the left is.
No, I realise that. Hard to give examples of American far left abusing power when they don’t have any!
The far right’s definition of “people” is super limited. It doesn’t even include women.
I mean, that’s just lies. That the ‘Left’ around here enjoys as an oversimplification, but doesn’t help you understand other people at all.
There are some people who treat women as not people, but even the far right, as I understand it, are much broader than that, and less-far right certainly.
The far anything is miserable, left and right.
What counts as “far” is entirely relative. A few centuries ago, democracy and abolitionism were “far” left
Clearly. Go back a thousand years and it makes no sense. We’re talking about today.
Really? Your comment definitely doesn’t make sense then
Except the Far Side.
This is correct. 😂 Great comic
If only you had a brain, you might not have missed the point and construed it so far up your own ass it came out your mouth.
I agree with your take of the far left to a decent extent, but your take of the far right is dumb. They are actively “micromanaging” society by disallowing anything that doesn’t align with there “the way things were” ideals, and even then the way things were sucked for anyone who wasn’t a white Christian.
Is that so. It hasn’t looked that way to me, from the news. More, it’s looked like people getting paranoid that it’s that way. But I typically only see big news from America, and not from many news sources. What I see more is Trump being a ridiculous bully, making a mess of relations both at home and abroad, and Musk doing the nerd equivalent, trying to solve government bureaucracy as if he knows everything and damaging everything in the process, not heeding anyone’s caution. But not micromanaging society.
But if it is, I don’t think that’s what the Repb supporters see, and this sort of comparison is about how one picks and chooses certain aspects of the two sides to compare.
How is restricting access to abortions, birth control and healthcare not micromanaging? How is abolishing gay marriage and trans rights compatible with “imma leave you alone to do your own things”?
I don’t think that is micromanaging at all. Abortion: federal level has fought for it to be ruled at state level. That’s lifting restriction. State level: those states which have restricted it, are doing it on the idea of protecting the life of the foetus: that’s restricting specifically what appears to them as killing another person. Birth control: not restricted, is it. Healthcare: removing or changing federal subsidised healthcare: that’s not restricting or micromanaging! It’s just removing a good thing! (Yes, I think national healthcare is good.) Abolishing gay marriage: hasn’t happened. Trans rights: “you should use your identified gender bathroom” Vs “you should use your birth sex bathroom” is not one more micromanaging than the other.
And, believe it or not, these are not the only things going on in America. Again, if you pick and choose, yes you can make an argument one particular way. Doesn’t help you help anybody else though.
Its only restrictive when the feds do it, okay.
Abolishing gay right hasnt happened, but is something conservatives clamor for at every twist and turn. Conservative justices write opinions about how decisions regarding the accessibility of birth control should be limited, but i guess thats not restrictive either.
And i am sorry, did you just pretend that the entirety of the conservative debate around trans rights is about bathrooms? No, they dont want trans people to exist. The feds just said “There are only two genders.” How tf is that not interference?
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Why would they do better when you vote for them no matter what they do?
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Let’s not suck off the left too hard, they have some splaining to do for this mess as well.
For not supporting Jill Stein? Agreed.
I think people who call Republicans and Democrats the same are just in love with their own need to rant. When they’re elderly they’ll walk around shouting at trees.
The more… favorable right wing points I’ve heard are more along the lines of “I’ve busted my ass for what little I have! How dare you ask me to pay to subsidize the lives of people who aren’t trying to work?”
Completly ignoring the fact that better welfare programs should help them to not have to work so damn hard for so little in the first place. Or the fact that the welfare cliff and other various systemic problems make it that much harder to get out of that pit no matter how hard you’re trying.
It’s not even quite “fuck you, I got mine” because so many of them barely “got theirs” as is, which makes them even more protective. The ones that do have, have latched on to this idea of the entirely self made man, which ignores all the public welfare systems they used on their journey. Like schools, or roads. You can hardly exist in modern America without using multiple tax funded public works/welfare things every day.
The “barely got mine and defending it” thing really sticks in other ways too.
When I wanted aid for school “sorry, we ran out. Should have gotten here earlier.”
When I wanted to get food stamps “sorry, you don’t meet the qualifications on a technicality.”
When I finally got Medicaid but couldn’t use it “not enough spots for you to be seen, sorry.”
Many times the administrators that gave me this news implied it was because too many people asked for it. Being young and stupid (and let’s face it, indoctrinated), it made me put the blame on the other people asking for aid. If there were less people that asked for aid, I wouldn’t be starving and sick. I thought that I was more worthy of the aid because some people are cheating the system and I deeply resented them.
Fortunately I grew the hell up and pulled my head out of my ass. It’s all a distraction we get fed from the news that other needy people are the reason why we suffer. It’s so hard to fathom how much the rich actually waste when all we see is our fellow working class folk.
To add a voice to the choir, I was raised like this too. We went the other direction of feeling guilty for needing aid though.
Like they weren’t completely wrong, you really should be able to raise a family off a single full time job, the problem is that said jobs don’t pay enough for that. But the broken system is good at defending itself, and politicians are quick to point out all the ways it does work, so you wind up with a ‘well, it works for them, guess I just have to try harder’ mindset. Like, I spent hours each week as a teenager helping mom do the extreme couponing and do stuff like take a cart through another line to get around limits on sale items.
I’ve been shit at math for my whole life, so maybe I’m just hoping I’m not alone in this, but I really think a lot of people are number illiterate. I’ve spent so much time learning to be grateful for my shoe-string budget, I have a hard enough time envisioning double my salary, and that’d just make me middle class. I literally don’t have a way of conceptualizing what 200x my salary would be like.
