Gavin provided the basic conservative arguments against
welfare. Welfare makes people lazy. People that are on welfare are fat and
should get jobs. And so on. He also cited that approximately 20% of the
populace is on some type of welfare.
The problem is that his definition of “welfare” is somewhat
narrow. According to the data, 21,995,000
in 2015 were directly employed by the government. Per the chart below, that are
almost twice as many people in government as there are in manufacturing. The
government is a HUGE jobs provider. And it is the government’s stated goal to
give preference to women and “people of color.”
The question is how many of these governments jobs are
actually productive? And in a real sense
you could consider these people to be on “welfare.”
But the scope of government welfare jobs also is found in
private industry. Many such jobs are directly tied to government contracts. And
many private jobs are due to the result of government mandates.
I think that what Gavin is referring to are the unemployed, people with no official occupation who are able to sit at home all day. The people who work on government contracts etc. however, are under the same discipline as anyone else with a job, ie they have to get up in the morning, go somewhere for so many hours & perform some activity to earn their money. Such people will have a very different ethic & attitude to life from the unemployed who as Gavin points out see no incentive to get 'off their ass.' Government contract work also creates wealth whereas the unemployed simply consume without producing. Gavin seems to be particularly concerned about the abuse of food stamps & the inability of the recipients to use them to eat sensibly.
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