This is pretty amazing:

“Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era,” a paper by Cornell’s Clinton Rossiter Professor of American Institutions Suzanne Mettler features this remarkable chart showing that about half of American social program beneficiaries believe that they “have not used a government social program.” 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.

Reconstituting the Submerged State: The Challenges of Social Policy Reform in the Obama Era (PDF)

via BoingBoing, where there is some concern over whether certain tax credit and deduction programs should be counted as social programs.