re: #7 iceweasel

I never heard those, but I certainly remember that Reagan scared people with his tales of ‘young bucks in Cadillacs buying steak’ and ‘welfare queens’.

I haven’t seen anyone on the right make one of those arguments (Why do black people vote Democrat?) without ‘concluding’ or just asserting that a central component is that ‘they’ just love ‘getting free stuff’. If only ‘they’ were less shiftless and a little smarter, they’d realise it’s the GOP that has their best interest at heart.

Variations on this argument pop up all the time— usually the racist component is up front, but sometimes they’ll generalise and say ‘everyone who voted for Obama’ did so for ‘the free stuff and handouts’. Their meaning is still very clear though, and racism is a central component.
It’s getting wearying belonging to the reality-based community.

Just looked up Reagan’s comments. Right, it was “an innocent mistake.” So was dragging his feet on South Africa. That part of history pisses me off since Reagan was siding with the apartheid regime — end of story.

Instead of using steak as a reference Johnny Rebel used “a can of beans” but he also used the stereotype of the Cadillac which is still in frequent use. Again, the connection of blacks and welfare was a common rallying cry with the Klan and post Great Society racists.

They talk like living on welfare is like living it up in life. People that live on welfare have a hard time making ends meet and there are dozens of restrictions on what they can buy and even what they can drive sometimes.

There was barely any jobs even before this recession hit. Most of heavy industry moved out of the USA not because of unions and regulations but so they can get away from regulations and pay their workers what we were paying workers in the USA in the late 1930s. That’s how much workers get payed in China. And at the same time we saw an escalation of billionaires in the country who contribute almost zero to society.