Corporate Welfare Queens Are Bleeding Us Dry

Conservatives' Austerity Kills

-by Jerrad Christian

Today, let’s kill a lie.

When politicians talk about cutting Medicaid or SNAP, they want you picturing some lazy dirtbag playing video games all day— some “welfare queen,” or some stoned freeloader living large on your tax dollars. That image is doing a lot of work covering the reality of the situation. It’s propaganda. A distraction. A cover story so those ‘on top’ can keep robbing the working class while we’re busy blaming each other.

Most people on Medicaid and SNAP work. They often work long hours at shitty jobs with no benefits. These are the folks bagging your groceries, flipping your burgers, stocking your shelves at midnight, wiping down your hospital bed. The backbone of this country, the ignored masses, the REAL silent majority— treated like parasites by the people getting rich off our labor or talked down to by a Karen.

Nearly 60% of non-elderly adults on Medicaid who can work already do. The rest are raising kids, going to school, or too sick to hold a job. And when I say too sick to work, I’m not talking about folks faking it. I’m talking about people with cancer, lupus, Long COVID, PTSD, bipolar disorder— those that want to work but can’t reliably stand on their feet or survive a week without collapsing.

Medicaid is the only thing keeping them alive— and the only shot they’ve got at ever being able to work again.

SNAP is the same deal. The USDA says over 41 million Americans rely on food assistance, and most of them live in working households. Think that through: working full-time, and still can’t afford to eat.

And here’s the part that should really piss you off: we’re not giving these people charity— we’re covering the bill for billion-dollar corporations so they don’t have to pay a living wage.

You know who shows up every year on the list of top employers with workers on Medicaid and SNAP? Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon, and Dollar General.

Walmart costs taxpayers $6.2 billion a year in public assistance just so they can keep wages low. In many states, 1 in 3 Amazon warehouse workers is on food stamps or Medicaid, while 57% of fast-food workers need public assistance to survive.

We don’t subsidize people. We subsidize business models built on wage slavery. These companies rake in billions, then let us cover their workers’ healthcare and groceries— and the politicians cutting benefits have the balls to call taking more from these people “fiscal responsibility.”

So when they say it’s time to “tighten the belt” or “make tough choices,” ask yourself: whose belt are they tightening?

• It’s not the politicians’ belt.

• It's not the billionaires’.

• It’s the single moms working full-time and skipping dinner.

• It's the diabetic warehouse worker rationing insulin.

• It's the home health aide caring for your grandma for $13 an hour, praying they don’t get sick and miss a day’s pay.

And while all this is happening, half the country’s been trained to point fingers at the poor like they’re the problem.

The system is working exactly as designed:Exploit labor —> Blame the poor —> Protect the rich —> Rinse and Repeat.

Personally, I’m sick of this shit. And it’s WELL beyond time to do something proactive about it.

Boycott corporate offenders, support workers, show some common decency, and for the love of everything you hold holy— elect better people.

Because I’m done watching working Americans be corporate whipping boys.