Topix Politics

The New York Times’ Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff report that middle-class Americans often critical of government spending and the welfare state in general are increasingly reliant upon federal aid to get by. They put this trend in perspective:

In 2000, federal and state governments spent about 37 cents on the safety net from every dollar they collected in revenue, according to a New York Times analysis. A decade later…spending on the safety net consumed nearly 66 cents of every dollar of revenue.

And while more of this is going to families in the middle class and not to the poor, cultural resistance to state provision of social welfare has created a population suffering a kind of cognitive dissonance:

They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it.

The attitude displayed above may account for the decline in tax revenues some have blamed for the mushrooming of state and federal assistance costs. And while politicians compete to win over the affection of the middle class tax payer, the fact is, as Clive Crook of The Atlantic pointed out a few days ago, the central rung of America’s income ladder pays less in taxes than its counterparts in the rest of the western world.