Joel Blau wrote: > > Or in other words (and this is true across all welfare states), if we > don't pay give the affluent some money, the poor will never get > theirs.
Simple answer: Yes. And why not? More complex. The contrast of "affluent" and "poor" tends towards differentiating the working class into strata and simply ignoring the exploiters, who after all make up a very small percentage of the population. (Probably around 2%). They are few enough in numbers to make social services/payments to them a trivial matter and raising it politically distracting. Among the various strata of the working class, from desperately poor to quite affluent: means testing is the perfect way to fragment, depoliticize, and weaken workers. Means testing does to the working class as a whole what the (so-called) Merit System does to unity among faculty (K-12 and university). Means-Testing and Merit systems are two of the most powerful weapons the capitalist class has to keep workers down. Carrol
