There's been at least a half-century of Republican propaganda demonizing the poor who rely on these services.

It started getting particularly nasty with Reagan's "welfare queens" campaign, which focused on a woman incarcerated for egregious fraud and portrayed her case as if it were the norm, playing not only on fears that welfare was rife with fraud and abuse but also on prejudices against women and non-whites.

To this day, many people envision the welfare system as creating a class of people living luxurious lives off the taxpayer's dime without having to do any work themselves. That this is a far more accurate description of the very representatives still benefiting from such propaganda is a salient historical irony.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen See: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/12/20/255819681...

> Republican propaganda demonizing the poor who rely on these services.

Collaborators like Bill Clinton didn’t exactly help matters either.

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