The Michael Character: “Means Testing”

A folktivist banger about needless bureaucracy. On “Means Testing” The Michael Character delivers a philippic against the hurdles that are placed between social benefit programs and the society trying to benefit from them.

At least since the Reagan administration, people all over the political spectrum, but mostly in the center and on the right, have had several bushels of pine cones up their butt about the hazy and remote possibility of “welfare queen”-types stealing social benefits from truly needy, hard working American citizens.

It’s one of many persistent fever dreams of the American conservative, that there are hordes of people out there collecting unemployment checks in the morning and buying Cadillacs with the proceeds in the afternoon.

“Means testing,” is the generic term for a variety of procedures designed to test whether the poor are poor enough, the needy are needy enough, the desperate are desperate enough to qualify for the benefits of whatever social welfare program.

Of course, these populations are also the populations of people least likely to have the time and resources to pull together the proper paperwork. So needy or not, they fail the “means test,” and the American conservative and centrist realize their dream of austerity for the poor. Meanwhile, billionaires pay nearly nothing in taxes.

Great system we got here. Off My Cow!

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