Some myths never die, they just get recycled with every passing generation.
Back in the 1970s, the first time Ronald Reagan ran for president, he spun a tale about “strapping young bucks” buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. Not because it had happened, let alone because he had witnessed it, but rather, because he knew it would play well with a public predisposed to think the worst of persons receiving so-called “welfare” benefits. Especially if the persons they were asked to imagine were black (as was surely the case here, given the longstanding racialized term Reagan had used).
Since then, I’ve heard one or another version of the T-bone story, always updated to sound even more profligate and thus to enrage a public raised on anti-welfare rhetoric for at least a half-century. First, the T-bone morphed into the more prestigious filet mignon, then shrimp, and most recently “king crab legs,” when described by U.S. Congressman Louis Gohmert on the floor of the House a few years ago.
To hear these stories, one would believe — and they are told so that you will believe — that poor people are regularly living it up at taxpayer expense and gorging themselves…
