"First, Atlas shrugged. Then he scratched his head in puzzlement."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/opinion/krugman-moochers-against-welfare.html?_r=1Moochers Against Welfare
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 16, 2012
First, Atlas shrugged. Then he scratched his head in puzzlement.
snip//
First, there is Thomas Frank’s thesis in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.’s exploitation of social issues. And it’s true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don’t.
Still, as Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.’s war on contraception.
Finally, Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they “have not used a government program.”
Presumably, then, voters imagine that pledges to slash government spending mean cutting programs for the idle poor, not things they themselves count on. And this is a confusion politicians deliberately encourage. For example, when Mr. Romney responded to the new Obama budget, he condemned Mr. Obama for not taking on entitlement spending — and, in the very next breath, attacked him for cutting Medicare.
The truth, of course, is that the vast bulk of entitlement spending goes to the elderly, the disabled, and working families, so any significant cuts would have to fall largely on people who believe that they don’t use any government program.
The message I take from all this is that pundits who describe America as a fundamentally conservative country are wrong. Yes, voters sent some severe conservatives to Washington. But those voters would be both shocked and angry if such politicians actually imposed their small-government agenda.
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Not decent folks like me!!"
"...that pledges to slash government spending mean cutting programs for the idle poor, not things they themselves count on."
And the frigging MEDIA refuses to correct this mis-perception! 
They love to focus on "Social Security" (employees/employers pay into this) or "Medicare" (employees/employers pay into this). But refuse to point out highway subsidies, farm subsidies including paying farmers not to plant to keep the prices up, disaster relief, a myriad of tax credits at tax time, etc.
Someone needs to make a poster for every Dem congressperson to use that does a bullet of the most common never-reported government "entitlements" that the media ignores and that zombified people don't realize they get but want cut.
