Middle-Class Welfare State Is Invisible by Design: Ezra Klein

By Ezra Klein Feb 29, 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-01/middle-class-welfare-state-invisible-by-design-commentary-by-ezra-klein.html

What is a government program? And are you on one right now? Those are the questions Cornell University political scientist Suzanne Mettler has been posing.
For her book “The Submerged State,” she asked a scientifically selected sample of 1,400 Americans whether they had ever used a government social program. Only 43 percent copped to having done so. Then she read off 21 social programs, such as Medicare (FFSOMED) and the home-mortgage interest deduction, and asked the same question again: Have you ever used a government social program? This time, 96 percent said yes, in fact, they had.

Ezra Klein is a columnist and blogger at The Washington Post and a policy analyst for MSNBC. His work focuses on domestic and economic policy-making, as well as the political system that's constantly screwing it up.

According to Mettler’s survey, 60 percent of those who benefit from the home-mortgage interest deduction didn’t think they had ever used a government social program. Fifty-three percent of those with student loans didn’t think they had used one. Among Social Security beneficiaries, 44 percent thought themselves unsullied by the touch of government, and among Medicare beneficiaries, 39 percent said the same. Twenty-seven percent of those in public housing answered in the negative, as did 25 percent of those on food stamps.
The implication seemed to be that Americans are hypocrites, or at least woefully uninformed. But in forthcoming research, Mettler and co-author Julianna Koch dig deeper, and find the reality is more complicated.
Their new paper argues that “policy design” is an important determinant of whether people recognize they’re using a government program or not. Some programs, like food stamps and Medicaid (USBOMDCA), force recipients to go to a government office and apply for them. Those are the programs that beneficiaries are most likely to recognize as government social programs.
Other programs, like Medicare, are provided by the government, but eligibility is mostly automatic, and recipients have paid into them. Beneficiaries of such programs are somewhat less likely to realize they’re on a government dole than beneficiaries of means-tested programs.

Submerged State