A study on politics, propaganda, and potential.
For people to unite and rise up against something, especially something big, they will all have their own reasons. Varying problems with the powerful structure. The key lies in finding the thing people all want in common, rather than focusing only on single issues. The core principle is what people can unite behind from various perspectives and reasons.
Freedom is one principle that can unite people from various specific issues to overtake a controlling structure. Just an example. This principle would be anti-tyrant or anti-overreach etc, and pro-freedom.
I think the core principle can also become clear from looking at the varied reasons people have issues & determining what the same underlying factor is.
It’d be useful to study what prevents it and what’s really under the surface. The focus here will be on the US.
The scapegoat pattern
Interestingly, these varying groups can be turned against one another by the very structure that causes their problems. We can see this in the ways propaganda has been used to blame an out group for the failings of the power structure. The nazis blamed Jews for the struggles of Germans as a historical example.
Modernly in the US, low wages and job insecurity has been blamed on immigrants. All the while, the top 1% gets more and more wealthy, and the people get poorer due to rising costs, unable to afford healthcare, unable to afford housing.
None trickles down, yet propaganda convinces people that their poor immigrant neighbor (among other scapegoats) is the reason they’re poor.
In reality, this is a misdirect to keep the truth from becoming clear.
The people targeted with this propaganda have more in common with their poor immigrant neighbors than with the ones feeding them the propaganda.
So what unites these struggles?
Poor job market, high cost of living, a medical care & insurance system that exploits them legally, food insecurity, poor economy, rising costs without fair wages, lack of safety nets, and so on. The system is corrupt, and benefits the same top 1% that convinces people to blame each other. Meanwhile, the common people are working hard and still barely making ends meet if at all.
Clearly it’s not poor immigrants who are masterminding this. Undocumented immigrants are often exploited with undercut wages and sometimes even threatened. Undocumented immigrants don’t receive federal benefits, though they do contribute taxes to our economy. With lower wages, they contribute with higher tax rates than the wealthiest businesses and Americans. In 2022, their contribution was $96.7 billion.
And the blame doesn’t lie with poor citizens receiving social benefits either.
The propagandists claim very loudly that social programs are fraudulent, mainly benefitting the mythic “welfare queens.” This idea started with the very same movement that created the failed idea of trickle down economics.
Propaganda math
So what is the percentage of “fraud” (where individuals sell and profit off of their SNAP benefits)? According to the USDA government website, the rate of SNAP trafficking is 1%. Of course there are other issues, such as errors when incorrect payments are made by the system, but that is not the same as the fraud boogeyman that some claim is stealing from taxpayers.
Let’s find out exactly how much this fraud costs us.
- Taxpayers contributed 1.5% of federal income tax dollars to SNAP in 2024.
- In 2024, the median household income was $83,730. We’ll use this as our starting point.
- If married filing jointly, the federal income tax burden is an estimated $9,584.
Overall SNAP contribution from this household (1.5% of federal tax):
- $143.76
SNAP fraud annual cost (1% fraud rate):
- $1.44.
That is one dollar and forty four cents (rounded up).
This means that the total amount an average middle class taxpayer wastes on fraud is about $1-$1.50 annually.
The rest of that money allows the other 99% of SNAP recipients to eat, of which many are children in families that can’t afford food.
Further, the dollar amount contributed goes down with each lower bracket.
Either way, with 1.5% of federal funding supporting SNAP as a whole, and only 1% out of that being fraudulent, SNAP fraud makes up 0.015% of our federal funding, a tiny fraction of a percent. It really makes you wonder where exactly the alleged welfare queens are.
Generally, the cost of fraudulent use of food stamps for taxpayers is minuscule. But the funds as a whole benefit the entire economy and actually prevent larger costs in the long term.
Many of the people who benefit from SNAP, nearly half, are children in the family household. SNAP is highly efficient, and helps 42 million Americans with food insecurity. For each dollar of SNAP spent, the economic benefit produced is $1.50.
In one study, 70% of people on SNAP benefits were employed full time, which again doesn’t align with the “lazy welfare queen” trope pushed by propaganda. And it brings questions:
- Why is SNAP demonized when it actually boosts the economy – as every dollar spent with SNAP produces $1.50 in economic activity?
- Why are people who are employed full time, often at some of the richest businesses worldwide, unable to afford food?
In one of the wealthiest nations in the world, there’s no excuse for our people to be starving.
Poison parties
We support probably the most billionaires, yet many people refuse to go to the doctor because they can’t afford the bill, and can’t afford to miss work. Worse, the billionaires and their corporations influence our government to avoid regulation, often while knowingly harming human health.
Some of these companies manufacture harmful chemicals and toxins, hide the facts of the severe impacts they have, and make employees work in hazardous conditions. This is a repeating pattern across decades.
We all have heard about DuPont’s habit of poisoning the public by now. Since 1970, they’ve poisoned the people, the animals, the water, and the land. Since 1970, they covered it up. And for five decades, they’ve still been afloat to continue. This cycle creates higher cancer rates, even when it could’ve been prevented. Accountability is rare for these companies, most don’t get near the level of public controversy and consequences that DuPont has, if at all.
Worse is that the current administration has stacked the EPA with former lobbyists for these very companies. When workers and those living near these factories get sick, they’re let go or fought tooth and nail by the very companies that poisoned them.
Corporate welfare queens
But what about public tax dollars spent on corporate subsidies? Corporate welfare costs hundreds of billions, while SNAP fraud costs about $1 per taxpayer.
Much of this information comes from Corporate Welfare in the Federal Budget | Cato Institute, which was a huge help in researching.
Corporate welfare tends to return a third of the value of the public dollars spent on it. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on this, far outweighing “wasted” funding allocated for the public good.
Many companies that receive these public dollars abuse them, like Intel for example. 8.5 billion dollars of taxpayer money was given to Intel in the form of a grant from the CHIPS Act. Then, they laid off 15% of their workforce (15,000 jobs). Their CEO, who lobbied for the grant, said afterwards that they’d need at least a CHIPS-2 (aka, to be given more money from public taxes) in order to bounce back.
Intel isn’t alone though, as this too is a longstanding pattern.
During the 2008 recession, families struggled and banks were bailed out, only to use the people’s money to give themselves raises and bonuses.
If that’s not a welfare queen, I don’t know what is.
These corporations become dependent on welfare. They take risks with low payoffs when they’re being financed by the people’s money. They lobby and bribe politicians who then pad their pockets with public dollars in return.
Let them eat nothing
They clearly don’t respect the public. They admit that they are not concerned with providing jobs or stability for the people. In fact, they prefer to operate with as few people on payroll as possible, while they mooch off of the tax dollars that sustain them, piling more onto their already unimaginable wealth.
This has actually been a relatively recent surge. Corporations lately have been proud of cutting staff, even seemingly bragging about it publicly. What’s strikingly odd is that this goes against the status quo that has existed for decades before now.
Until recently, a company’s strength was reflected in its employment. Mass workforce cuts and layoffs were a sign of weakness and instability in businesses. Now, they celebrate it.
Meanwhile, talking heads in the government sell the public on giving corporations welfare packages, under the guise of creating domestic jobs.
This is enabled by the very representatives that the people elected to protect their interests. It doesn’t benefit the people as much as it benefits politicians and the corporations that buy them. It doesn’t trickle down. It costs more than it’s worth, and we all foot the bill.
Number 1!
But what about our most prioritized area? Defense, which also majorly supports large corporations?
This information is according to the usaspending.gov site as of early November 2025 (it tracks awards amounted from trailing the last 12 months of transactions):
- This year, $35.8 billion has been spent on Lockheed Martin alone.
- There is also $16.5 billion for Boeing, over 91% of which is for defense.
- Electric Boat Corporation, a company I hadn’t heard of, also suddenly scored $19 billion in military contracts.
Outreach and influence on other countries must be important, given our military spending.
Interestingly, less than 1% of the budget was allocated to USAID by comparison. Humanitarian aid programs like this have a massive positive impact on the world. Even at the 1% funding level, it was a main source of aid for countries in need. USAID saved 90 million lives across the globe over the last couple decades.
Yet humanitarian aid is another boogeyman that propaganda calls un-impactful, expensive and wasteful. This is what they claim is “antithetical to American values.” This is what they eliminate so they can increase corporate welfare, tax cuts for the rich, and the military.
Cuts to USAID are expected to result in the preventable deaths of 14 million people by 2030. It feels quite similar to the 1% of fraud cases in SNAP benefits.
The public is told to be outraged about pennies, while hundreds of billions blow up ships in South America.
The sneaky scam
The companies that are subsidized by the government, given tax breaks, grants, and government contracts, all benefit massively from public money. The funding (and cost) is on a scale that’s unimaginable when compared to the programs they want to destroy.
There’s also a hidden aspect that these companies benefit from as another form of corporate welfare. Many people working at Amazon for example, one of the richest companies headed by one of the richest billionaires in the world, are on food stamps.
Many large companies like this don’t pay their fair share of taxes due to legal tax breaks, meanwhile their employees are on public assistance programs, and public taxes funnel back into them via the government.
They have it made, truly. They get all the loopholes. Big tax breaks reduce their contribution. They don’t have to pay their employees fairly. And they don’t have to provide proper insurance options, because publicly funded programs will take care of their underpaid employees for them. Public taxes subsidize corporate payrolls.
Further, with 72.5 million Americans on some type of benefit program (SNAP included), more than one in five people are in need of some kind assistance.
Why is that? Why can’t Americans afford basic necessities?
The wrong 1%
These power structures, funded by billionaires and corporations, have convinced half the population that the $1 of their taxes “wasted” per year on food stamps fraud is the reason they can’t afford anything. Is this not an outrageous claim?
They’ve convinced people to focus on the wrong 1%.
Who’s really benefiting from all of this?
Why are the people really struggling?
When people see the truth about the system, rather than the propaganda they’re told, it’s infuriating for them. And rightfully so. But even for those who have been targeted with propaganda, they likely see some of these truths already. That’s where people can unite. We’re all being exploited, and we all need to stand together. No matter what issue is one’s personal reason.
So… what is anti-corruption, anti-exploitation, anti-tyranny?
Truth, justice, freedom, fairness.
Security. Dignity.
For now, this is the stage of truth, our collective rude awakening.
They know the rule that we forgot. United we stand, divided we fall. We’re starting to remember that again.
When we finally stand together, we will not allow ourselves to be dehumanized. We will not allow lies and propaganda to separate us nor distract us from reality. We will ensure justice. We will be dignified. We will overcome tyranny.
The only revolution that fails is the one where people keep fighting each other instead of the system that profits from the fight.