Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

In fact, the perception of more violence is rather like what’s happened in the case of welfare: people’s image is that welfare has gone way up, but the reality is, it’s gone way, way down.49 So I don’t know if you’ve looked at the polls on this, but people’s attitudes are really quite striking. For example, when you ask them, “Do you think we’re spending too much on welfare or too little?,” 44 percent say we’re spending too much, and 23 percent say we’re spending too little. But if you take exactly the same question and you just replace the word “welfare” with “assistance to the poor”—so now you’re saying, “Are we giving too much or too little assistance to the poor?”—the numbers change radically: 13 percent say it’s too much, and 64 percent say it’s too little.50 Alright, that’s kind of funny: what’s welfare? It’s assistance to the poor. So how come you get this strange result? Because people have bought the racist line. The image they have of “welfare” is black mothers driving Cadillacs past some poor white guy who’s working: Reaganite propaganda. And I think it’s pretty much the same kind of story with the perception of more violence.