Michele Bachmann's 'Submerged' Benefits
Clarence Page

She's a famous foe of "big government" in her presidential campaign. Yet Rep. Michele Bachmann says it is no big deal that her family is reported to have received several hundred thousand dollars in government benefits. We'll let the voters decide how big of a deal they think it is.

After all, if the Minnesota Republican and tea party favorite is receiving government benefits without thinking of them as government benefits, she's hardly alone. Recent studies confirm what many have long suspected: A substantial number of Americans who say they support cutting government programs don't realize just how much they benefit from them.

Many who receive government benefits either don't believe or don't understand that they are government beneficiaries, according to a study last year by Cornell University political scientist Suzanne Mettler.

Those who incorrectly identified themselves as not receiving government help included 60 percent of homeowners who qualify for a mortgage-interest deduction, 53 percent of those who hold government-backed student loans, 47 percent of those who qualified for the Earned Income Tax Credit, 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 40 percent of Medicare recipients and 27 percent of Americans receiving welfare or Medicaid benefits.

Those findings remind me of the South Carolina town hall attendee who famously told his congressman in 2009 to "keep your government hands off my Medicare." The quote quite properly topped the year's Top Ten list of "most famous or important or revealing" quotations at The Yale Book of Quotations. It captures the oddly conflicted way Americans define the role that government spending plays in our lives.

As a mortgage payer, I was not surprised to hear that homeowners and student loan borrowers were least likely to see themselves as receiving a government benefit. After all, we work hard to pay off our loans. That makes it harder for of us to think of tax breaks and government loan guarantees as "benefits," a term that today's political conversations tend to equate with "handouts" -- even in some liberal circles.

Cornell's Mettler refers to such popular programs and policies as "the submerged state," a social welfare system that is virtually hidden in a wide array of popular policies aimed at incentivizing and subsidizing incomes, education, home-owning and other productive activities.

The reasons for the camouflage are political and practical.

For example, liberals and conservatives alike find the Earned Income Tax Credit to be more popular than welfare payments as a way to fight poverty, reward work and help the poor become economically independent. But it's still a government program, even if almost half of its recipients don't realize it.

Which brings us back to Bachmann. Her rapid rise to tie with front-runner Mitt Romney for the Grand Old Party's presidential nomination in a June poll in Iowa has come largely from her relentless assault on the "slavery" of taxes and big-government "welfare" programs. Only recently are we learning how much the "submerged state" has surfaced in her own life.

The Los Angeles Times reported in late June that her late father-in-law's farm, in which she and her husband Marcus Bachmann own a partnership stake, has received nearly $260,000 worth of crop subsidies -- despite her outspoken opposition to farm subsidies.

She insisted in a Fox News interview the next day that she and her husband "have never gotten a penny of money from the farm." But the fact-checking website Politifact noted that her own financial disclosure statements show "at a minimum Bachmann has received somewhere between $32,503 and $105,000 in farm income between 2006 and 2009." That's more than "a penny."

Two days later, NBC News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff reported that her denunciations of Medicaid for swelling the "welfare rolls" had not stopped the mental health clinic run by her husband from collecting more than $137,000 in Medicaid payments for treatment of patients since 2005.

In a statement, a Bachmann's spokeswoman defended the payments, saying it would be "discriminatory" and irresponsible to turn away Medicaid patients. Agreed. You don't have to be "socialists" to help the poor, although you wouldn't know it from some of Bachmann's speeches.

Twitter: @ihavenet

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