takes a parasite to know a parasite

My hometown paper has an absolutely hilarious story about a farmer in Raytown. You see, apparently some guy painted the side of a tractor trailer with the phrase:

Are you a producer or parasite
Democrats - Party of Parasites

Here's the picture from the story taken by Donald Bradley:


The lefty sphere of the intertubes has had some fun with this, because the Kansas City Star did a little investigative journalism (!). It turns out anti-welfare small-town farmer David Jungerman is actually a posterboy for everything that's wrong with ag subsidies specifically and corporate welfare more generally.

Over the past 15 years, Jungerman has taken over $1 million worth of federal farm subsidies.

Hi-larious.

Now, generally speaking, I think there's a lot more common ground for average Democrats and Republicans to work together on issues - I argue strongly that most Americans see the world pretty similarly and that Democrats in particular would benefit from a little less mockery of Republicans and a little more cooperation.

However, I think it's also important for my more conservative friends to understand that this is the kind of stuff that gets associated with the GOP; this is what people hear about at places like Think Progress and Daily Kos. This is an act of idiocy, showing the worst of entitlement mentality combined with an incendiary lack of taste. Nevermind the policy debate about the real world benefits of social insurance programs like TANF/welfare, SNAP/food stamps, unemployment insurance, health insurance, old age insurance, disability insurance, and so forth, and nevermind the actual political leanings of Jungerman (in response to the publicity the stories have created for him, he has said that

he's not even a die-hard Republican. He voted for Claire McCaskill when she won a U.S. Senate seat in 2006.)

the image of a million-dollar welfare queen lobbing personal insults at people who

Always have their hand out for whatever the government will give them

is just farcical.

And it raises the tricky question for Republicans: does Jungerman represent the economic views of your party? There are all too many people in both parties that are more interested in the gamesmanship of hurling insults back and forth than actually crafting policy options to solve problems and make us more peaceful and prosperous. If we ended all government welfare tomorrow, it would devastate poor people with no other cushion. But in absolute terms, the amount of money lost by richer folks would be much, much, much greater, from war profiteers to financial crooks to big farmers. If we can't be intellectually honest about current federal spending, then we can't move forward on deciding how we want to change spending in the future.