Don’t Worry Wisconsin Poor! Walker Will Help You When You Die

Herbert Spencer

So, this is an interesting disgusting and disturbing revelation that I can only see and believe is a purge of the poor.

Today Think Progress reported that Walkers budget bill slashed Wisconsin’s medicaid program and gives more funding to pay for destitute funerals:

As In These Times’s Lindsay Beyerstein notes, this new provision in the budget is coupled with another policy which seems darkly ironic when seen alongside these Medicaid cuts. The Walker budget “recommends increasing payments to counties to cover the costs of burying Wisconsinites who die destitute” — one of the few major increases in spending to be found in the document. Indeed, on page 248 of the governor’s Health and Human Services budget, Walker recommends an “increase” in “funeral and cemetery aids”.

What are you doing, Scott Walker? What exactly is going on on that pea brain of yours?!

I thought the idea was to try to keep people alive not say “Hey, its okay we’ll pay for it when you die”.

I realize that the GOP has always kept the “bootstraps survival of the fittest” mentality to an extent, but this screams Spencer’s complete misunderstanding of Darwin’s evolution theories that came to be known as social Darwinism to me and the forced reemergence of it is disturbing and disgusting.

This is not a concept that did any good for society unless of course you were a privileged white male class and it was used to oppress women, people of color, the poor and many many many immigrants because they could just dismiss their turmoil as being lazy, stupid, or “genetically inferior” to themselves. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

The problem with this is that the turmoil of the lower-class and minorities (today and yesterday) were a result of social oppression and not a result of laziness, intelligence, or genetics. While the right-wing can attempt to feverishly deny that these people are somehow defective and less than human (as well as deny that they are racist, classiest, and sexist); it simply isn’t the case.

Spencer was incorrect and many people suffered for his “theory” for a very long time. There should be absolutely no desire to return to that in this society or any other.