This stuck out for me.
I got the impression that she has mixed feelings about assistance programs but recognises their importance whilst wanting them to be applied fairly.
Yeah I agree with that point they made. I just didn't explicitly say it. I should have probably.
What I focused on was the idea that it often boils down to a feeling. And I agree with that too, but I wanted to point that it is important how people arrive at those feelings.
GP showed some example, but I didn't find those convincing. I think a lot of what people believe and think gets acquired and filtered through 3rd party sources (media, friends, parents, teacher etc). And even though a lot of people have strong feelings about welfare, they might not have gotten those from their own experiences.
And then of course there are whole industries (marketing, pr, propaganda) whose goal is manage feeling, perceptions and ideas in others.
Anyway, to recap I didn't disagree with their main idea, just wanted to expand on one part of it.
Have you directly stopped and talked to those people buying rugs? Or at a restaurant? Are you sure they are not just hipster kids wearing second-hand clothes but who might work at Google or have a rich daddy with a trust fund?. Maybe you did, but I doubt it.
So a lot of opinions and "feels" people have about welfare is what they are _told_ to have. By their parents, teacher, media, friends, TV, magazines, movies, etc.
I lived with a conservative family for many years, and I was of firm opionion that welfare queens are everywhere wasting pulblic's money and that's where all out taxes were. It was a very sincere and string opionion. But it was put in not head not my socializing with "welfare queens" but by White Middle Class Americans, who also didn't really socialize much with welfare recipients, but instead listened to Fox News all day every day.
So to make story short, it is about the "feels" but the feels are often easily updated/manipulated/used by whomever you let control your thought processes.