Middle class comes to depend on safety net more than poor
22.05.12
He says too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the tea party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region's long-serving Democratic congressman.
Yet this year, as in each of the last three years, Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.
There is little poverty here in Chisago County, northeast of Minneapolis, where cheap housing for commuters is gradually replacing farmland. But Gulbranson and many other residents who describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the U.S. middle class and as opponents of government largess are drawing more deeply on that government with each passing year.
Source: Anchorage Daily News
