blaming the poor

(Apology: This entry is not well structured on account of being written after my sleep was disturbed,...)

The other day I had a casual conversation with a woman working in an El Paso hospital.
I was surprised to hear her say something roughly like the following:

I am of Hispanic descent, but it bothers me when I see people here getting free medical care.
I mean my father and mother worked all their lives so they could have health care; but these
people come from Mexico and they don't...

Now, that's not exactly what she said, but the general idea is something I've heard expressed several times by different people here in the land of the free.

I suspect, however, that this is simply a fallacious inference. The people making this complaint never stop to think about damage or unfairness from the other end of the socio-economomic divide. To what extent do the super-rich receive benefits from the government in the form of tax cuts, or even government subsidies, etc.? (Consider the way in which George W. Bush earned his first million--via investing the money of wealthy friends, plus getting the benefit of a new baseball stadium built with taxpayer money.....)

[Moreover, even if someone comes from Mexico to use a USA hospital, I don't see that is necessarily wrong. The USA and Mexico have economic connections. NAFTA has damaged the Mexican economy and increased poverty, while benefitting people in the USA. Unfortunately the woman I was talking to today is not among those who benefit from NAFTA, so there is an irony here. She is as much a victim of the USA ruling class as are the people she is criticizing. So, ultimately, that's sad and a sign of successful propaganda, a political/cultural system which prevents people from seeing clearly.]

What about the freebies and perks which the super-rich get?

That's a question the complainers never seem to ponder.

(Do you tell me it's all a matter of "trickle down" economics? Sorry, that myth
is very adequately debunked in John Quiggin's Zombie Economics (2010, Princeton University Press)

There should be a name for this fallacy, but I'm not able to make one up right now.

(The rule seems to be: When in doubt about the cause of a social problem, blame the people least able to defend themselves, or blame those at the bottom of the social hierarchy...
Or, perhaps: Notice the small crimes of the poor, and ignore the larger crimes of the wealthy....
Only I'm not so sure about the assumption that the poor are actually guilty of any crime or wrong-doing when they use the system any way they can in order to simply survive... The Elephant in the room that's being ignored is: There shouldn't be any poor people AND their poverty is a consequence of the wealth of the Super-Rich!)

The error here is tantamount to focusing on a mouse that's just stolen a crumb of cheese which fell off your table .... at the same time you fail to see the hungry beast standing behind you, ready to devour you.....

(That image is not quite accurate, but it will have to do for now.)