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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

In a supposedly very conservative red state, Arkansas, the recent TV ad message run by the GOP candidate was “young men who are gaming at home and eating Cheetos all day are why we had to implement work requirements for welfare”; it was a very negative ad that made young men look like slackers, layabouts etc.

Of course, only about one percent of welfare recipients are young men; single moms in middle age are the ones who are a large percentage of those receiving the benefits, for very different reasons than Cheetos consumption.

But it shows how attacking young men when they aren’t even the crux of the problem is en vogue.

BTW House Speaker Johnson has said the same thing on TV about young men.

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It's separate from the welfare angle, but there absolutely is a trend of deteriorating workforce/education participation for men. Male labor force participation has fallen sharply over the long run, and the long-run decline is concentrated among men without four-year degrees.

How does something fall sharply over the long run?

Big drop over long time. The other options include falling sharply over the short run = big drop over little time, and falling gradually over short or long time frames.

Did they ever stop blaming video games?

Like you said, it's a very red state, so I guess these young men voted for these people in the first place?

This is the paradox of it all, disenfranchised people voting against their own best interests, all the time. This is populism, this is 2026. yay.

They think all the other young men are moochers and that they themselves are working their butts off trying to find jobs, a girlfriend, and what not but just happen to be down on their luck or the system is pushing them down.

> only about one percent of welfare recipients are young men

False framing of welfare recipients to get people to oppose these programs is not new. There weren't many welfare queens either, yet they held an outsized position in people's understanding of who was receiving benefits.

You can see this in JD Vance's book for example. He argues that the cause of misery in Appalachia is that people are too lazy to work and being on the dole creates a cycle of poverty. He concludes this from like two anecdotes and then argues that we can fix Appalachian poverty by cutting welfare programs.

1) I would think that having grown up with a crackhead mom that JD Vance would know what it's like to live in poverty and have poverty surrounding you.

2) Have you ever looked up what dollar value is of a family that receives welfare? Its around $80k when you account for food, healthcare, rent controls, child care, cell phone plans and the many many other benefits that are present In the modern system. Do you really think that someone who lives on that is going to risk losing part or maybe all of their welfare benefits if they go to start working a minimum wage job that will make them maybe $40k a year?

> I would think that having grown up with a crackhead mom that JD Vance would know what it's like to live in poverty and have poverty surrounding you.

And yet he managed to make so many claims that are not supported by evidence.

> Have you ever looked up what dollar value is of a family that receives welfare? Its around $80k when you account for food, healthcare, rent controls, child care, cell phone plans and the many many other benefits that are present In the modern system. Do you really think that someone who lives on that is going to risk losing part or maybe all of their welfare benefits if they go to start working a minimum wage job that will make them maybe $40k a year?

Welfare cliffs exist. They are things to be fixed. The idea that they are the cause of misery in Appalachia is outrageous.

As I said, "they think".

Lying and blaming whoever seems good targer is very on brand for conservatives. There is nothing "supposedly" to he had here.

After all, that is what people (including men) want when they vote for republicans. They just dont expect themselves to be receiving it.

You conveniently forgot to mention that a lot of the controversy is coming from the GOP side because it was a young white man being used to depict someone that's lazy. You should ask yourself if these people would be as upset if the ad depicted a young black man instead.

You need to ask yourself if they would ever run such an ad starring a black man instead, and what the public reaction would be like then.

Perhaps young White men are right to be sick of being everyone's punching bag.

> You need to ask yourself if they would ever run such an ad starring a black man instead, and what the public reaction would be like then.

Ronald Reagan and the GOP are the ones responsible for popularizing the "welfare queen" stereotype and specifically associating it with black women. It has been a part of the playbook for quite some time.

I mean, yeah, young white men would be upset when someone who's supposed to represent them slanders their group instead, and they won't be as upset if some other, unrelated group is being slandered instead. Is that supposed to be a hot take? What's your point?

The comment I'm responding to left out the race aspect entirely and tried to frame it like the controversy is about the age of the guy depicted, which is a complete misrepresentation of events.

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