OriginalShroom
Gold Member
- Jan 29, 2013
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For years I've been hearing the Left caterwaul that Reagan lied about the "Welfare Queen".
Turns out he didn't lie.... At least not the way that the Liberals meant he did. It seems that he minimized the crimes.
Turns out he didn't lie.... At least not the way that the Liberals meant he did. It seems that he minimized the crimes.
Linda Taylor, welfare queen: Ronald Reagan made her a notorious American villain. Linda Taylor?s other sins were far worse.
Ronald Reagan loved to tell stories. When he ran for president in 1976, many of Reagans anecdotes converged on a single point: The welfare state is broken, and Im the man to fix it. On the trail, the Republican candidate told a tale about a fancy public housing complex with a gym and a swimming pool. There was also someone in California, hed explain incredulously, who supported herself with food stamps while learning the art of witchcraft. And in stump speech after stump speech, Reagan regaled his supporters with the story of an Illinois woman whose feats of deception were too amazing to be believed.
In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record, the former California governor declared at a campaign rally in January 1976. She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year. As soon as he quoted that dollar amount, the crowd gasped.
Four decades later, Reagans soliloquies on welfare fraud are often remembered as shameless demagoguery. Many accounts report that Reagan coined the term welfare queen, and that this woman in Chicago was a fictional character. In 2007, the New York Times Paul Krugman wrote that the bogus story of the Cadillac-driving welfare queen [was] a gross exaggeration of a minor case of welfare fraud. MSNBCs Chris Matthews says the whole thing is racist malarkeya coded reference to black indolence and criminality designed to appeal to working-class whites.
Though Reagan was known to stretch the truth, he did not invent that woman in Chicago. Her name was Linda Taylor, and it was the Chicago Tribune, not the GOP politician, who dubbed her the welfare queen. It was the Tribune, too, that lavished attention on Taylors jewelry, furs, and Cadillacall of which were real.
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In late September 1974, seven weeks after Sherwin met Taylor for the second time, the detectives findings made the Chicago Tribune. Linda Taylor received Illinois welfare checks and food stamps, even tho[ugh] she was driving three 1974 autosa Cadillac, a Lincoln, and a Chevrolet station wagonclaimed to own four South Side buildings, and was about to leave for a vacation in Hawaii, wrote Pulitzer Prize winner George Bliss. The story detailed a 14-page report that Sherwin had put together illuminating a lifestyle of false identities that seemed calculated to confuse our computerized, credit-oriented society. There was evidence that the 47-year-old Taylor had used three Social Security cards, 27 names, 31 addresses, and 25 phone numbers to fuel her mischief, not to mention 30 different wigs.
As the Tribune and other outlets stayed on the story, those figures continued to rise. Reporters noted that Linda Taylor had used as many as 80 names, and that shed received at least $150,000in illicit welfare cash, the numbers that Ronald Reagan would cite on the campaign trail in 1976. (Though she used dozens of different identities, Ive chosen to call her Linda Taylor in this story, as its how the public came to know her at the height of her infamy.) Taylor also gained a reputation as a master of disguise. "She is black, but is able to pass herself off as Spanish, Filipino, white, and black," the executive director of Illinois Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid told the Associated Press in November 1974. "And it appears she can be any age she wishes, from the early 20s to the early 50s.