Of course, none of the ones you suggested are actually about public welfare, in the sense of the government providing supplemental income for people who are unable to get jobs to provide themselves adequate income. So what we have is not a code word, but rather a code issue.
Except the first one, but with how you framed it as “public welfare codes for...” I don’t see how that one wouldn’t have the same connotations.
Tl;dr: You have a good point, but we seem to be stuck with the historical context.
Unemployment benefits might qualify as public welfare. More tenuously, the various health insurance subsidies and expansions of Medicaid (government health insurance for the very poor) contained in “Obamacare.”
But your point is well taken. The well has been poisoned by political talking points from the 1980s (e.g. welfare queen and the response from the left). I’ll agree that there’s no good reason for us to be trapped in the context from the past, but politicians have not tried very hard to escape that trap.
Of course, none of the ones you suggested are actually about public welfare, in the sense of the government providing supplemental income for people who are unable to get jobs to provide themselves adequate income. So what we have is not a code word, but rather a code issue.
Except the first one, but with how you framed it as “public welfare codes for...” I don’t see how that one wouldn’t have the same connotations.
Tl;dr: You have a good point, but we seem to be stuck with the historical context.
Unemployment benefits might qualify as public welfare. More tenuously, the various health insurance subsidies and expansions of Medicaid (government health insurance for the very poor) contained in “Obamacare.”
But your point is well taken. The well has been poisoned by political talking points from the 1980s (e.g. welfare queen and the response from the left). I’ll agree that there’s no good reason for us to be trapped in the context from the past, but politicians have not tried very hard to escape that trap.