Posted on 12/19/2013 1:12:20 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
"........Given all the superlatives that attached themselves to Taylor—the executive director of the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid told the Tribune, “She is without a doubt, the biggest welfare cheat of all time”—the charges against her weren’t all that impressive. One of the assistant state’s attorneys prosecuting Taylor told the UPI that all the rumors were “probably” true. “But what makes me angry about all the stories is that most of them are not indictable," she said. "We simply don't have the facts on all of those things.” The Tribune reported that Taylor was filching every form of public assistance imaginable: social security, food stamps, Medicaid, and Aid to Families With Dependent Children. But the hard evidence—canceled AFDC checks, and Medicaid ID cards under multiple names—allowed the state to charge her with stealing $8,000 from the public coffers, nothing more.
Taylor’s welfare fraud case stalled in the courts for long enough that her 1974 indictment remained campaign fodder for Ronald Reagan in 1976. The yawning chasm between “probable” and “indictable” was wide enough for Reagan to label Linda Taylor a public scourge, and for the candidate’s critics to claim she was a media myth. In October 1976, Reagan—who had lost that year’s GOP nomination to Gerald Ford—devoted one of his regular radio commentaries to updating the story of the “welfare queen, as she’s now called.” (While I haven’t found any examples of him saying “welfare queen” on the stump in 1976, he did use the term in this radio address.) According to Reagan, it had now been revealed that this woman (he still didn’t identify her by name) had operated in 14 states using 127 names, claimed to be the mother of 14 children, was using 50 addresses “in Chicago alone,”.......
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
.....and people wonder why Odungo had 6 social security cards
Believe it or not, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), once had a bonafide Welfare Queen who actually lived in public housing right before becoming its chief executive. Sheer in-your-face arrogance of power.
And, blacks called the outer metro counties racist for not joining MARTA.
Long but l o n g !
My God! That woman was a walking disaster and a rolling crime wave!
The only way she could have caused more damage would have been to go into politics.
I had a liberal, just yesterday, tell me that one of the virtues of liberalism is that the truth, while subjective, was now allowed to stand on its merits, rather than dogma.
I called him a bald face liar, on that account. I wish I had seen this story 24 hours earlier. This story is proof positive that liberals wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and stole their wallet. Reagan was a racist and cold-hearted, because he pointed out the nefariousness of this Linda Taylor; even though she was demonstrably more nefarious than even Reagan described.
This article is worthy of a Pulitzer Prize, informative, well written and a great piece of sleuthing. I understand that the author had to take a few potshots at President Reagan to sell it to Slate.
I wonder how Reagan knew about Taylor before the detective and the Tribune did?
It sure knocked the legs from under Reagan’s detractors and the revisionists.
To be sure, many leftists loved the welfare system and their goal was and remains to get as many people on the government teat as possible. Among many other reasons, that's why they hated Reagan. He was trying to destroy their beloved Frankenstein-like creation, the welfare state.
As little as ten years earlier, many prominent Dems would have condemned the welfare state. By the mid-seventies most of them were gone, and the hard leftists in charge. Welfare was good, more people should be on gov. assistance was their motto. The last thing they wanted to do was get people off welfare.
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