WTF on the road wrote:As I recall, a recent poll of Americans that identify as Evangelicals indicated that something like 60+% believed that poverty indicated a moral failure. Given that those same self-identifying Evangelicals represent a third or better of the electorate and you have a core hostility to any perceived "hand outs" by government.
The many and varied historical reasons the US is significantly more religious than most of the other Western democracies are too numerous to list without the dread "wall o text" but coupled with an aversion to teaching other than thin layers of comic book style history up to and including high school and you get an electorate that believes in the Horatio Alger self-made man myth of unbridled capitalism coupled with a gut feel that accepting help is a moral failing. If the educational system was better we'd know it was essentially Calvinism for Dummies.
and Indiana and Utah.....
