They Built A Welfare Queen So You'd Never Look Up

Jermaine Fowler
Jun 14, 2026

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There are two kinds of welfare in America.

One gets investigated. It comes with a caseworker, a drug test, a work requirement, and a form you’re required to file twice a year proving you still deserve to eat. This one is watched, audited, shamed, blamed for national debt and constantly cut. The other is the kind of thing that comes with a ribbon-cutting. It arrives as a corporate subsidy perfumed as economic growth. Or, it comes as a tax break laundered through the code until nobody can smell the public money on it. One is patted down for fraud. The other is handed a parade.

Your tax dollars fund both but you are only ever told to resent one.

Days ago, a man became the world’s first trillionaire ($1,000,000,000,000, a number that strains the eye). Elon Musk’s spacecraft company went public, in the largest offering ever recorded, and the clips ran on the news like a victory lap. Some highlighted the employees who had been given stock and were millionaires by the end of the day. The welders, the technicians, a woman who ran the cafeteria, all of them holding shares that printed a fortune overnight. The rising tide of capitalism, the story goes, lifting all the boats. Corporate welfare was not a part of the headlines about Wall Street and the Nasdaq.

The cameras also did not go to the Tesla factory lot in Fremont, California. Workers at the plant have slept in that lot in their cars, one of them not long ago showering at the factory and microwaving dinner in the break room, because the commute on a Fremont wage was a room he could not afford. The shares that made some workers rich and the wages that put a worker in a car in the lot run up into the same trillion.

Say “corporate welfare” out loud and watch them come out to defend billionaires in the comment sections, as predictable as mold in a damp basement.

“He provides goods,” the first one says. “Unlike the welfare cheat who does nothing.” As if the man asleep in the car in the lot does nothing.

“He earned it,” says the next, who will never hold a thousandth of that money.

“Nobody handed it to him,” says a third, under the headline about the thirty-eight billion that was handed to him.

It came when his companies were dying. A man who worked at Tesla said it plainly: it would not have survived without the government’s money. The public is the reason he exists.

When she took public money to survive, they called it fraud and made her pee in a cup. When he took public money to survive, they called it a rescue and celebrated him as a god.

You were taught to look down for the taker. The decades-long propaganda directs your eyes toward the grocery line, child assistance programs, and Medicaid rolls.

You were never taught to look up.

The Spokesman

Somebody taught the country to look down, and we know his name.

In 1976, on the stump, a Hollywood actor turned candidate for president worked a story he had told before. The crowd was already leaning in. There was a woman in Chicago, he said. She had eighty names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards, four dead husbands collecting on her, a tax-free income over one hundred fifty thousand dollars. Reporters went looking. The names shrank, the income shrank, the husbands turned out mostly invented, and none of it mattered, because the woman was not what they needed. They needed the myth. Reagan handed the country a face to hate, and the face was Black, and poor, and female. The hatred came first. The program only gave it somewhere to point.

He won. After that, the jobs went overseas and never came back. Pay stopped rising. The rules got rewritten so the biggest fortunes paid the least and answered to no one, while a single mother’s check got audited like a bank robbery. He had handed the country someone to watch, and the country watched her for fifty years and never once looked up.

The Woman

The “welfare queen” was never born whole in Reagan’s mouth. It drew from much older slavery-rooted American fantasies of Black women as lazy, hypersexual, dishonest, and undeserving. But Reagan’s story crystallized the figure in the national imagination.

On a winter morning in 1974, Linda Taylor climbed the steps of the Cook County courthouse in a fur coat and dark glasses, her chin level, giving the photographers nothing. The furs were real. The Cadillac at the curb was real. The thirty-three names were real, give or take. The Tribune had run her down all that year, and the Tribune, not the candidate who later made her a legend, printed the words first: welfare queen. Everything the myth needed was there. They only had to keep the parts that worked.

And they had so much to choose from. Taylor was suspected of kidnapping a newborn from a Chicago hospital in 1964. She was suspected of leaving a woman dead and walking off with her name and her credit cards. There were whispers of other vanished people, other graves. The state looked at all of it, a possible kidnapper, a possible murderer, and chose to prosecute the welfare fraud. A baby-stealer makes no headlines about waste and fraud. A woman with a Cadillac and a stack of aliases makes the case all by herself.

So they tried the rarest woman in the system for the one crime that paid. Two years later, a candidate picked up the story and hung every Black mother in the country behind her face. Then every poor mother, whatever her color, each one eyed at the checkout as if she too kept a Cadillac at the curb.

The Ones You Never Pictured

They built her a crown and never built his. He has a name too. In 1987 Rick Scott put his savings into two failing hospitals in El Paso and built them into the largest health care company in the country, three hundred and forty hospitals, a quarter of a million employees. The way he built it was theft.

His hospitals billed Medicare for patients sicker than they were, for diagnoses the patients did not have. At one of them the accountant was ordered to keep two sets of books, one true, one for the government. The company kept a billion dollars in reserve to pay back whatever the auditors caught. The auditors caught little. The reserve became profit. They were robbing the old and the dying, and they had budgeted for the day someone noticed.

In 1997 federal agents raided eighteen of his hospitals in six states. Scott resigned within two weeks and said he knew nothing. He walked away with three hundred million and a consulting deal that paid him to stop working. The company pleaded guilty to fourteen felonies and paid one-point-seven billion dollars, the largest health care fraud the country had ever seen. He was charged with nothing. He spent seventy-five million making himself governor of Florida, and he sits in the Senate today, where he chairs the committee that hunts Medicare fraud.

Every dollar of it comes from somewhere, and you are living in the gap it left. A tooth that rots in the back of a mouth because the dentist wants four hundred up front. The ambulance you don’t call, lying still until the pain decides for you, because the ride is a month of rent. School counselors, one now for a thousand kids, the rest let go. A hundred million people in this country who owe money for the crime of having a body.

The examples span past and present. In Norco, on an ordinary morning in 1988, with the shift not yet off the clock, the Shell refinery the parish had exempted from its taxes opened up and killed seven men. The company stayed along with its exemption and the men did not.

Along the Mississippi, in the stretch people call Cancer Alley, the plants that poison the air owe almost no tax, while the parishes breathing it give up tens of millions to keep them.

Look Up

The phrase corporate welfare is not the left’s and the ledger isn’t kept by socialists. They are the libertarians at the Cato Institute, the free-market shop funded by billionaires, who add it up every year. Their most recent count (2025) is one hundred eighty-one billion dollars a year in corporate welfare.

Per their own definitions; a government contract for a real good is a purchase; a tax break carved out for one company is welfare. By their line, the eleven billion Musk’s car company harvested in credits is welfare. The economists have one word for the food stamp and the subsidy both, a transfer, money moved from the public to someone who gives nothing back. There is no economic difference between the two welfares. And yet there is a drug test on only one of them along with the attitude of disgust.

The takers were never the woman in the grocery line. It also wasn’t the man asleep in the car in the Tesla lot. They were up here the whole time, and they paid to keep your eyes down on them.

You were taught to look down.

Look up.

Not at the rockets, but to the line, climbing into the billions.

We are building historical literacy here, the ability to see the pattern as it is being written in real time and the thing that makes you harder to lie to at a moment when the lies are coming faster than most people can track. If you are reading this and recognizing the pattern, you are not the only one, and the community of people doing that work with you is part of what this is.

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NOTES & SOURCES

The Two Welfares

1. Musk became the first person worth $1 trillion as SpaceX began trading on the Nasdaq.
   https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-spacex-ipo-trillionaire-wealth/
2. The IPO, the largest on record, was set to make more than 4,400 employees millionaires, around 400 of them centimillionaires.
   https://www.inc.com/brian-contreras/4000-spacex-employees-millionaires-elon-musk-ipo/91360232
3. Oxfam, drawing on the Washington Post analysis, on the at-least $38 billion in government support Musk’s companies have received since 2003, and a former employee’s account that Tesla would not have survived without a government loan.
   https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/issues/economic-justice/how-did-elon-musk-make-his-money/
4. Homeless workers and others have camped in vehicles near Tesla’s Fremont plant, priced out by Bay Area rents.
   https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/east-bay/number-of-homeless-camping-outside-fremont-tesla-plant-on-the-rise/2218832/
5. Former Tesla worker Nico Murillo described sleeping in his car in the Fremont lot, showering at the factory and microwaving dinner in the break room.
   https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-layoffs-employee-slept-in-car-nico-murillo-daniel-ho-rebecca-tinucci/

The Plan Had a Spokesman
6. Josh Levin’s Slate investigation into Linda Taylor, the figures Reagan cited in 1976, and the Tribune’s coining of the term.
https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html
7. Chicago magazine on the Tribune origin of the story and the crowd response Reagan kept returning to.
https://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/may-2019/the-true-story-of-chicagos-welfare-queen/

The Woman They Taught You to Picture
8. Slate (Levin) on the Tribune first applying the label in 1974, on Taylor’s furs and Cadillac, and on the crimes police set aside to protect the fraud case.
https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html

The Ones They Never Made You Picture
9. The Justice Department’s case describing how Columbia/HCA defrauded Medicare, including false cost reports and reserve accounts kept to repay what auditors might catch.
https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/1998/December/611civ.htm
10. Florida Phoenix on the Columbia/HCA settlement, Scott’s resignation and roughly $300 million parachute, and his path from governor to the Senate.
https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/05/13/sen-rick-scott-again-maintains-that-clinton-doj-went-after-me-when-he-led-his-hospital-chain/
11. Rick Scott chairs the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging, which conducts oversight of Medicare.
https://www.aging.senate.gov/press-releases/chairman-rick-scott-announces-2026-priorities-for-senate-aging-committee-building-on-2025-results
12. A 2022 KFF Health News investigation found roughly 100 million people in the U.S. carry medical debt.
https://kffhealthnews.org/health-care-costs/diagnosis-debt-investigation-100-million-americans-hidden-medical-debt/
13. A monument at the plant memorializes the seven Shell workers killed in the May 5, 1988 Norco refinery explosion.
https://lobservateur.com/1998/05/06/monument-dedicated-at-shell-to-men-who-died/
14. ProPublica on Louisiana’s Industrial Tax Exemption Program and the revenue parishes forgo to keep the plants.
https://www.propublica.org/article/chemical-companies-are-building-their-plants-overseas-and-shipping-them-back-in-they-still-get-state-tax-breaks

Look Up
15. The Cato Institute’s 2025 study puts federal corporate welfare at roughly $181 billion a year.
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/corporate-welfare-federal-budget-0
16. The term belongs to Ralph Nader, who spent decades calling these subsidies what they are.
https://nader.org/1992/01/12/corporate-welfare/
17. Tesla has earned roughly $11 billion selling regulatory credits to rival automakers.
https://www.axios.com/2025/01/09/tesla-clean-credits-trump

Suggested Reading
Ange-Marie Hancock, The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen (NYU Press, 2004) — how the figure was built, and why disgust ends the argument before it starts.

David Cay Johnston, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (Portfolio, 2007) — the Pulitzer reporter’s tour of how the public’s money moves quietly upward.