Literally everyone receives some form of public assistance. I'll choose low-hanging fruit as an illustrative example: tax advantages for having dependents.if you receive public assistance, you lose the right to vote.
Mortgage interest tax deduction is another big one.
For sure, and that one only applies to upper middle class people. There are too many to name, really, even just looking at the tax code. The list could get exhaustive if we started talking about all the ways in which the government supports businesses that affect consumer prices (that again, mostly rich people benefit from). That number is large enough that the total dollar value of line item tax breaks for specific businesses is larger than the Bush tax cuts on the top income bracket (according to an NPR report from a couple years ago when the rollback of that tax was being debated). "Public assistance" is one of the things that illustrates the dire need we have for tax reform in this country. The one thing I agree with Trump on is that the system is rigged (although I'm not sure we'd agree on prescriptive solutions).
The guy I was talking to was talking about food stamps, section 8 housing, and other forms of cash subsidies to the poor. For some reason he seems to want further disenfranchise the disenfranchised... or something. His main contention was that as the population of people who are entirely reliant on governmental support grows, they will continue to only vote for public officers who commit to spend more on those systems.
Is he familiar with Medicare? How about real estate depreciation? Department of Defense contractors? Recipients of all of these programs routinely vote for candidates that support their continued existence, the difference being that old people, developers, and defense contractors have actual political power.
agreed - like I said - not mine... just one I heard. In fact, he and I got into a discussion because he went on to say "ok, maybe not no vote, but like a fractional vote" which I told him sounded a little like when slaves were counted as some fraction of a "person".