Because the residents keep electing Republicans who sell the message that the poor should pull themselves up by the bootstraps and that real Kansans can get everything they need with hard work and salt of fhe earth something something. The voters blame those that are poorer than themselves instead of seeing the problem is self inflicted by continuing to elect Republicans.
Figure it is pretty much the same thing in other states that keep electing Republicans.
Republican Texas specifically denies using federal money to supplement the state funds for Medicaid and unemployment. Free money just sitting on the table and Texas gives the federal government the bird and tells citizens they should have been born rich.
Then Republicans campaign saying, “Does your life on public assistance suck? That’s because a Democrat is president. If you instead pay more taxes, then we can hurt the Blacks and Mexicans even more so you will feel higher than a Black person.”
That’s the wild thing about the Medicaid expansion. For years, it was 100% federally funded. The right used fearmongering about that finding dropping off… but it’s still like 95% federally funded…
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They’re doing it to be dicks. Ask me how I know. - South Carolina resident
To those people (conservatives), charity is for the “deserving”, which most of these people aren’t in their view. This is why conservatives prefer charity be left to the rich and private organizations to decide who is deserving of what charity (and for the tax breaks) rather than the government using tax dollars to give it to everyone. Furthermore, it is abhorrent to them to be forced to give charity via taxes, especially to “just anyone”, especially those they may feel “undeserving” for whatever arbitrary reason they may invent.
These people don’t believe that they can be on top unless people are ground to dirt beneath them because they see life as a zero-sum game which must be “won” at the expense of others, and that this is the “natural order of things”. The very idea of disrupting this hierarchy with the concept of equality or equity is profane to conservatives, so they will fight any attempt at it.
This video from The Alt Right Playbook does a good job of explaining this:
