When they’re not expressing shock over the growing participation of women, Hispanics and African American voters in the election, Republicans are reacting to President Obama’s victory by acknowledging the party’s shortcomings in appealing to non-white voters. Some members of the GOP, like former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, are even suggesting that the party should cut a deal with Democrats and pass comprehensive immigration reform to win votes from the growing Latino population.

But in acknowledging the nation’s changing demographics, Republicans and conservative pundits are also advancing a new pernicious narrative: America has permanently shifted from a white male-dominated electorate, to a new crop of minority voters who support Democrats because they are dependent upon government:

– BILL O’REILLY: “The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?” [Fox News, 11/6/2012]

– RUSH LIMBAUGH: “It’s just very difficult to beat Santa Claus. It is practically impossible to beat Santa Claus. People are not going to vote against Santa Clause especially if the alternative is being your own Santa Claus. [The Rush Limbaugh Show, 11/7/2012]

– SEAN HANNITY: “One other thing that we need to come to terms with as a result of last night. What appears to have happened is that the liberal welfare state in this country has now grown. More and more Americans have become dependent on that welfare state. As they have, they have found themselves siding with the party of government.” [Fox News, 11/7/2012]

– STUART VARNEY: “With Obama’s victory, the takers have taken over. The makers are clearly in the minority.” [Fox Business, 11/7/2012]

Conservatives are doubling down on Romney’s claim that 47 percent of Americans refuse to take “personal responsibility and care for their lives” — though the argument is highly misleading. In fact, to the extent that Americans are growing dependent upon government, Republican voters are raking in a greater share of the benefits.

The recession has pushed more lower-income Americans to rely on government assistance like food stamps, but “nearly 70 percent of all benefits of these programs go to white people.” Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that the overwhelming majority “of counties with the fastest-growth in food-stamp aid during the last four years voted for the Republican presidential candidate in 2008.” These included Republican strongholds like King County, Texas, where 96 percent of voters supported Romney.

More than 90 percent of the population has turned to government programs at one point or another, ranging from Social Security pay outs to government grants or contracts — including the traditional Republican block of higher-income voters. Top earners disproportionately benefit from the a plethora of government tax breaks that deplete the government of revenue in the same way that access benefits do. According to a study from the Tax Policy Center, the top 1 percent of income earners, those who take home in excess of $400,000 a year, account for almost a quarter all tax breaks, saving more than $250 billion a year in taxes. Meanwhile, the bottom 60 percent of wage earners take in just over 20 percent of annual tax breaks, or approximately $217 billion in breaks each year. Exit polls show that Americans earning an income of $250,000 or more (around the top 2 percent of earners) “voted for Romney approximately 1.5:1.”

After releasing false radio and television ads about the auto bailout, Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign unveiled a new commercial that highlights another one of the candidate’s favorite false claims. This ad, first flagged by the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, revives Romney’s claim that President Obama has “gutted the welfare work requirement” through a waiver program that Republican governors, including Romney himself, have long asked for.

The ad hits Obama on a number of issues, but the most blatantly false of its claims are aimed at welfare:

NARRATOR: If you want to know President Obama’s second term agenda, look at his first: gutted the work requirement for welfare. Doubled the number of able-bodied adults without children on food stamps. Record unemployment. More women in poverty than ever before. Borrowed from China and increased the debt to over $16 trillion, passing the burden onto the next generation. We may have made it through President Obama’s first term – it’s our children who can’t afford a second.

Watch it:

As reporters, fact-checkers, and the directive Obama signed made abundantly clear, the welfare work requirements will remain in place even if states are granted waivers. The major change is that states will be granted more leeway in how they transition welfare recipients into jobs. That is a change sought and supported by many Republican governors, like Romney endorser Rick Snyder (MI), who said of the program, “More flexibility to governors is a good thing.”

The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program certainly needs changes — since 1996, it has failed to provide America’s poorest families the assistance they need. But with the election in the balance, Romney has now resorted to making claims in multiple advertisements that even members of his own party say are false.

A study by the Congressional Research Service has determined that federal programs to assist low-income Americans — welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, Pell Grants, and so on — grew from a total of $563 billion in 2008 to $746 billion in 2011, according to a report today from The Hill. This increase of 33 percent so alarmed Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) that he fired off a statement yesterday calling for a wholesale retooling of the American social safety net:

These astounding figures demonstrate that United States spends more on federal welfare than any other program in the federal budget. It is time to restore—not retreat from—the moral principles of the 1996 welfare reform. Such reforms, combined with measures to promote growth, will help both the recipient and the Treasury. [...]

No longer should we measure compassion by how much money the government spends but by how many people we help to rise out of poverty. Welfare assistance should be seen as temporary whenever possible, and the goal must be to help more of our fellow citizens attain gainful employment and financial independence. This is about more than rescuing our finances. It’s about creating a more optimistic future for millions of struggling Americans.

Sessions’ complaint here is not simply wrong. It’s totally bizarre. The CRS report, which Sen. Sessions and other minority members of the Senate Budget Committee requested, makes clear that the bulk of the growth occurred between 2008 and 2009 due to the stimulus — by definition, a temporary measure. Sessions also makes no mention of the 2008 economic collapse, even though caseloads for programs such as Medicaid and food stamps naturally rise in an economic downturn as more Americans lose jobs and incomes and thus need greater help.

Medicaid spending will probably continue to increase because the growth of health care costs outpaces growth in the overall economy. But that problem is unique to Medicare and Medicaid, and long pre-dates the recession or the Obama administration. Other low-income programs such as food stamps are already anticipated to return to their historic trends as a share of the economy, once the effects of the recession and the stimulus wane.

By “the moral principles of the 1996 welfare reform” Sessions most likely means the budget engineered by vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan and passed by House Republicans, which block grants most low-income programs in the same way the 1996 reform did with welfare. Those block grants act as a smoke screen to hide massive cuts that slash Medicaid by a third in ten years — kicking 14 to 27 million people off the program — while driving spending on other low-income support programs down to their lowest levels in half a century. Beyond the ten year window, those cuts go even deeper. (There’s also a strong case that welfare reform made things worse for struggling families on its own terms.)

The official poverty rate currently stands at over 15 percent, a high it’s only touched twice since the 1960s. For children it’s almost 22 percent. Alternative poverty measures meant to disentangle income and assistance programs show that food stamps alone kept more than four million people above the poverty line in 2010, while reducing poverty’s severity for millions more. Programs to help low-income Americans quite naturally ramp up in times of economic hardship. That’s what they’re supposed to do.

Yesterday, the Huffington Post unearthed video from last year of Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan echoing Mitt Romney’s now-infamous comment about the “47 percent.’ Ryan raised the specter of an America going over the moral tipping point to become a country “of takers, not makers,” then declared that 30 percent of Americans don’t believe in the American dream:

Today, 70 percent of Americans get more benefits from the federal government in dollar value than they pay back in taxes. So you could argue that we’re already past that [moral] tipping point. The good news is survey after survey, poll after poll, still shows that we are a center-right 70-30 country. Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want their welfare state.

Watch it:

It’s not clear what surveys Ryan is referring to. To the extent that he has a case, it appears to be “a loose pastiche of factual misstatements and illogic,” as New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait put it. After all, a poll by the Pew Research Center in July of 2011 found large majorities opposed to benefit cuts for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Another poll by Gallup in January of 2011 found majorities from 52 to 67 percent opposing cuts in education, Social Security, Medicare, anti-poverty programs, and even arts and science funding. And a year before that, a joint poll by The Economist and YouGov asked voters about aid to the poor and unemployment benefits, as well as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security again. Support for cuts in any of these areas didn’t even crack 20 percent.

It’s true that Americans tend to be skeptical of government spending in the abstract, and prefer amorphous “spending cuts” to “tax hikes.” But when asked about concrete programs serving concrete needs their refusal to trim the social safety net is striking. Romney and Ryan’s proposed budgets, meanwhile, would slash Medicaid by a third over the next decade, could substantially increase what seniors pay for their health care, and would decimate welfare programs such as food stamps, unemployment benefits, assistance to needy families, and education.

Republican Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan is returning to Washington on Thursday to cast what will likely be his last vote before the November election. House Republicans are holding a vote to block the much-maligned welfare waivers that the Obama administration granted states that wanted to experiment with their welfare-to-work programs.

Ryan will likely support the legislation. “The waiver I don’t think meets the letter of the law. The law was not intended to allow states to waive the work requirements,” Ryan said last week. “If states waive work requirements, people will not go from welfare to work. They will stay on welfare. That’s not good for anybody.”

For starters, the waivers do not waive the work requirements. And as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted, in 2002 Ryan inserted a provision into a reauthorization of the welfare law that gave his home state “a significant break in meeting new federal work rules“:

Those measures — patterned after a Bush administration plan — require states to have 70% of their welfare recipients working by 2007. That’s compared with an average of about one-third now.

But under the change sought by Ryan, a Janesville Republican, the states with the biggest drop in their welfare caseloads since 1995 would have a lower threshold to meet.

Wisconsin had the third-biggest caseload drop between 1995 and 2001 — 76%. Under Ryan’s change, that would mean the state would need to have 54% of its welfare recipients working by 2007, instead of 70%. Sixteen other states would get relief under the change, but only two states would benefit more than Wisconsin.

As ThinkProgress reported, Ryan argued that this provision would “give the state more flexibility in meeting the tough new federal work requirements expected to be enacted this year — including more use of education and training to help move people into better-paying jobs.”

Now, of course, Ryan is singing a different tune, claiming that flexibility “is not the American idea. That’s a welfare state.” On Wednesday, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) attempted to move a measure blocking the administration’s waivers through the Senate by unanimous consent, but was blocked by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD).

Several weeks ago, the Romney campaign launched dishonest series of attacks claiming that the Obama administration has “gutted” welfare reform by removing welfare’s work requirements. Early on Wednesday, Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) admitted that the attacks have no basis in reality, a fact already well explained by major media outlets.

“You agree that these claims that the work requirement has been abolished are false?” asked MSNBC’s Chris Jansing. “As far as I have seen,” Brownback replied.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), however, declined to take the same step. Initially, Kasich said that the work requirement had been “eroded.” But after MSNBC’s Chris Matthews played the clip of Brownback’s answer and asked Kasich if he could say the same, Kasich replied that he hasn’t had time to examine the issue. However, he did say that he refused to sign onto a letter that the Romney campaign has been circulating on the welfare issue:

MATTHEWS: Can you give that same answer from what you have seen? They haven’t removed the welfare requirement — work requirement yet? They haven’t done it yet? You say eroded. I don’t know what that means. Is it gone or is it still in place? Can you get welfare without working?

KASICH: I don’t know the answer to that, Chris. In fact, I was asked to sign a letter as I was going out the door to head down to this convention before I had a chance to study the whole issue. I said, look, I’m going to pass on this letter until I understand the whole issue.

Watch it:

Kasich is the governor of a major state, and the Romney campaign has been using this attack for weeks, yet he claims he hasn’t had any time to look into it. But that didn’t stop him from presuming that the claims are true. Campaign officials, meanwhile, have simply laughed off questions about the false ads, while campaign pollster Neil Newhouse told BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

The Romney campaign has been running a series of blatantly false ads claiming that the Obama administration has waived work requirements included in the 1996 welfare reform law. Everyone from independent fact-checkers to major newspapers to President Bill Clinton (who signed the law) have said that the campaign’s attack is untrue.

Last night, however, failed presidential candidate Rick Santorum once again made the false claim, saying “this summer [Obama] showed us once again he believes in government handouts and dependency by waving the work requirement for welfare.” But evidently not every member of the Republican party received the memo about how to characterize what the administration did. When asked Wednesday morning whether the welfare claim is a lie, Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS) replied, “as far as I have seen”:

JANSING: But you agree that these claims that the work requirement has been abolished are false?

BROWNBACK: As far as I have seen, but I don’t know all of the basis to it. I do know the basis to this dependency on the government and how big the government is and how big the entitlement state is and how much of a debt we’re leaving to our kids.

Watch it:

All the administration’s welfare waivers would do is empower states to innovate with new work strategies. The directive from the administration reads, “The Secretary [of Health and Human Services] is only interested in approving waivers if the state can explain in a compelling fashion why the proposed approach may be a more efficient or effective means to promote employment entry.”

Yesterday, the Romney campaign’s political director laughed off a question about the false welfare ads, saying, “I think reasonable people can have a disagreement over this.”