Episode 240: How the Media's "Burden," "Straining Resources" Framing Manufactures the Expendable Other
“Cost of saving babies drains health care,” announced the Associated Press in 1992. “Elder influx bound to tax health care, other services,” cautioned the news agency again, in 2004. “Chicago Begins Evicting Migrants From Shelters, Citing Strain on Resources,” stated The New York Times in 2024.
For centuries, we’ve been told that certain populations – whether in need of specialized medical care or education, specific accommodations or whether moving from one place to another – are a "strain" on resources. Supposedly, seniors and people with disabilities are causing healthcare costs to skyrocket. Immigrants are overcrowding schools and causing teacher and textbook shortages. People without permanent housing are filling up clinics and shelters. And it’s all "on the taxpayer’s dime."
It’s undeniable that local and state governments operate vital resources – Medicaid, public schools, subsidized housing – with insufficient funding, and that these resources can indeed be, and indeed are by design by manufactured austerity, "zero sum." But, instead of placing the blame on artificial policy decisions that don’t plan for increased need, or strip those essential programs of the funding they need to reach their potential, the Burden Framing scapegoats the vulnerable people who rely on these programs, simply because they have needs and have committed the unforgivable crime of existing in the first place.
Why should we be expected to accept that a person is a “strain” simply for needing housing, education, and healthcare? Why is the obscene resource consumption of the 1% who sit upon sprawling estates, fly private jets, and sail in mega-yachts not said to be a strain on a planet facing catastrophic climate chaos?
And how does this framing of sorting out good and bad resources consumption where the villain is always the poor and desperate condition audiences to resent members of their communities and view public funding of societal goods as a bad thing?
On this episode, we dissect the “strain on resources” framing, examining how it’s disproportionately applied to “undesirable” populations like immigrants, seniors, disabled people, and homeless people. We discuss how it conveniently skips over resource intensive military spending and AI bubble energy demands, how it serves as a pretext for further defunding of socially beneficial programs, and how it conditions audiences to view essential public investment as a form of stealing from the always put upon, the holiest of the holy: The American Taxpayer.
Our guest is Death Panel's Beatrice Adler-Bolton.
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Guest
Beatrice Adler-Bolton is co-host of the Death Panel podcast about the political economy of health and co-author of the book, Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto, which was published in 2022 by Verso Books.
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Show Notes
How Elites Concern Troll ‘Waste’ to Gut Social Welfare and Divide the Working Class
Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson | April 23, 2025 | Citations Needed
The “Graying Population” Panic and the 90-Year War on Social Security
Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson | December 5, 2023 | Citations Needed
Nativism in Media (Part III) — IMF, NAFTA and Global Inequality By Design
Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson | July 26, 2023 | Citations Needed
The Costs of the Iran War: Thousands of Lives and Billions of Dollars
Edward Wong and Aruni Soni | June 19, 2026 | The New York Times
How Social Security Administration Cuts Affect You
David Dayen | March 6, 2025 | The American Prospect
How Schools Make Up for the Feds’ Unfulfilled Special Ed. Funding Commitment
Caitlynn Peetz Stephens | February 27, 2025 | Education Week
We’re Funding Wars Instead of Education. Only the Rich Get Educated
Cyrus Coron | June 19, 2023 | Newsweek
Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy
Elizabeth Popp Berman | 2022 | Princeton University Press
Capitalism Is Making Us Sick and Sucking Us Dry
Beatrice Adler-Bolton & Kelly Hayes | August 11, 2022 | Movement Memos / Truthout
On Marta Russell’s Money Model of Disability
Beatrice Adler-Bolton | December 13, 2021 | Blind Archive
How incremental healthcare reforms built the industries we're fighting today
Artie Vierkant | August 30, 2020 | Health and Capital
Disability, Eugenics, and the Culture Wars
Paul A. Lombardo | 2008 | St. Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy
Failed Trade Policy & Immigration: Cause & Effect
Public Citizen
ACLU | March 12, 2002
An Essay on the Principle of Population
Thomas Malthus | 1798
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Transcript
For a full transcript of this episode, go here. You can also find transcripts of past episodes, live shows, Beg-a-Thons, interviews, and News Briefs here.
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Credits
Senior Producer: Florence Barrau-Adams
Producer: Julianne Tveten
Production Assistant: Trendel Lightburn
Newsletter: Marco Cartolano
Music: Grandaddy