> When a politician 'advises' an entire class of people that way, it implies that they view the problem that affects that entire class as fundamentally not thei

> When a politician 'advises' an entire class of people that way, it implies that they view the problem that affects that entire class as fundamentally not their responsibility to solve. I think you've pretty much hit the nail on the head here, however it's not unacceptable to everyone, just a particular group of people (I don't know much about US politics but certainly in Europe that'd be a standard left/right split). A lot of people just don't see that as being the role of government. They might, in a reduced form, roughly subscribe to the idea of welfare as an insurance policy (against crime at a low level, and uprising at the more extreme end of the spectrum), but not as some sort of moral imperative.