Who were/are the unproductive Americans?

In the 1976 presidential campaign, President Reagan introduced America to the anonymous welfare queen who lived on the south side of Chicago. This meme replicated and mutated. In 1996 President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. He had campaigned on the promise to "end welfare as we know it." Thus ended an entitlement program for the poorest of the poor in America, predominantly single women with children, who received cash benefits from Aid to Families with Dependent Children, reborn as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The new meme was Workfare. In return for training and transitioning to what was usually a minimum wage job, these women were promised child and medical care. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report the results on the fifteenth anniversary of TANF August 22nd. First, there are indeed fewer families receiving cash benefits.

As for the promises, only three states have increased their TANF benefits in real terms from 1996 to 2010.
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In my previous quote from David Wiegel, a mutation of the meme to include the recipients of the TARP bailout is what set off the Tea Party rallies in 2009. Even more recently Michelle Bachmann has been described as a welfare queen for the farm subsidies she has received.

Still, neither the introduction of the Workfare meme nor the mutation of the welfare queen meme has killed President Reagan's original imputation of a black, unwed mother of several children by different fathers living on the south side of Chicago, using her cash benefits to pay for her Cadillac. I recommend the Myth of the Welfare Queen by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist David Zucchino if you have never met such a woman in person.

The New Meme: The Working Poor

Both Representative Bachmann and Governor Perry have characterized the working poor as unproductive, non-tax-paying Americans, and I again quote the governor, “We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax.” As I mentioned later in that post, 30% of the working poor receive tax expenditures comprised mainly of child care credits and Earned Income Credits. These are the new welfare queens. The hopes versus the reality of creating a new meme and destroying an old one is very well summarized in this quote from Bill Kilgore:

But whatever you thought of the law in 1996, or of its performance since then, the biggest surprise has been the rapid erosion, especially during the last few years, of the hopes shared by liberals and conservatives alike that firmly connecting public assistance to a requirement to work would detoxify the social and racial poisons that had grown up around the old system. At first, that actually seemed to happen; the “welfare wedge politics” so common from the 1960s to the 1990s largely abated in the aftermath of the legislation. But now, even as the “working poor” (the bipartisan heroes of welfare reform) are bearing much of the brunt of the Great Recession, they have become the objects of a new and intense wave of conservative hostility that treats them as parasites just like the “welfare queens” of yore.

The richest Americans, on the other hand, are "wildly productive geniuses" and "the true aim of tax policy is keeping their tax burden low so they have sufficient encouragement to unleash their potential."