White conservatives in the South are all convinced that all black people here are on welfare. Is there more evidence of welfare dependence by blacks in the South than in other places? I found out the answer is, "no," and I work out the numbers below. Thus, racist and prejudiced attitudes seem to pervade here despite the evidence to the contrary, not because of it.
Certain topics will stir controversy no matter how factual and objective your approach is. Controversial though it may be, I want to look at the relationship between race and welfare, and the general idea of welfare queens, burned into every Southerner's mind from early childhood by conservative culture. Despite the welfare reform that took place in the US, and the overall decline of participation and benefits of the programs, many people still think that lots of people are sucking the government teat. It's easy enough to google certain terms and find links that debunk the myths about race and welfare, but it's a little harder to find the most recent official statistics for TANF participation by ethnicity and analysis by the OFA. Considering these data will be my aim.
I have heard the term "welfare" used since I was a kid, but I finally sat down and actually looked up the federal department that oversees it -- Administration for Children and Families -- within the DHHS and the official name of federal welfare: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).
Another thing to keep in mind is how relatively small the overall amount of the federal budget is for welfare spending. I made this chart myself from the data contained in the US 2008 budget page at wikipedia. If the numbers in the article are correct, then so is my pie graph. Basically, the 2006 report to Congress gives a value of $26.3B for the total size of the TANF program from both federal and state governments. Given that the total budget spending of the US government for FY2008 is $2.9T, plus $180B for the Iraq appropriations bill, this means that 26.3B / 3,080B = 0.854% of total spending. Literally, it is a drop in the bucket.
Consider further that welfare money is recirculated into our economy. The money given to poor people is used by them as part of national consumer spending, which drives production and actually stimulates the economy. So, in effect, this use of tax dollars isn't so horrible: money goes from me (and you, and everyone else) to someone else in need, who then turns around and buys basically the same things with it that we would: food, clothes and housing.
- Now let's get into the issue of race and welfare
As you can see, a larger share of white families was using TANF than black families -- 39% versus 37% -- during the early part of the Clinton years, before welfare reform began in earnest, and while the share of black families has remained almost completely stable since then, the drop in white families using TANF has been made up by hispanics. This early data is a rather inconvenient truth for racist assholes like Rick Howell, as he would probably rather not know that only a few years ago, likely long after he initially formed his prejudices, white people used more welfare than blacks.
These are national numbers. As of 2006, TANF recipients are 33.4% white, 35.7% black and 26.4% hispanic. The population of the US is around 75.1% white, 12.3% black and 12.5% hispanic, which that means that whites are underrepresented nationally 33.4:75.1, or by a factor of 2.45, while blacks are overrepresented nationally 35.7:12.3, or by a factor of 2.90, and hispanics are overrepresented 26.4:12.5, or by a factor of 2.11.
According to the most recent data, SC recipients of TANF are 27% white, 70% black and an amazingly-low 1.8% hispanic. Although whites still make up over a quarter of all SC TANF cases, blacks make up only about 30% of SC's population, and are overrepresented by a factor of 2.33 in the percentage who receive welfare: 70:30. As a proportion, whites are underrepresented by a factor of about 2.56 -- 27:69, and hispanics are underrepresented by a factor of 1.94 -- 1.8:3.5.
The long story short is that comparing national numbers to local numbers turns Southern prejudices upside-down: while the overrepresentation of blacks nationally is 2.90, it is only 2.56 in SC, or 88% of the national value. So Rick's racist rant actually would make more sense if these numbers were flipped around: if blacks in SC depended more on welfare than in other states.
Perhaps one of the reasons that poverty and race and so linked in Southern minds is the idea of the ghetto: a pocket of poverty that the media and stereotypes have reinforced as being almost exclusively black. One idea for helping to eliminate the psychological effect of poverty "pockets" in public housing complexes (a.k.a. "ghettos") has been to offer housing choice vouchers instead of providing low-cost facilities. This seems very smart: when lots of poor people congregate, the problems associated with poverty would seem to multiply on one another and the mentality of crime and poverty would seemingly fester. After The Atlantic's Hanna Rosin's article which seems to provide evidence that housing vouchers have simply dispersed, rather than lowered, crime, this is a potentially-crushing blow to a program that is otherwise held up as a success story. Here's what Yglesias has to say:
I got to request to say something about Hannah Rosin's article on the Memphis crime experience. I don't have a ton to say about it other than that you should read the article, since I think the article itself says about everything I would want to say. But to give it a brief gloss, people hoped that tearing down public housing towers and replacing them with Section 8 vouchers would, by dispersing the people on public assistance, help mitigate the social pathologies associated with poverty by breaking up "pockets of poverty." In fact, as Rosin reports, dispersing impoverished people mostly seems to have dispersed rather than dispelled, the crime problems associated with pockets of poverty.Despite this evidence, I still have to think the vouchers program is a good idea: perhaps it's the reacclimation period that is difficult, but one would think that increased neighborhood vigilance and police reporting would occur in "dispersed" areas, compared to housing projects. One would also think that the influence of a stable neighborhood would eventually affect new residents.
I'm not 100 percent sure where that leaves us. Housing vouchers still seem like a better idea than "the projects" for various reasons related to economic efficiency and choice. And as far as crime goes, we seem to mostly still know what we know -- higher wages for low-skill workers, higher educational attainment, the presence of more police officers patrolling the street, throwing enormous quantities of young men in prison, fewer drug addicts, and reductions in the amount of lead poisoning all seem to lower crime.
I don't think there are any easy solutions to the problem(s) of poverty and race in our country.
I also don't think there are any easy solutions to attitudes like that displayed by Rick Howell. Hopefully as people like Rick encounter more people like me, who are willing to argue with them and actually use facts, rather than feelings, in trying to make an argument, these attitudes will begin to recede. Perhaps...
