Good! I see that you , little-whip and the rest, have done your homework. Now, since you have listed your reasons why “poor whites vote republican,” perhaps, we can have a reasonable and sensible conversation without hurling insults toward one another. Correct me if I’m wrong, your reason for voting republican is based on the following: taxes and welfare. Now, let us debate these issues separately and hopefully we may find some common ground.
As for me, I have never met a person who didn’t want a tax cut - democrat or republican. Where we may differ is you are satisfied with an unequal tax cut and I am in favor of an equal tax cut for the rich and the middle class.
Now, let us take a look at the next issue, welfare. Some of you incorrectly associate poor people with slavery; however, statistics show that the majority of recipients of welfare are white even though "welfare" is frequently treated as a governmental program for people of color.
In economics welfare is defined as (1)government programs which seek to provide a minimum level of income, service or other support for disadvantaged peoples, (2)financial assistance paid by taxpayers to people who are unable to support themselves, (3)social welfare service concerned with social protection.
I think what I have most often heard is that many people view poverty as a black, urban underclass phenomenon and, by extension, assume the same of welfare. And welfare is most often understood as food stamps, SSI, WIC, Head-Start, various forms of housing assistance, medicare and medicaid, etc. Every now and then someone (as you have done) will choose to make an issue of state-run general assistance programs. These definitions, as I note above, are not necessarily the only ones possible and I would strongly urge you to pay attention to them when people start making any sorts of claims about social policy. Poverty, of course, is not exclusively a black urban underclass phenomenon - au contraire. There are zillions of sources you can look to to confirm this. See, for instance: the Underclass", Harvard U Press, 1992 and Christopher Jencks' "Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty. However, what we find is that while there are far more poor white people than poor black people, poverty rates are higher among black people than among white people. Among white people the poverty rate is only around 11% or 12% (approximately 25.2 million) while among black people it is over 24% (approximately 9.36 million).
As for division according to who receives welfare, the division of aid recipients by "race" varies widely from place to place - where the majority of the population is white, say, in rural Minnesota, the majority of aid recipients are as well. Its a big country, after all, and policy is not necessarily best served by broad sweeping statement about who gets what aid. In fact, if we redefine social welfare spending to include all the programs I cited above, aimed primarily at poor people (except Medicare), as well as things like college loans and military pensions, social security, various forms of home loan assistance, etc., the majority of such spending goes to the middle classes. Jencks' writes (p.76), "In 1980, only a fifth of all social-welfare spending was explicitly aimed at low-income families, and only a tenth was for programs providing cash, food, or housing to such families." Which of course suggests that overall social spending is oriented towards white folks, since more of them are middle-class.
