Posted on 06/08/2013 10:50:38 AM PDT by Ultra Sonic 007
What do you imagine when you hear the word "welfare"? Most of us think of a minority living in a filthy house with five kids running around while an alcoholic dad sleeps it off face down on the couch ... if there's even a dad at all. I talked in another article about the things politicians will never understand about poor people, but it's not just Washington elites who treat the poor like an alien species. Hell, I find myself thinking in "welfare queen" stereotypes, and I grew up among them.
The problem is that everyone -- from the news media to well-meaning activists -- refer to "the poor" as one group having the same problem, when in reality no two people are in the category for the same reason, and almost none fall neatly into the stereotype. Right now there are millions of people out there who are using government assistance because they are ...
(Excerpt) Read more at cracked.com ...
You posted that to rebut my post of "What is your source, that is a very weird claim, on several levels." about the bizarre claim of "70% of welfare is given to rural whites....the very ones who populate many of those seedy trailer parking lots."
I naturally took that to mean that you were defending it as accurate and that I was wrong.
I speak from first person experience. I grew up in one of those seedy rural trailer parks living in a two bedroom 1971 Marlette 12 x 63. (search mapquest for Chinook Lane Altmar, NY and Otto’s Trailer Park, Scriba, NY. Right next to the Scriba Town Inn). Froze my ass off in the winter, and sweated by balls off in the summer. I managed to escape through hard work in a crappy school and twelve years in the silent service of the U.S. Navy.
Very few of those I left behind, ever amounted to anything. Most are still the bar rats that they have always been. Working odd jobs, at whatever business that might be willing to hire them.
I do hate manufactured housing and the denizens of same. I hate Hambuger Helper, Mac & Cheese, and Shake-n-Bake too. When you eat enough of it as I have, one vows, never again.
With a family history of poverty induced by poor choices and destructive behavior one can see the forest and the trees.
There are far more lowlife rural whites than there are baby-momma’s in the cities.
As I pointed out, there is welfare as direct payment and there is welfare via tax credits and other programs that are not considered direct transfer payments but they are transfer payments just the same.
Obviously you have never lived in multiple trailer parks as I have. Live on lousy food, and at the whim of mom’s boyfriend. I have, and it’s not pleasant.
Wow, that had nothing to do with your making up false facts and trying to spread them.
“”70% of welfare is given to rural whites....the very ones who populate many of those seedy trailer parking lots.””
You can’t just make up stupid nonsense and try to pass them off as statistical data and facts.
no worries!
As for #4 (It works for some people), a success rate of less than 20% is abysmal, especially when an equal percentage is on the dole for 5+ years.
False. Less than a third of recipients of TANF are non-Hispanic whites. They promote a figure of "most welfare recipients are white" by including all Hispanic recipients as white.
Characteristics and Financial Circumstances of TANF Recipients, Fiscal Year 2010 : In 2010, 31.8% of recipients were non-Hispanic whites, 31.9% were black, so black recipients slightly outnumber white recipients.
The thing about rural whites is there are far fewer of them, because they are, well, rural. The vast majority of whites live in the suburbs. There are tens of millions more of them than rural whites.
Maybe your experiences suggest that 70 percent of rural whites are on some form of assistance. Even then, I’d like to see the actual numbers.
Altmar-Parish-Williamstown CSD is a pretty poor rural upstate school district. Most everyone in the district and the surrounding districts, Sandy Creek, Camden, And Adirondack Central, were full of people who were just like me. Working class or below. Those who had jobs worked for below average wages, at the wire mill, paper mill, or furniture factory (only the furniture factory remains). Else they were farm hands, or loggers. The men had jobs, a wife, and an ex-wife or two. The rest of the locals were the rural riff-raff who worked in the local Big M Grocery or gas station. While not all of us lived in trailer parks, a great many lived in a trailer on country roads, or a dilapidated old farm house without the means to maintain it.
It wasn’t that different in all of the other districts all the way to the Canadian border on over to Vermont. Everyone got some sort of aid, either in EITC tax credits of thousands of dollars, or outright welfare. Food stamps are the norm. It was/is a full 70% of the population then, and that was 40 years ago. It extended south east and west. The closer you got to the cities, the better things were for the people, but those of us in the woods life was a government handout.
Most of the city/suburb folks don’t realize how many people live out there. This is not Wyoming, Oklahoma or West Texas with miles of open road. This is the very populated Northeast where every hick road has a house or trailer every 1/8 mile. It is like that all the way out into Maine, and south to Alabama/Mississippi. More people than you can imagine live out there.
The sorts of aid that are paid these are not registered as direct welfare, TANF, AFDC, SSDI, or WIC. It is tax credits like EITC, heating assistance like HEAP, Section 8 housing assistance. If you have never lived in it you don’t realize how pervasive it is in the rural areas populated by whites.
It is deliberately masked by the DemocRATS and Republicans. They do not want it exposed. It is hard to quantify and deliberately so. But do not listen to those who say I have some sort of agenda. I do not. I speak from what I have seen, lived. And the feedback of my cousin who runs a small private grocery store in the town of Waddington, NY.
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