[rauljara]

You left out poor white people in your discussion. While white people do have a lower rate of poverty than blacks or latinos, they actually make up a very large majority (68.5% as of 2009) of the people living under the poverty line in the United States. [1]

"... let's not pretend that the Cherokee are the ones we're worried about here."

"Successfully repeating this experiment in poor black and latino populations a few times would go a long ways towards convincing the skeptical... "

I'm all in favor of repeating the experiment in whatever populations, ideally the general one on a large enough sample size to tease out demographic information. I don't want to seem like I'm implying something here, so I will instead say overtly that I find the way you've singled out certain populations for skepticism with regards to whether they should be helped disturbing.

[1] http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/income_expenditu...

[prawn]

Poor white people were left out of that comment because the writer's point was about minorities with access to a payment that didn't feel like "theirs". A poor white person receiving welfare from a largely white government/authority might not be a good comparison.

[notdrunkatall]

Forgive me for offending your politically correct sensibilities, but it seems that I'm going to have to be even more blunt: if you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse. The only way to do that is to try something similar in neighborhoods that are comprised predominately of minorities and cross your fingers that it is a success. It doesn't matter whether those below the poverty line are 65% or 5% white - it's the minorities that they're concerned with. That's just the political reality of the situation.

And while we're on the subject of statistics, I may as well go ahead and ask about yours: where did you get that figure from? Because I found something much different:

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_weal...

According to this, only about 25% of people living in poverty were white, and that includes the somewhat dubious category 'white, not hispanic.' (It's near the bottom, Table B)

That also includes white retirees, which inflates the figure as you're taking the number of retirees from a large category and sticking them into a smaller category, which means they will be over-represented in the smaller category.

And that's not even mentioning the rate of poverty or welfare participation, which is where the common perception that blacks and latinos abuse the welfare system comes from in the first place. It's much higher than it is or other races. When you dig into the data, it usually turns out that stereotypes exist for a reason, and this appears to be no exception.

[djtriptych]

Shocker: You completely misread the data from that source.

Table B in the link you posted shows 31,650* white people in poverty out of a US total of 46,180. That's 68.5%.

* all numbers in thousands

[stephencanon]

To be fair, he’s describing “non-black, non-latino”, which I suppose most closely aligns with “white non-hispanic” in that table: 19,599/46,180 or 42%. No longer a majority, but still a plurality.

The whole argument is ridiculous, of course:

> If you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse. The only way to do that is to try something similar in neighborhoods that are comprised predominately of minorities and cross your fingers that it is a success.

When did we have the double-blind controlled study showing that the mortgage interest tax deduction wouldn’t be abused by the upper middle class "en masse" as a tax-protected store of wealth, contributing to a wildly over-inflated housing market?

Perhaps you can point me to the literature showing that carried interest being taxed as capital gains wouldn’t lead to wealthy fund managers being able to claim zero “income”?

Budget policy in the US (or anywhere, really) isn’t set by enlightened scientists who carefully consider the sociological and economic consequences. Voters and politicians are swayed by pundits and lobbyists, not by scientific studies. Get the right people to endorse an idea with the right (specious but superficially convincing) talking points and you too can help set public policy.

[lmm]

> When did we have the double-blind controlled study showing that the mortgage interest tax deduction wouldn’t be abused by the upper middle class "en masse" as a tax-protected store of wealth, contributing to a wildly over-inflated housing market? > Perhaps you can point me to the literature showing that carried interest being taxed as capital gains wouldn’t lead to wealthy fund managers being able to claim zero “income”?

It doesn't matter. Voters don't hate the upper-middle-class, and they don't hate fund managers enough to vote differently. And sure, it would be nice if the electorate were less racist (and I'd support efforts to change that), but in the here and now we want to introduce positive policies, and we have to do that with the electorate we have rather than the electorate we wish we had.

[notdrunkatall]

The right thing to do would be to test the idea before shoving it down voters' throats.

It would not only be morally correct, it would provide great ammunition for fighting against those who would be against it.

But that's not going to happen, because despite the rhetoric of the left, no one knows whether it would work or not, and a failure would be catastrophic for the left politically.

So we'll trudge on, doing the same shit, implementing the same policies not to fix actual problems, but to appease our consciences and to feel like we've won some kind of political victory against that evil other side.

The whole game is a farce.

[notdrunkatall]

Is it a shocker that I misread that table? Obviously, you meant that facetiously, suggesting that you believe that someone who espouses views contrary to popular liberal ideology is necessarily a stupid person. But the fact that I made a mistake no more means that I'm stupid than does the fact that I disagree with liberal ideology on many points; on the contrary, the fact that you believe it does says much more about you than it does me.

At any rate, the rest of my points stand. Now that you've pointed out my mistake, maybe you'd like to follow up with a quick 1-2 punch and knock the moron out of the ring, eh? Come on, it should be easy, right?!

[EdwardDiego]

> It's much higher than it is or other races. When you dig into the data, it usually turns out that stereotypes exist for a reason

You'll find blacks and latinos are overrepresented in all negative socioeconomic indicators. But I'm sure that they're all deliberately choosing to have die younger and spend more time in prison.

[protomyth]

You could have probably gone with: a tribally (single culture or group) owned and operated business paying dividends to its members is likely to have different results than a welfare payment from a government where ownership is distant.

I'm actually fairly offended that people are equating dividends from a tribal business with welfare. It is a bit insulting.

[thyrsus]

I don't believe those who have contempt for the poor have any less contempt for science, and social science in particular.

[runamok]

> if you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea

Based on the last presidential election I'm not so sure you need to convince white voters about anything: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/scocca/2012/...

[unclebucknasty]

>if you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse.

Alternatively, rather than attempting to convince them, we could educate them.