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Welfare Backlash Tied to White Fear of Declining Status

posted by janrinok on Saturday June 02 2018, @05:31AM   
from the was-not-expecting-that dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

White Americans' fear of losing their socioeconomic standing in the face of demographic change may be driving opposition to welfare programs, even though whites are major beneficiaries of government poverty assistance, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.

While social scientists have long posited that racial resentment fuels opposition to such anti-poverty programs as food stamps, Medicaid and Temporary Aid to Needy Families, this is the first study to show the correlation experimentally, demonstrating a causal relationship between attitudes to welfare and threatened racial status.

"With policymakers proposing cuts to the social safety net, it's important to understand the dynamics that drive the welfare backlash," said study lead author Rachel Wetts, a Ph.D. student in sociology at UC Berkeley. "This research suggests that when whites fear their status is on the decline, they increase opposition to programs intended to benefit poorer members of all racial groups."

The findings, to be published May 30 in the journal Social Forces, highlight a welfare backlash that swelled around the 2008 Great Recession and election of Barack Obama.

Notably, the study found anti-welfare sentiment to be selective insofar as threats to whites' standing led whites to oppose government assistance programs they believed largely benefit minorities, while not affecting their views of programs they thought were more likely to advantage whites.

"Our findings suggest that these threats lead whites to oppose programs they perceive as primarily benefiting racial minorities," said study senior author Robb Willer, a professor of sociology and social psychology at Stanford University.

[...] "Overall, these results suggest whites' perceptions of rising minority power and influence lead them to oppose welfare programs," Wetts said.

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Original Submission

• Re:People are waking up? (Score: 5, Insightful) by Bobs on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:37PM

  by Bobs (1462) on Saturday June 02 2018, @02:37PM (#687685)

  I looked the site’s numbers. There is a lot of vagueness and lack of detail about the sources of the data and how the calculations are made. ( Talking about the single data source cited by the article above: http://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2016/05/11/fiscal-impact-of-whites-blacks-and-hispanics/ [thealternativehypothesis.org]

  If the numbers are true and accurate then he ought to be able to provide links to the source data and show his work on how the calculations were performed. Since the underlying detail is missing, I doubt the stated results.

  Hard to argue against vague claims without spending a bunch of time trying to replicate his results first, but here is a few problems I see:

  • You change this and say rich people pay most of the taxes, and most rich people are white, and many / most poor people are a net negative in terms of tax revenues. Or, more simply: The Federal Government loses $ on poor people of all races.
  • People have more value than just $, and people add economic benefit that isn’t always reflected in tax dollars.
  • We aim to tax good things less, bad things more. So lower Federal taxes does not necessarily indicate less worth. Example: Ask Donald Trump.
  • if/when poor people move up the wealth scale and pay more taxes - this analysis ignores that the same people pay more over time as they move up the income scale.
  • There is ambiguity about if/how taxes and spending from State/Local are factored in:
    • looks like May include some dollars collected by state and local, but summary says ‘Federal’
    • May/may not include $ paid by Sales tax. If so, that needs to be credited to non-wealthy using a different allocation method.
  • Looks like payroll taxes are not credited / need adjustment
  • More generally, if you ran a similar method in 1860, it would show blacks contributing nothing to taxes, yet their uncompensated labor was the foundation of the economy for multiple states. (If Fed income tax existed)
  • Then if you ran the same analysis in 1890 or 1920 it would show blacks as too poor to contribute to Federal taxes, but their under-compensated labor was still a pillar of the economy of multiple states.
  • There is a lot of inertia in going from poor and oppressed to equal opportunity. Separate but equal was still legal up until about 50 years ago.
  • If you ran a similar, flawed analysis using gender instead of race it would show females are a net drag on the economy and we would be better off if we eliminated females

  Given the obvious problems with the methodology, the lack of supporting detail, I call bunk on this.

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+4
  Insightful=3, Informative=1, Total=4
  Extra 'Insightful' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5