Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Um... It's a relative number we're looking at though. Welfare programs don't directly target one skin color or another. They target economic need. The effects are different on different groups within the US only because of differences in economic need within those groups. So changing the welfare criteria a little bit doesn't change the relative effect welfare has on those groups. Or at least, it isn't going to change it much. You also have to realize that these programs don't only exist at the federal level. States each engage in their own programs and use federal funding to cover the parts of their programs which overlap the federal guidelines. It's far too complex to simply look at a couple of federal level changes and say nothing happened, so therefore "welfare" isn't a factor in the outcome.
Ok, so show me any effects on black unemployment that you can actually correlate to a change in a the social welfare system.
That's the wrong question. My premise is that the implementation of a social welfare system tends to lock the percentage of populations in need. Evidence for this will not be seen in a change, but in the absence of one. The fact that despite removing massive and direct legal obstacles to black economic success in this country, we saw no change in the relative rate of unemployment over the subsequent 50 years. Assuming we agree that segregation restrictions, and housing restrictions, and education restrictions, and over hiring discrimination was having a negative effect on black economic outcomes, shouldn't we expect that removing those should have produced a measurable change in overall unemployment at the very least?
The data you presented in your OP is the evidence of what I'm saying. We should have seen a change in relative unemployment rates as a result of the civil rights movement. We didn't. We still haven't 50 years later. When casting about for an explanation for that, one might look to see what else we did in the 60s that might have an effect on this, and which has continued to be present from that time period until today. And when we do this, the very very obvious rise of the direct social welfare system in the US kinda leaps out at us, doesn't it?
And then if we start asking "how could something like welfare cause black unemployment to not improve as it should have", we might arrive at the same theory that I did. That because social welfare programs disproportionately target those in need when the systems were put in place, if those systems have a secondary effect of retarding the ability of recipients to become independent of the programs themselves, this could easily explain the deviation from the expected outcome. As I said earlier, it would "lock in" the economic condition based on the level it was at when the programs were first implemented.
It's just a theory, but it does explain the data.
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Asking for some sort of support for your arguments? Shame on me...
They're logical arguments Joph. If you disagree, you need to point out the flaws in those arguments and/or present a counter argument. Demanding "proof" or "support" (not even sure what that means) is a pointless thing to do. Do you honestly disagree that children raised in households dependent on welfare are more likely to end out on welfare themselves when they grow up? Do you disagree that children raised in communities with a high percentage of welfare recipients are more likely to end out on welfare when they grow up? Hell. We can also ask about likelihood of having a criminal record, or being a drug addict, or any of a number of other negative socio-economic outcomes that can be correlated to the conditions one grows up in.
Assuming you don't disagree with those things, then don't we have a situation where poverty leads to poverty, but welfare institutionalizes that poverty in specific communities and among specific groups? Is that really so much of a stretch? Absent some form of government assistance, poverty can only reach a certain level in any specific geographical location (assuming an unequal distribution of poverty within a national structure and freedom of movement of the population within that structure). Poverty normally is a function of job availability. As jobs disappear from an area, people move from that area. There's a natural feedback system that prevents overwhelming quantities of poverty, and thus limits the degree to which the deck can be stacked against someone's economic success based on where they were born.
You introduce social welfare systems to that and now you can allow poverty to grow in relatively small geographical areas. People can choose not to move out when the jobs leave. They just go on welfare. As a result, each successive generation within that community faces an increasingly difficult task to become self sufficient. That's how welfare traps people. It's not so much an individual thing (cause each individual *can* escape it), but a statistical outcome over a population in a given area. We then end out with pockets of incredible poverty within a sea of an otherwise wealthy nation. This should not happen, and cannot happen, unless you have welfare systems in place.
And guess what? We'd expect that factor to afflict populations based on the ratio of need at the time the systems were put in place. This doesn't require "support" so much as a bit of simple logic.