Ross Douthat says the following:
We still have a costly welfare bureaucracy that caters more to minorities than to whites, but it’s no longer a political liability for liberals because the system is no longer the disaster that it became in the Seventies and Eighties
Which prompts John Cole to ask:
Is this accurate?
Answer: No. This is both a lie and a myth.
Although it is true that minorities are over-represented among the poor when calculated as a percentage, in sheer numbers a vast majority of the individuals who collect "welfare" are white.
According to the Census Dept, there were almost 36.5 million Americans living in poverty in 2006. Of that group, 16 million were white, 9 million black, and 9.2 million Hispanic.
Welfare doesn't "cater" to minority groups. If it "caters" to anyone it is to the poor.
And that, of course, assumes that you define "welfare" solely as means-tested programs designed to alleviate poverty. If you do not - a much more appropriate definition is any government program designed to transfer wealth from one group to another - you will be forced to include things like the mortgage interest tax deduction, a welfare program aimed at the middle class that explicitly transfers wealth from those who rent homes to those who own them. Or, as another example, the tax exemption provided to individuals for any contributions made by their employer to cover the cost of their health insurance, an exemption that transfers wealth from those who do not have health insurance to those who do.
Does Roth believe the myth or is he deliberately lying? Given that he's a smart guy, I'd assume the former over the later. And given that this claim comes in an apparent defense of Republican rhetoric on race and welfare, that may actually be worse.
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