People on welfare are black. People who use food-stamps are lazy, and probably vote for Democrats because they like getting free cell phones. The esteemed “Doctor” Stapleford of the CRI said just that in a News Journal Op-ed once, so it must be true. (Except it isn’t and Stapleford, as we all know, is a outright fraud.)
As it turns out, white people get welfare (most of it). And those white people who get most of the welfare, are rural, broke-ass, angry SOBs. Who do they vote for…?
Alex Henderson has the skinny. […]
The number of Americans who are poor enough to qualify for food stamps has increased by a disturbing 30 million in the last 13 years. In 2000, 17 million Americans were receiving food stamps; in 2013, the number is 47 million. Hoping to stir up racial tensions, far-right AM radio talk show hosts and Fox News wingnuts try to paint food stamp recipients as strictly or mostly people of color. But the facts don’t bear that out. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, roughly half of food stamp recipients are non-Hispanic whites (in Ohio, it’s around 65%).
Because the GOP base is conditioned by a corrupt media to assume everyone on welfare is black, they have readily voted against their own best interests.
Slashing food stamp benefits won’t harm the Koch brothers or JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, but it will definitely harm poor whites in a place like McDowell County, West Virginia, which is 94% white (according to the U.S. Census Bureau), rural and has a life expectancy of only 63.9 for males and 72.9 for females (according to a report that the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington released in July 2013). If life expectancy is any indication, the economic conditions for white males in McDowell County aren’t much better than the economic conditions in Haiti, where, according to the World Health Organization, males have a life expectancy of 62. In contrast to McDowell County, that study showed a life expectancy of 81.4 for males and 85.0 for females in Marin County, California—which is affluent and heavily Democratic.
Owsley County, Kentucky is another example of a place that is predominantly white (97.6%), heavily Republican (Romney won 81% of the vote in Owsley County in 2012) and full of poverty. Bloomberg News has reported that in 2011, 52% of the county’s residents were receiving food stamps—which Rep. Hal Rogers, the Republican who represents Owsley County, voted in favor of slashing. From Kentucky to Mississippi to West Virginia, Republicans who were elected by an abundance of poor whites have voted in favoring of cutting food stamps.
Does anyone think that poor whites in Kentucky knowing voted to cut their own benefits? Of course not. By voting for Republicans, they thought they were voting to cut the benefits of black people in the Bronx. Who cares if their life expectancy takes a nosedive?
There is no shortage of data on life expectancy that shows a downward trend for poor whites. In September 2012, the New York Times reported that poorer white males were dying much younger than more affluent white males: according to the Times, life expectancy had fallen to 67.5 years for the least educated white males compared to 80.4 for the more educated white males. And theTimes reported that life expectancy was 73.5 for the less educated white females compared to 83.9 for the more educated white females—which is also bad news for the GOP because even though white males are more likely than white females to vote Republican, white females are more likely to vote Republican than African American or Hispanic females. And depriving either white males or white females of access to food and healthcare certainly isn’t going to help them live longer.
So let’s starve these poor white people, but that will be kinda slow – so we need to get rid of them a little faster.
Cutting food stamps isn’t the only way in which the Republican Party is doing things to literally kill its own base. The GOP, from Sen. Lindsey Graham to Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz, has been in lockstep in its opposition to the Affordable Care Act of 2010. According to WHO, the U.S. on the whole has an overall life expectancy of 79 compared to a long list of European countries where life expectancy is 81, 82 or 83—and the fact that Europeans have universal healthcare clearly has a lot to do with the fact that they are generally outliving Americans. A major difference between being poor in the U.S. and being poor in Switzerland or France is that in Switzerland or France, the poor have easier access to healthcare (including preventative medicine). The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index has found that Americans living in poverty are more likely to suffer from heart disease, high blood pressure or diabetes than Americans not living in poverty. The fact that men in poverty-ridden McDowell County are dying 18 years younger than men in upscale Marin County bears that out.
If the lack of access to healthcare doesn’t do the job, is there anything else the GOP could do to its base?
Another way in which Republicans endanger the lives of their rural white male base is by endangering Social Security. President George W. Bush advocated privatizing Social Security and turning it over to Wall Street. It became obvious just how terrible that idea was when Wall Street went into cardiac arrest in September 2008. But instead of backing down from that idea, Republicans have doubled down on it. In 2010, the Club for Growth proclaimed, “Privatize Social Security? Hell, yeah!”
In the past, there were many Republicans who saw the value of having a social safety net. Today’s Tea Party Republicans, however, believe in assaulting the poor and the middle class at every turn—and the older whites who vote for them are not exempt. Between butchering the food stamp program, opposing healthcare reform, trying to turn Social Security over to the whims of Wall Street, and going out of their way to eliminate what’s left of the New Deal, modern-day Republicans are no friends of older Americans—including their older white male rural base.