Rich White Welfare Queens Analysis

In the article The Intellectual Free Lunch, the Wall Street Journal focuses on a middle-class group of white men that are mad at welfare and lobbyists. The thesis “Washington should stop sending money aboard and instead zero in on the domestic front”. The thesis explains that the Americans government need to spend more money on our own country and less on foreign aid. Basically, stop sending money out of our country or giving free handouts. Instead we need to focus on our own nation and help build our economics first, before giving money and resulting us to overspend our budget.

At a campaign rally in 1976 Ronald Reagan talked about welfare queens and poverty. He said, “She used eighty names, thirty addresses and fifteen telephone numbers to collect food stamps, social security and veteran’s benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands as well as welfare. Her tax free cash income alone has been running 150,000 thousand dollars a year.”The welfare system is full of gender stereotyping. Stereotyping is when we make perceptions on what we make about others. In the past forty years America welfare system has been designed around Reagan’s fake welfare queen (Black, Sprague). This slur has had negative effects for the families on welfare that urgently need support and are struggling. This paper will discuss the lies of the welfare queen and how it originated and its negative effects on African American families and young girls.

The main concepts of the article are describing the corporate welfare system and how it is responsible for growing economic imbalances between the poor and rich populations. The article elaborated on how we cannot ignore the issue anymore because of the substantial loss that we are facing by letting the gap grow (Huff, 1993). The article also goes into the IRS and how there are tax exemptions and deductions that people qualify for and what is allowed.

Some people have more advantages than others, while the rest are left with disadvantages and struggles. Peggy McIntosh mentions that as she was growing up, as a white person, she was taught about racism in a way that would make other individuals are at a disadvantage. White people had certain privileges that others did not.

The welfare system first came into action during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Unemployed citizens needed federal assistance to escape the reality of severe poverty. The welfare system supplies families with services such as: food stamps, medicaid, and housing among others. The welfare system has played a vital role in the US, in controlling the amount of poverty to a certain level. Sadly, the system has been abused and taken for granted by citizens across the country. The welfare system was previously controlled by the federal government until 1996; the federal government handed over the responsibility to the states in hope of reducing welfare abuse. However, this change has not prevented folks from scamming the system. The

David Zucchino’s captivating book, Myth of the Welfare Queen, sticks to his journalistic roots and reads like an extended news article as it captures two separate yet interconnected stories of women struggling to get by in Northern Philadelphia. Philadelphia was—and is—an impoverished city in many ways, with huge percentages of the population struggling to get by at or bellow the poverty line. Zucchino spent much of 1995 with woman and families on welfare as it was a time when welfare was a particularly hot topic directly preceding the passing of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act. Zucchino strove to cut through the stereotypes and misinformation surrounding welfare and those relying on it. In his own words, “this book is the story of

Poverty is present in today’s U.S. social system. For example, as Lesser states in the Clearinghouse Review, “Forty-six million Americans live in poverty” (1). Lesser then goes on to say how forty-six million Americans living in poverty correlates to almost one in every three single-parent families is poor (1). This is a daunting fact as it applies to today’s economic context with “rising unemployment rates and mortgage crises driving more individuals and families to seek the support of a cash-strapped social welfare structure” (Grijalva 1). With this in mind, many legislators are discussing the topic of poverty in the political realm. In order to tally the score of representatives the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law conducted its sixth annual Poverty Scorecard. “The 2012 Poverty Scorecard grades the voting record of every U.S. senator and representative on the most important poverty-related votes in 2012” (Lesser 1). The 2012 votes covered a range of topics such as budget and tax, food and nutrition, health care, housing, and many more (1). The results of the 2012 Poverty

In his article “Is California the welfare capital?” Michael Gardner states California has one of the nation’s highest welfare recipient.it comes third compared to other states. This is mainly a result of democratic dominance in the state and their heavy focus on social services. The author argues the size of California’s welfare rolls is disproportionate considering the state has only 12 percent of the nations population. Some of it has to do with benefits generosity and others point to several socio-economic factors. In support of the main point of view of the author, California pays out a maximum of $638 in cash grants making it one of the highest states in grants payment. However, Gardner highlights the cost of housing in the state eats

In his article, “Should Recipients Be Tested for Drugs?” David Vitter talks about the issue of drug testing people who are on welfare in the US. Vitter believes that annually drug-testing recipients of welfare will stop people from using the money to support their drug habits. He further believes that those who are using drugs and test positive as a result can then get the help that they need.

Tim Dickinson published an intriguing article in the Rolling Stone, “How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich”, which scrutinizes the complicated history of the American government. Dickinson’s objective is to persuade the audience that the Republican party is giving leniency towards the upper class through the reduction of taxes, which results in the upper class becoming even more wealthy and the middle and lower classes struggling to make ends meet. He not only utilizes credible sources in order to convey the unreasonable actions of the Republican party, but also uses a multitude of historical facts pertaining to the central concept of his argument to strengthen his statement.

We live in a country that feels the urge to label every individual, group, or race however; sometimes that label does not truly represent that individual. For instance, the U.S. Census Bureau, during the 1940s classified Hispanics/ Latinos as white. In this case being labeled, as White did not benefit Hispanics/Latinos because they did not enjoy the same privileges as a White person. However, it was not until 1970 during Nixon’s administration that the academia term Hispanic was created, but it was not included in the Census until 1980. Regardless of how long it took to be included within the Census, the Hispanic/ Latino race will always live under the oppression of the superior race due to the phenomenon

Both of these excerpts are expressing visibility. The “White Privilege” article expressed visibility by trying to show whites about unseen racial and gender issues. One thing of the many things that frustrated me was when it was written. I looked up the publication date, which was 1988. I found that her arguments were old and seemed redundant. I feel this way because she didn’t really didn’t show way she felt the way she did. She didn’t really change my feelings on this because she only wrote her essay in one perspective, which doesn’t seem accurate to me. She tries to make a big deal about racial inequality, but she doesn’t make a firm stand on her perspective. She focuses on many different issues, and not on one. The condition she states

I recently read a news article that almost seemed like satire to me. It was about how a Connecticut town’s diversity council held an essay contest and its prompt was to discuss how white privilege had impacted the lives of people in the town. As you could expect from a predominantly white, suburban town, the essay contest received backlash. The public was outraged and became defensive. One of the people in the town is quoted in saying, “‘There are no barricades here. Nobody says if you are black or whatever, you can’t move here’” (Theroot.com). The sheer oblivion and refusal to discuss the existence of racism in a primarily white town is the epitome of white privilege.

The essay “Richer and Poorer Accounting for Inequality,” written by Jill Lepore, and published in The New Yorker on March 16, 2015, is a demonstration of how Jill Lepore effectively uses rhetoric in her essay “Richer and Poorer Accounting for Inequality,” and shows American Citizens the realization of Inequality in America by using Logos, Ethos, and Pathos. When reviewing Jill Lepore's essay, it is obvious that she is very straightforward in trying to reach her audience of the U.S Citizen. Jill Lepore uses assorted rhetoric strategies to inform U.S Citizens of her view on Inequality in America and have them adopt her position on the argument, that the U.S is not fixing an ongoing issue of Inequality in America. She then explains how Congress needs to be the one responsible for the steps towards improving and lowering Inequality in America.

One of the problems that poverty presented in the expansion of the newly born Republic was a building of tension between the government and welfare recipients over aid benefits. The very idea of what constituted someone in poverty, what aid should be given, and to whom by whom was vigorously debated. It was thought that poverty would impact the developing patriarchal American society, so much so that public officials “worried that generous relief programs encouraged the poor to live on the public’s expense.” The government struggled with the type and amount to provide to those in need and they quickly learned that not all of the welfare programs necessarily met the demands of those living in poverty. The welfare recipients in the new Republic had the potential to disrupt the social and political structures of the government, especially a newly formed one, by burdening its taxpayers. Even in a country, like the United States, with opportunities to make a living wage, a welfare system to provide additional resources, and religious backers to support “paupers openly mocked the values of thrift, sobriety, and self-control.”