Welfare: Who is On It and How It Works
Jared Taylor and Marian Evans, American Renaissance, May 1993
(CLICK)Of the dozens of ways that the government has found to take money from people who work and give it to people who do not work, the best known is Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC).
Although there are other programs that actually spend more tax money on poor people, AFDC is what is generally thought of as “welfare.” A significant minority of recipients are white. However, since whites are considerably less likely than any other racial group to be on AFDC, welfare acts as a net transfer of billions of dollars from whites to non-whites.
Americans are suspicious of government handouts to able-bodied adults, so AFDC payments are supposed to be for the benefit of the children of the indigent rather than for the indigent themselves. Eligibility is therefore restricted to poor families with children under the age of 18. There is a certain looseness about the definition, so virtually all AFDC “families” are single women with children. In 5.2 percent of all welfare cases, the other parent is dead or incapacitated, and 33 percent of the time the other parent is absent because of divorce or separation. Fifty-six percent of the time, however, the mother did not bother to get married at all. Thus, in more than half of all welfare cases, money goes to women who started “families” when they had illegitimate children.
Blacks are vastly overrepresented on the rolls. As the first chart on this page shows, 5.4 million — nearly 40 percent — of all recipients are black. Only 2.9 percent of whites are on welfare whereas 18 percent of blacks are. This means that any given black is six times as likely as any given white to be on the dole.
In female-headed households, 68.4 percent of Hispanic children are poor, while 64.7 percent of black children and 45.9 percent of white children are poor. In families in which a man is present, 26.7 percent of Hispanic children are poor, while 19.3 percent of black children and 9.5 percent of white children are poor.
The welfare rolls look very different from state to state. In the District of Columbia, 98 percent of recipients are black (and 82 percent have never been married). In Hawaii, which is 62 percent Asian, 70 percent of recipients are Asian. In California, 33 percent of recipients are white, 23 percent are black, 29 percent are Hispanic, and 12 percent are Asian.
Interestingly, a child’s chances of being poor are linked to how many brothers and sisters he has. The child poverty rate in one-child families is 12.4 percent, rises to 23.7 percent if there are three children, and reaches 50.6 percent if there are five or more. The family prospects for black and white children are vastly different. Although 80 percent of white children live with both parents only 38 percent of black children do.
