Ahmed Abdi
Sunday, December 16, 2012
The Republican Party, delirious with its recent successes but lacking any solutions to the very serious problems that underlie the voters’ unease, has accelerated its cruel tactic of demonizing people on welfare. Welfare recipients have become the official national scapegoats all across the country.
Welfare as we know it is the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (A.F.D.C.). Compared with programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, it is not a big budget item. But it is the program people love to hate.
Who gets welfare? This is where the race issue enters. Contrary to popular perception, the recipients of TANF are about equally divided between whites, blacks and Hispanics. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, in 2011 the TANF rolls were 33.3 percent white, 31.2 percent black, and 28.8 percent Hispanic. Yet the primary image of a “welfare recipient” in most people’s mind is a black woman. This has been demonstrated in study after study by political scientists, psychologists, and communication scholars. Most Americans not only drastically overestimate the proportion of welfare recipients who are black, they also tend to believe that welfare makes up a huge proportion of the federal budget, when in fact it accounts for less than 1 percent of federal spending. As Donald Kinder and Cindy Ham wrote in us against them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion, “means-tested programs like AFDC and food stamps are understood by whites to largely benefit shiftless black people.” The racialization in perceptions of welfare is reinforced by the news media, which usually use images of black people to illustrate stories about welfare and poverty (Martin Gillens’ Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy is the most complete examination of this topic).
So when you say the word “welfare,” the image that immediately pops into most people’s heads is a black one. Opinions about welfare and opinions about race are inextricably tied together, and there is no one who works in politics, Republican or Democrat, who doesn’t understand that.
This Mayor of Lewiston, Maine has been known to say controversial and sometimes absurd comments such as “trying to keep his town from turning into a Somali Muslim slum”.
The mayor is under fire again, suggesting the city’s schools are overcrowded because families from Massachusetts and New York move to Maine to take advantage of the state’s generous welfare system.
He says there are 1,000 children of welfare seekers in city schools “who could care less about going to school” because “they don’t feel like they’re going to work anyway.”
Mayor Robert Macdonald, is ignorant about lots of issues specifically, welfare issues. For single-parent families, welfare benefits help close the gap between very low and median household income, which has a massive effect on their ability to pay for housing. This in turn provides children in single-parent families with a better chance of moving out of poverty through improved school attendance and education achievement, and better health.
It is a disgrace that community Lewiston to allow this Mayor to say outrageous and baseless comments.
I understand there is a great lack of intelligent Mayor and ideas. But if you really think that welfare are the biggest problems this country has, I think you are really letting some whackos do your problem defining for you Mr. Mayor.
Welfare programs are a small part of the total federal and state budgets. I find it disturbing you would lash out against the most desperate and poor people who are trying to help their family.
Wealth inequality is the worst it has been in this country since the 1920s. However, if you were paying attention at all, you would know that welfare rolls nationally have not gone up significantly during the recession. Food stamp benefits, however, have gone up several times, mostly to people who work hard, get laid off, and spend a short amount of time on food stamps while they are looking for another job.
Lewiston is an All-America City Mr. Mayor. I cannot for the life of me wonder how people can make such stupid remarks and then wonder if the remarks offended anyone. We need to stop these kinds of remarks from this Mayor who is divisive. I also feel that a person who is in that position (mayor) should be held accountable for their comments. People cannot be expected to follow a leader who can offer up dumb remarks like this mayor. The mayor basically lost a great deal of respect from his constituents. It is time to step down Mr. Mayor.