Conservative Contradiction: Help the poor (white people)

Althalucian

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tl;dr (paraphrasing the author): I argued that the conservative way is for people (especially these Trump voters) to take responsibility for their own life and move to a new place for a job, but now I am contradicting my whole philosophy and saying that the government should pay people a huge amount of money to relocate for work.

Help the Poor Move

For the past year or so, I have been involved in an on-again/off-again debate with a number of conservatives of the “paleo” tendency, Michael Brendan Dougherty prominent among them, on the question of what to do about economically stagnant and socially dysfunctional communities. This has taken place in the context of the election year’s attention to what we euphemistically call the “white working class” (its main problem is that it is not working) and its attraction to Donald Trump’s anti-capitalist populism. The answer I have come up with — that people should leave those communities, if they can, and seek better lives for themselves elsewhere — has scandalized some of my friends on the right.

It shouldn’t. And, in the past, it didn’t: No conservative social critic ever blinked an eye or coughed up his cognac when the best advice from the right to the discontented and ambitious poor was to get out of the ghetto or the barrio, get an education, get a job, and start a new life and a new family in some more prosperous corner of the county or country. But the dead and dying and white towns of Appalachia and the Rust Belt are another story. “Why should they have to go elsewhere?” our freshly created populists demand. The answer is, Because the lives they desire are not to be had where they are; their communities, along with their families in many cases, are terribly sick, and the hard truth is that they’d be better off putting some distance between themselves and them. Some of the diseases of poverty are individual, but some of them thrive in congregation (gang violence is the obvious example), and the only treatment for these is dilution. A 2000 Brookings study of Jack Kemp’s famous Moving to Opportunity program found “striking” evidence that poor families who moved out of poor communities with help from the Department of Housing and Urban Development earned more, enjoyed better health, and saw their children do better in school than did families who stayed behind.
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Improving the housing situation is a long-term project — even if zoning rules were changed overnight, housing wouldn’t simply spring up from the earth. An expedient for the meantime would be simply to pay people to move. We already spend a great deal of money, through unemployment benefits, paying people to stay in place. It would make sense to offer a worker eligible for 26 weeks of unemployment benefits a lump-sum payment of his remaining eligibility (perhaps in the form of relocation assistance, or maybe just a check) if he moves to take a job after two or three weeks rather than riding out the entire 26 weeks of eligibility. We could also use tax credits or other instruments to encourage businesses to be more proactive in helping blue-collar workers relocate for work. Under current practice, relocation benefits are reserved almost entirely for the white-collar workers who need them least.

None of this is going to fix what ails Bailey’s McDowell County or Dougherty’s Garbutt, N.Y. But it would help ensure that geography is not destiny for people residing in such places and desiring something better.

The problem with this thinking is that conservatives are against ideas like this and look down on unemployment. They'd just as rather cut out unemployment entirely...unless of course it helps these blue collar white (Trump) people.

Maybe President Tweemp will start proposing social affirmative action plans for his people?

On the other hand, if so-called conservatives did vote for this, it might help black people, too. Or maybe repubs will find a way to keep these kinds of benefits away from black people (see for evidence: America).
 

hashmander

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i never fell for the conservative scam. all their bootstrap positions are basically formed with minorities in mind. put a white face on it and suddenly you need a kinder, gentler drug war ... people should get govt assistance to improve their lives, etc.

then again maybe they aren't hypocrites because today's republican party is basically the dixiecrats and those guys were populists and believed in helping poor whites.
 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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It's the double standard created in a white privilege society. When economic woes hurt minorities and the black community we had the bootstrap speech and we were told to stop expecting handouts from the government. But when economic woes hit white community they are the silent/forgotten majority, the people left behind that need the government to save them, invest in infrastructure, deport immigrants, etc.

Basically if the country isn't working for blacks then we need lecturing. But if the country isn't working for whites we need to make drastic changes with the help of uncle sam.

Side note: I think its hilarious Trump is trying to promote a "free market" by rolling back regulations for businesses but will openly condemn, ridicule, and even threaten any business that chooses to set up shop outside the country to benefit from the "free market".
 

mbewane

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It's the double standard created in a white privilege society. When economic woes hurt minorities and the black community we had the bootstrap speech and we were told to stop expecting handouts from the government. But when economic woes hit white community they are the silent/forgotten majority, the people left behind that need the government to save them, invest in infrastructure, deport immigrants, etc.

Basically if the country isn't working for blacks then we need lecturing. But if the country isn't working for whites we need to make drastic changes with the help of uncle sam.

Side note: I think its hilarious Trump is trying to promote a "free market" by rolling back regulations for businesses but will openly condemn, ridicule, and even threaten any business that chooses to set up shop outside the country to benefit from the "free market".

The double standard goes even beyond that, the same people use "socialist" as an insult yet want the bolded.:francis:
 
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