What's Wrong With the South?

[Street Knowledge]

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2014/09/18/whats-wrong-with-the-south

What's Wrong With the South?
The national poverty rate declined to 14.5 in 2013 from 15 percent in 2012, the first time it's fallen since 2006. But the picture is far gloomier in the South, which at 16.1 percent, had the highest rate of all four regions of the country.

The southern poverty rate has declined since 2012, according to the latest figures from the Census Bureau, but so, too, did the rate in the other regions, and the South’s declined by the fewest percentage points. Additionally, the South was the only region that experienced a decline in real median wages from 2012 to 2013.

[READ: Census Bureau Data Sheds Light on America's Poor]

The Census Bureau defines the South as a 17-state region encompassing Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia. For statistical purposes, the Bureau considers the District of Columbia a state and part of that region.

Income inequality is markedly more widespread in the South. The map below measures inequality by each state’s Gini coefficient, which ranges from 0 to 1. Zero indicates perfect equality and proportional distribution of income, according to the Census Bureau’s report on income released Thursday. One means total inequality, where one social class has all the income and the rest have none.

Poverty among children is also endemic in Southern states: Twelve of the nation's top 15 states with the highest child poverty rates are in the South, according to an analysis of Census data by the Children’s Defense Fund. “Child poverty is a moral blight on America,” Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund, wrote in a statement Thursday. “Children of color and those under six during the years of rapid brain development are the poorest. Five years into the recovery poor children in the majority of states still have not benefited.”

Under the Affordable Care Act, the share of Americans without health insurance has reached pre-recession lows. But the majority of Southern states, at least through 2013, continue to have higher rates of people without coverage than the national average. Most Southern states are using the health insurance Marketplace and are not implementing the Medicaid expansion, leaving a gap in coverage for low-income adults who don't qualify for Medicare or make enough to earn tax credits for coverage under the Marketplace, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Further, Southerners are more likely than people in other regions to have chronic illnesses and other poor health outcomes.

The gender-wage gap is more widespread across the country, but the biggest pay discrepancy between men and women is in Louisiana, where women make 65.9 cents for every man's dollar. That gap is more than 3 cents higher than in Wyoming, the state with the second biggest wage gap. Right after that is West Virginia, where women make 69.4 cents for every dollar a man makes, according to a National Women’s Law Center analysis of the new Census data.

[OPINION: Census Poverty Statistics Fail to Reflect Scope of Homelessness Problem]

These states underscore occupational segregation at play, says Kate Gallagher Robbins, senior policy analyst at the National Women's Law Center. The energy industry is a major, high-wage employer in states like Louisiana and West Virginia. But those highly-physical jobs are dominated by men, leaving women to rely on lower-paying service-industry jobs instead.

“Some of the states that have these large wage gaps also tend to have an over-representation of these types of industries that are relatively well-paying and that women have traditionally not been a part of and not really been welcomed in,” Gallagher Robbins says.

Lindsey Cook for USN≀ Source: U.S. Census

The difference in poverty rates among men and women are pronounced in the South. The poverty rate among women is as much as 7 percentage points higher than men in Mississippi.

Part of the reason for this, Gallagher Robbins says, is the fact that many of those states have the lowest minimum wages, and women make up two-thirds of minimum wage workers overall.

"States that paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 also tend to have larger wage gaps. The reverse is also true: States that have smaller wage gaps also have higher minimum wages," she says.

Lindsey Cook contributed to this story.

Lindsey Cook for USN≀ Source: National Women’s Law Center

 

[Bay Area]

I didnt read the whole article but a great bit a info that has always stuck with me from a college history class was the fact that to this day the South still hasnt recovered from the civil war/ending slavery. Their economy was slave based while the North had an actual system of capitalism in place that didnt need slave labor to thrive.

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

lazy cac?

 

[superunknown23]

How the GOP is Winning Among the Poor (white)

Among the far-right entertainer class, 2012 was defined as the “takers versus makers” election. According to that narrative, Romney lost because the grasping poor wanted a President who would promise them “free stuff” instead of opening up opportunities to succeed through hard work. Minority voters supposedly chose Obama by spectacular margins because, well…you know what those people are like.

The results tell a very different story. Obama performed well in many of America’s wealthiest areas, including places that have been Republican strongholds for generations. Romney, on the other hand, racked up lopsided wins won in some of the country’s poorest counties. A closer look at Romney’s success among the poor reveals a disturbing picture of the forces overwhelming the Republican Party in our time.

Brian Kelsey at Civic Analytics in Austin did an excellent analysis of voting patterns in the most government dependent counties in the US. He used data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis to gather a list of counties whose residents are most dependent on government aid in the form of food stamps, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and other “welfare” programs.

Strangely, Kelsey discovered that Romney won 21 of the 25 most welfare-dependent counties in the country. The pattern Kelsey found extends beyond his limited data set. Romney won some of his most overwhelming support in the 2012 election from America’s most “dependent” regions, carrying 77 of America’s 100 most welfare-dependent counties.

It turns out that America’s most aid-dependent counties share some other characteristics that might explain their voting patterns. They are overwhelmingly white, southern, and rural. In fact, 86 of them are in areas that did not outlaw slavery prior to the Civil War and 81 of them are majority white.

Romney lost only four of those 81. Three of those four are in the North. He lost only one county on that list which was white and Southern (Elliot, KY), and he lost there by 60 votes.

Another surprising pattern emerges from the analysis – the stark racial divide between the poorest Americans, and those who receive the most poverty relief. In an interesting irony, the list of most dependent counties does not line up with the list of poorest counties. The counties which receive the highest levels of welfare assistance are disproportionately white; while most of America’s poorest counties are majority-minority.

Though African-Americans and Hispanics suffer far higher poverty rates, they receive far less proportionately in government transfers. Poor whites receive government assistance at a far higher rate than poor non-whites. In other words, even in poverty, it pays to be white.

On the other end of the spectrum, Obama won half of the nation’s fifty wealthiest counties. He lost all of the counties on the 50 wealthiest list which are located in the South (if you exclude Virginia’s DC suburbs – not exactly the heart of Dixie).

This reflects a pattern seen across the country in the 2012 results. The Republican ticket saw its greatest success based not on wealth or welfare, but on three, ranked criteria:

1) Region – The single highest indicator of success for the GOP ticket regional. Republicans won reliably in sections of the country in which slavery was legal until Lincoln’s election.

2) Urbanity – The lower the population density, the more successful the GOP ticket.

3) Race – Romney performed best among white voters, particularly older white voters.

Where factors were at tension with one another, as in Harris County (Houston), the outcome was muddled. Houston is Southern, urban, and ethnically diverse. Obama scored a narrow win there, also winning Texas’ other big cities by modest margins.

In rural, Southern, majority-white counties, Romney racked up margins sometimes topping 90%. Apart from those three criteria, outcomes appear to be almost completely unaffected by poverty rates, welfare, food stamps, or any other socio-economic factors.

The “takers” narrative is not born out anywhere in the election results. Like voter fraud and un-skewed polls, it’s one of those ironclad facts of life that somehow only exist inside the magical world of rightwing media. Were those desperately poor white voters in counties across Kentucky and Tennessee choosing Romney in order to end their own “dependency,” or did some other factor inspire their passionate support of the GOP ticket?

The racial and regional character of the 2012 election and every subsequent political fight is ominous. It helps explain why political compromise has come to be equated with betrayal and why so-called “patriots” are willing to bring the country to its knees just to take rhetorical swipes at this Administration.

This approach to politics is not just failing the GOP at a national level. It is placing the party at odds with the country’s future direction. By playing on latent racial tensions, the party is fostering a degree of bitterness that will be difficult to diffuse and may have dangerous implications down the line.

How the GOP is Winning Among the Poor - GOPlifer

Who will feel real pain with these food stamps cuts? As it turns out, most of them live in Red State, Real People America. Among the 254 counties where food stamp use doubled during the economic collapse, Mitt Romney won 213 of them, Bloomberg News reported. Half of Owsley County, Ky., is receiving federal food aid. Half.

You can’t get any more Team Red than Owsley County; it is 98 percent white, 81 percent Republican, per the 2012 presidential election. And that hardscrabble region has the distinction of being the poorest in the nation, with the lowest household income of any county in the United States, the Census Bureau found in 2010.

Since nearly half of Owsley’s residents also live below the poverty line, it would seem logical that the congressman who represents the area, Hal Rogers, a Republican, would be interested in, say, boosting income for poor working folks. But Rogers joined every single Republican in the House earlier this year in voting down a plan to raise the minimum wage over the next two years to $10.10 an hour.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/red-state-pain/

Keep your guvmint hands off my welfare!

Poor whites have this "I may be poor but I'm still better than a niqqer" mentality. It's an existential pathology, a need for superiority to compensate for their failures. This country was set up for them to succeed, yet they failed.
That's why they are the most racist folks around, so they vote republican (against their best interests)... Associating with poor blacks would be too painful for their egos.

The GOP has been very successful at convincing poor whites in rural areas to vote for them and against their own economic interests.
Poor whites defending tax cuts for the rich kinda reminds me of poor southerners fighting for slavery in the 1860s (only the rich owned slaves).
Racism and the three Gs (guns, god & gays) sure worked like a charm in the South.

"If you can convince the lowest white man that he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll even empty his pockets for you."
- President Lyndon Johnson