Blacks are Several Times More Likely to be on Public Assistance, as Compared with Whites

by David Sims

FEW SUBJECTS are more muddied by leftists than the matter of which race is the most likely to be on welfare programs.

The correct answer is “blacks.”

But the liberals never seem to tire of finding ways to obfuscate. One of the commonest methods they use, in order to convince the public that blacks aren’t quite as dependent on hand-outs as racists say they are is to point out, correctly, that there are more whites than blacks on welfare.

But, of course, there are far more whites than blacks in the US population. It isn’t the total counts of whites and of blacks that form the proper comparison, but their per capita rates.

If we wanted to know whether Californians or Nevadans were the more criminally inclined, would we simply compare the total number of crimes committed in California with the total number of crimes committed in Nevada? No. California has a much larger population than Nevada does, and comparing the total counts that way would be unfair to the average Californian. Instead, we take the total counts and divide them by the population size of the state from which the count comes. Then, when we have the per capita rates, we can make a valid comparison.

The same is true when you are comparing two races, instead of the residents of two different states. The same methods apply.

I’ve learned that 2006 was the last year that the Department of Agriculture still published complete data on race. In that year, then President George W. Bush told the Department that they no longer had to report the race of welfare recipients. They continued to report the whites as whites, but they began assigning most of the non-whites to the “unknown race” category starting in 2007.

But, in 2006, of households on welfare in the United States:

41.7% were white
33.7% were black
19.9% were Hispanic
2.6% were Asian
1.7% were Injun
0.4% were “unknown race.”

Meanwhile, of the US population,

63% were white
12% were black
15% were Hispanic
4% were Asian

Adjusting for the populations of these racial groups, we see that in 2006, compared to whites…

Blacks were 4.24 times more likely to be on welfare
Hispanics were 2.00 times more likely to be on welfare
Asians were only 98% as likely to be on welfare

These ratios fluctuate a bit because the data change from year to year, and sources vary. But the general picture the data create remains the same, when the statistics are properly treated. The point is that blacks are, yes indeed, for sure, without any doubt, several times more likely than whites to be living on welfare.

And the leftists/liberals are trying as hard as they can to make it seem otherwise.

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