Where is the National Guard?

[Janx]

We need to be careful when we are talking about a rate (a percentage) and when we are talking about an absolute number.

According to the National Census Bureau, in 2014, some 31 million white people in the US were below the poverty line. Some 11 million African Americans were below the poverty line. So, yes, in absolute terms, there were more white people in poverty. But...

According toe the same source, those 31 million white people were about 12% of the white population. The 11 million African Americans were 26% of the African American population.

So, the poverty *rate* is higher among African Americans - if you're African American, you're more than twice as likely to be in poverty than if you're white in the US.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2014/table3.pdf



The USDA finds that about 86% of American households were food secure at all times in 2014. "These households had access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members."

That means 14% of housholds had some level of food insecurity - "At times during the year, these households were uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, enough food to meet the needs of all their members because they had insufficient money or other resources for food. Food-insecure households include those with low food security and very low food security."

Rates of food insecurity were higher for some groups:

All households with children (19.2 percent),
Households with children under age 6 (19.9 percent),
Households with children headed by a single woman (35.3 percent),
Households with children headed by a single man (21.7 percent),
Black, non-Hispanic households (26.1 percent),
Hispanic households (22.4 percent)

http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food...curity-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics.aspx




There are other social factors involved, that transcend race. Whatever the race, men are *far* more likely to be violent criminals than women. In essence, when you put a group under stress, it is the men who lean toward the high risk activities that may lead to violence. This likely has more to do with more broad gender roles than race.



By the US Census Bureau, voting rates for blacks were 2.1 percent higher than whites in the 2012 Presidential election. That was the first (and only) time that lack voting rates were higher than whites in the period of 1996-2012. The cite I found doesn't speak to years before that, but in 1996 blacks were voting at a rate of 7.7% lower than whites. The trend is such that I am not confident that they'd ever been at a higher rate before 2012.

https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-568.pdf




Yes. See the financial sector (filled with white people) as an example of both of these - you'd imagine a lot of folks should have gone up the river for fraud after our last financial crisis, but... no. Closed mouths and money do protect people, clearly.

Yay Stats from Umbran!

Last stat I had heard on NPR was that blacks account for about 75% of America's poor. Close enough to what Umbran said.

And sure, since more blacks are poor, I'm sure that means blacks in total pay less than whites in taxes. That's just math.

What gets racist is what we do with this information and how we express it.

I think blacks get arrested more because they are the largest portion of the poor people

I think cops, just by the crime rate and skin color distribution, see a lot more blacks they have to cuff than whites.

I think that colors how cops see blacks in a bad way (no pun intended).

Hopefully, these views don't make me a racist as I do not want to be a racist.

In my view, if we could raise everybody to be middle-class, we wouldn't have a crime problem* that is dominated by poor black people. Most crimes happen from poor people, and the most poor people are black. Flip the skin colors around and it would be white people in jail because they are poor and living desperate lifestyles.

*crime problem is relative, since the 1990's crime has dropped and is generally at all time lows.


I swear we've had this discussion in other threads, and I'm not sure how it involves the guys in Oregon, other than the difference in police response to their crime.

 

[billd91]

Indeed. Why that isn't a sexist statement is anyone's guess.

Because it's easily backed by statistics. Statements observing differences between sexes aren't necessarily sexist.

Re food security, sure, but the number of people who don't get enough to eat in this country is vanishingly small. And has more to do with individual circumstances on the ground (e.g., scummy parents who neglect their children) than with policy, per se.

Tell that to people when food stamps benefits get cut or otherwise encumbered by increasing regulation or when unemployment benefits run out. But, hey, justify your assumptions about people being "scummy" however you want and pray like hell that you'll never be in that position around people like yourself who will consider you scummy for it without knowing your story.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I don't understand your point. What are you referring to? What about poverty isn't understood? For the record, I spent a year homeless as a 20 something, so maybe I qualify as someone that might understand something about how poverty might work for some things? I don't know.

I was responding to people denying much of a connection between poverty and crime rates. I live in a poor and high crime area. I also have known people who otherwise wouldn't commit crime, do so because they are trying to pay the bills or feed their family.

 

[Janx]

I don't understand your point. What are you referring to? What about poverty isn't understood? For the record, I spent a year homeless as a 20 something, so maybe I qualify as someone that might understand something about how poverty might work for some things? I don't know.

he's referring to Morlock's comments about how nobody in America is starving.

 

[Morlock]

Last stat I had heard on NPR was that blacks account for about 75% of America's poor. Close enough to what Umbran said.

Either they were mis-reporting the stats, or you are mis-reporting what they said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

The US Census declared that in 2010 15.1% of the general population lived in poverty:[43]
9.9% of all white persons
12.1% of all Asian persons
26.6% of all Hispanic persons (of any race)
28.4% of all black persons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
223.5m Whites
39m Blacks

9.9% of 223.5m = 22m poor whites.
28.4% of 39m = 11m poor blacks.

There are twice as many poor whites in America as there are poor blacks.

Because it's easily backed by statistics. Statements observing differences between sexes aren't necessarily sexist.

So is the correlation between race and violent crime. Truth never saved anybody from the "racist" accusation.

 

[Bedrockgames]

he's referring to Morlock's comments about how nobody in America is starving.

That as well. I was just trying to emphasize that being poor means impacts every aspect of your life and that there are people doing things like surviving on one meal a day (or having to make really tough choices between things like food and bills).

 

[Janx]

I was responding to people denying much of a connection between poverty and crime rates. I live in a poor and high crime area. I also have known people who otherwise wouldn't commit crime, do so because they are trying to pay the bills or feed their family.

this is speculation (as I grew up poor and didn't resort to lawlessness), but I would suspect people living in continued poorness with no prospects may develop a lack of respect for society (what has it ever done for them), such that they turn to drugs and crime to escape or get their way over the world.

Consider that what we have here in the US is "street crime" over in the middle east is a comparable demographic that is joining terrorist groups instead.

It's the same lack of hope, and lawlessness attitude, just funneled slightly differently.

 

[MechaPilot]

There's nothing wrong with requiring ID to vote. Seems like common sense to me. It's what they do in Europe, after all.

Sure. There's nothing wrong with requiring ID to vote, despite the fact that in-person voter fraud is so rare as to virtually not exist in the U.S. If you have to pay for that ID it then becomes equivalent to a poll tax however, and that is wrong. And, if you prevent people from attaining that ID by shutting down the place you have to go to get it, that's wrong too. If those shutdowns target areas that heavily populated by a specific race, religion, or political affiliation, that's also wrong.

Voter ID laws cloak themselves in the shallow pretense of avoiding virtually non-existent instances of in-person voter fraud when they actually exist for the purpose of manipulating votes.

 

[Lord Twig]

What I have found is that "righties" have no idea what "lefties" want, think or feel, but they think they do.

Left: "I think if we do A it would make America great!"

Right: "No, doing A would destroy America! You want to destroy America! You hate America!"

Left: "I also think that doing B would help with racial equality."

Right: "No, doing B would give all of the advantages to the minorities! Why do you hate White people?"

Really those on the Right should just stop trying to ascribe motives to those of us on the Left and just agree to disagree. It seems in the past that both the Right and the Left would believe that the other side wants the best for America, but they just disagree on how to get there. Now the Right thinks the Left are full of evil, America hating communists that want to destroy the country.

As for the idiots at the Refuge in Oregon (I think we all agreed they are idiots). They are in the wrong here. The refuge was created over 100 years ago by Teddy Roosevelt. If they really want to give it back to the original owners, that would be the Native Americans. Or their descendants as none of the actual "original owners" are alive anymore.

But really, that ship has sailed. The people of America now own all of the land currently held for us by our government, however it was aquired. It is our government, we can tell them what to do with it. The majority is perfectly happy with that land being a refuge. If you don't like it you can vote for representatives that agree and will try to change it, but you have to accept when you are out voted. That's how a democracy works (or representative republic in our case).

 

[MechaPilot]

So is the correlation between race and violent crime.

As if race (or gender) were the determinative factor. It's not. It's not as if men or minorities are just monsters waiting to pounce when no one is looking.