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JD Vance on Welfare & Poverty
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Biden/Harris plan drove cost of housing higher by 60%
JDV: Here's what you won't hear, is that Kamala Harris has already done it. Because she's been the Vice President for three and a half years, she had the opportunity to enact all of these great policies.
And what she's actually done instead is drive the cost of food higher by 25%, drive the cost of housing higher by about 60%, open the American southern border and make middle class life unaffordable for a large number of Americans.
TW: The bold forward plan that Kamala Harris put out there is talking about this housing issue. The one thing is there's 3 million new houses proposed under this plan with down payment assistance on the front end. To get you in a house.
A house is much more than just an asset to be traded somewhere. It's foundational to where you're at. As far as the housing goes, I've seen it in Minnesota, 12% more houses in Minneapolis, prices went down on rent, 4%. It's working.
Source: 2024 Vice Presidential debate: Tim Walz vs. JD Vance
, Oct 2, 2024
Welfare queens are poor whites as often as black moms
I do hope that readers of this book will be able to take from it an appreciation of how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism. To many analysts, terms like "welfare queen" conjure unfair images of the lazy
black mom living on the dole. Readers of this book will realize quickly that there is little relationship between that specter and my argument: I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white.One of our neighbors was a
lifetime welfare recipient, but in between asking my grandmother to borrow her car or offering to trade food stamps for cash at a premium, she'd blather on about the importance of industriousness. "So many people abuse the system, it's impossible for
the hardworking people to get the help they need," she'd say. This was the construct she'd built in her head: Most of the beneficiaries of the system were extravagant moochers, but she--despite never having worked in her life--was an obvious exception.
Source: Hillbilly Elegy, by Sen. JD Vance, p. 7-8&57
, May 25, 2017
Homeownership policies moved bad neighborhoods to suburbs
As a 2011 Brookings Institution study found, "compared to 2000, residents of extreme-poverty neighborhoods in 2005-09 were more likely to be white, native-born, high school or college graduates, homeowners, and not receiving public assistance." In other
words, bad neighborhoods no longer plague only urban ghettos; the bad neighborhoods have spread to the suburbs. This has occurred for complicated reasons. Federal housing policy has actively encouraged homeownership, from Jimmy Carter to George W.
Bush. But in the Middletowns of the world, homeownership comes at a steep social cost: As jobs disappear in a given area, declining home values trap people in certain neighborhoods. Even if you'd like to move, you can't, because the bottom has fallen
out of the market--you now owe more than any buyer is willing to pay. The costs of moving are so high that many people stay put. Of course, the people trapped are usually those with the least money; those who can afford to leave do so.
Source: Hillbilly Elegy, by Sen. JD Vance, p. 51-2
, May 25, 2017
We spend our way to the poorhouse
Hillbilly Elegy is little more than a list of myths about welfare queens repackaged as a primer on the white working class. Vance's central argument is that hillbillies themselves are to blame for their troubles. "Our religion has changed," he laments,
to a version "heavy on emotional rhetoric" and "light on the kind of social support" that he needed as a child. He also faults "a peculiar crisis of masculinity." This brave new world, in sore need of that old time religion and manly men, is apparently
to blame for everything from drug addiction to the region's economic crisis."We spend our way to the poorhouse," he writes. "We buy giant TVs and iPads thanks to high-interest credit cards. We purchase homes we don't need, refinance them for more
spending money, and declare bankruptcy. Thrift is inimical to our being." And he isn't interested in government solutions. All hillbillies need to do is work hard, maybe do a stint in the military, and they can end up at Yale Law School like he did.
Source: The New Republic magazine on Hillbilly Elegy
, Nov 17, 2016
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