Who Gets Food Stamps?.................................White People, Mostly

[kpete]

"I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call 'welfare crazy checks,'" Alday said to a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger, a Mississippi newspaper, earlier this month. "They don't work."

http://www.clarionledger.com/story/news/2015/02/14/miss-third-grade-gate-fear-failure/23443737/



Nationally, most of the people who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are white. According to 2013 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, 40.2 percent of SNAP recipients are white, 25.7 percent are black, 10.3 percent are Hispanic, 2.1 percent are Asian and 1.2 percent are Native American.









MORE:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/28/food-stamp-demographics_n_6771938.html

[Gothmog]

1. Thanks for posting

[Travis_0004]

2. Whites makes up 77% of the population. Its shouldn't be a suprise that they use the most food stamps

[randys1]

5. Are you sure about that statistic? Could I see a link to that please.

[Travis_0004]

6. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

[randys1]

7. ,

White alone, not Hispanic or Latino, percent, 2013 62.6%

[NYC_SKP]

10. See also: 62.1%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Hispanic_whites

[DesMoinesDem]

17. Some quick math: 33% of black americans on food stamps, 10% of white non hispanics on food stamps.

[underpants]

3. Great info

[NYC_SKP]

4. US population: Whites 62%, AA 13%, Hispanic 17%, etc...

..

Clearly, State Rep. Gene Alday, R-Walls, is an idiot.

And he would probably find fault in those fancy graphs and facts you got there.

But we, too, and the Huffington Post, should be careful to remember that there are subtleties and details that graphs cannot display.

Taking just the raw data, whites are underrepresented in the program, and Hispanics even more so, while African Americans are more likely to use the program.

The reasons are manifold and a matter of economic and historic oppression and other factors.

[FLPanhandle]

8. Great post.

The OP was meaningless without understanding the base population.

[GummyBearz]

9. Thanks

For pointing this out before I did... as a scientist it drives me nuts when people with good intentions (I believe the OP had good intentions with his post) uses data that is supposed to change minds for the good, but in reality is based on completely flawed logic. And at the end of the day it turns out to be both divisive and easily dismissed by anyone who spends a few minutes to think about it... More "divide and conquer" harm, and no good done.

[NYC_SKP]

11. Indeed, this poster always has good intentions, a DU treasure, but Huffington Post is sketchy.

kpete is the best, I am a big fian.

[kpete]

12. well thank you

alas, sketchy is pretty much everywhere these days..........

thanks to all above for the distillations

clarity is an xlnt goal


Here at DU, we can put our open minds to work

I do not want people to think just because i, kpete posts something

that makes it sacred


that is NOT how the Liberal Mind should work


I supply some basic ingredients (things that interest ME)

DU makes the feast -

sometimes, there is no dessert, and other times dinner sucks,

mostly, i stay full and try to enjoy myself

knowing, what i really came for, is the company.












peace to all,
kp

[NYC_SKP]

14. Same her, the snacks are good but the company is awesome.

But stay away from the lemon scones, they're just bit "off" this morning.

[Igel]

16. It's actually a bit worse.

This is the kind of stat that must only be used for "good." "Good" varies.

When this kind of stat used to defend against one kind of charge, then suddenly 40% becomes "most". By that measure, the US House of Representatives, at 43% (D) is mostly assuredly "mostly" Democratic.

And the bias built into the sample pool is necessarily ignored, with the resulting distribution groundlessly presented as random.

When necessary, the stats are put in terms of "welfare," not a single program. Whichever is more useful when stripped of context.

On the other hand, the remaining "problem" is that blacks are very disproportionately likely to get SNAP. This can also be used to defend or attack, because the economic cause is that blacks disproportionately likely to have lower-paying jobs. So this skew in the data is both willfully ignored and noisily trumpeted, depending on the goal. And the many reasons for the economic skew is subject to the same kind of problems in presentations.

There's a third hand here, which is fertility. One reason for the disproportionality is the number of children each slice of each racial group's SES pie has. The "white children are a minority in many districts"--something that not a few progressives think is a good thing--entails that non-whites will have a higher poverty rate even if the income distribution was precisely the same between racial and ethnic groups given that the official poverty level for a family is a function of family size, primarily the number of children.

The problem isn't the data per se. It's defending group identity--do we advocate to protect a group or do we advocate to change the external circumstances of a group. As long as "science" is based on advocacy first and not understanding second, you get a lot of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. It's why education studies are pretty bad and laughingly frequently irreproducible but experimental physical chemistry papers tend to be much more commonly reproducible.

[glasshouses]

13. One other thing that never seems to be mentioned much is many are young couples with children

military .

[Takket]

15. confused

is this saying that "40.2% of all white households use SNAP" or "40.2% of the households on SNAP are white".... because there is a HUGE difference.

[mr_liberal]

18. I think most would be surprised that there

are more whites on food stamps than blacks. But the article should show statistics when you consider percentage of the population as well. Thats something anyone would think of. Since it doesn't I think its purposely misleading. By ignoring it it just calls more attention to it.