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 I know I’ve written about this several times, but it just keeps coming up. Recently, Colorado State Rep. Jim Welker (R) sent an email to his colleagues containing “an essay written by someone else that accused ‘welfare-pampered blacks’ of waiting for the government to save them from Hurricane Katrina.â€
An excerpt from that essay, written by the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson:
President Bush is not to blame for the rampant immorality of blacks. Had New Orleans’ black community taken action, most would have been out of harm’s way. But most were too lazy, immoral and trifling to do anything productive for themselves.
You can look through comments of my previous posts and find quotes such as:
Conservative economics does differ from liberal economics, but I think it is a misunderstanding of Republicanism that leads liberals to charge that conservatives don’t care about the poor. Cons argue that the poor must be empowered, not simply catered to hand and foot (which is often times what happens in the current welfare system). Hence, when cons cut taxes it is so that corporations will have extra money to expand and thus create more jobs, giving the poor more opportunities. If you honestly look at the stats, when the rich get richer, the poor don’t get poorer, they get richer as well.
Fact: In 1980, CEOs made 42 times the average blue-collar worker. By 1990, this disparity rose to 85 times, and by the year 2000 the disparity between worker and CEO climbed to 531 times as much.
“The income gap between the rich and the rest of the US population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself.”–Alan Greenspan Alan’s hardly a liberal!
The report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute found the incomes of the poorest 20 percent of families nationally grew by an average of $2,660, or 19 percent, over the past 20 years. Meanwhile, the incomes of the richest fifth of families grew by $45,100, or nearly 59 percent, the study by the Washington-based groups said.
In fact, “while welfare rolls have dropped by more than 50% since 1994, many of these former recipients have moved into jobs that pay low wages — compelled by welfare reform in the 1990s that required many of those who received welfare to work. These are employees who hold jobs as security guards, hotel workers, home health care aides, receptionists, food processors, data-entry clerks, call-center operators, telemarketers. Many are also in home health care or child care workers.” These jobs usually pay minimum wage or slightly above.
More than 25 percent of working families in the United States can be classified as low-income. To be considered low-income, a family of four earned less than $36,784 in 2002 (far less than the median income of $62,732 for a family of four). Of those 9.2 million low-income working families, 2.5 million are officially in poverty (earning less than $18,392 for a family of four). Working
families with a minority parent are twice as likely to be low-income as families with white parents.–Annie E. Casey Foundation
I know it’s easier on your conscience to write off the poor as lazy, by the fact is that the majority of the poor are not the stereotypical lazy folks. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we will develop compassion for and strategies for those who can’t afford healthcare. In my ministry experience, I’ve met numerous folks that are poor. Very few of these folks were lazy. Anecdotal evidence is very weak, I know, but at least I have had experience with the poor.
Barbara Bush during a visit to the Hurricane Katrina refugee shelter in the Houston Astrodome:
What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.
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My friend 
