So while most beneficiaries of welfare programs are white, many working-class whites perceive them as schemes to hand their tax dollars to minorities.
[my emphasis]
He spends his time blaming Liberals for not getting it with regard to lower class and lower-middle class whites. What's to get is simple racial hatred. It's no longer, post 1965, a Democratic strategy to race bait. Before the Civil Rights and Voting Rights bills, yes, the Dixiecrats mined white hatred of minorities below the Mason-Dixon, but Reagan took that meme without much contention from the rest of the Democrats.
There's really only two responses to the dirt kicking uneducated, unskilled, unemployed angry white folks plaint:
1 - the standard Right wing one of, "it's your own damn fault you're stupid; and why do you continue to vote for union busting Republicans"
2 - an income redistribution scheme to keep them in middle class wages forever
As to 1, well that was the response when the poor were mostly urban and mostly dark, although were mostly silent on the second part (they giggled about it amongst themselves). Now that the poor are increasingly white, suburban, and rural "we must do something about this carnage!!!" One of the nasty secrets of the Empty States is that, since before Scopes and still today, the quality of education in those places has been hidebound to a hideous degree. "It's your own damn fault you're stupid." One can't really expect people taught that the earth is 6,000 years old, people frolicked with dinosaurs, and the Bible is true history to be capable of doing 21st century work. Now, can one?
As to 2, well that's what the likes of Kim Jong-Don and Manchin and such are demanding. But no one in the Republican Congress supports any such thing. Neither does Kim Jong-Don, really. He imports foreigners at slave wages. And, of course, he imports foreign steel and other materiel. They didn't feel that way when the job losses were in unionized manufacturing in Blue states, of course.
... given the only beneficiaries of his decisions to go with cheaper Chinese metals for his construction project are Trump and his family, he is not someone who ever attempted to lead by example by only buying products made in America. He filled his bank accounts with millions of dollars that could have gone to blue-collar workers, many of whom now believe he is the man who will bring back the jobs that he secretly helped to destroy,
An MIT report from just after the election makes the case for redistribution:
The Rust Belt epicenter of the Trump electoral map says a lot about the emotional origins of his appeal, but so do the facts of employment and productivity in U.S. manufacturing industries. The collapse of labor-intensive commodity manufacturing in recent decades and the expansion in this decade of super-productive advanced manufacturing have left millions of working-class white people feeling abandoned, irrelevant, and angry.
Just suck it up and admit that you're lack of education and skill only got you good wages because Rust Belt unions did the heavy lifting. You elected Reagan, and he saw to it that such support would end. Vote against your self interest. Don't bitch about the result.
In fact, the total inflation-adjusted output of the U.S. manufacturing sector is now higher than it has ever been. That's true even as the sector's employment is growing only slowly, and remains near the lowest it's been. These diverging lines--which reflect improved productivity--highlight a huge problem with Trump's promises to help workers by reshoring millions of manufacturing jobs. America is already producing a lot. And in any event, the return of more manufacturing won't bring back many jobs, because the labor is increasingly being done by robots.
Remember: the CEO of UTC, which is the real Carrier company, said (after Pence and Kim Jong-Don and the cameras left) that the $16 million would be invested in more, not less, automation at the facility, and
"We're going to ... automate to drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive," Hayes said. "Is it as cheap as moving to Mexico with lower cost labor? No. But we will make that plant competitive just because we'll make the capital investments there. But what that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs."
What does the Bible say about worshipping false idols?
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