Underserved, really?

George Rebane

Underserved groups used to describe populations without adequate access to goods and services, e.g. education, medical care. This included rural, elderly, low-literacy, blue collar, and poor populations. Minorities (i.e. Blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, transphiles, illegal aliens, …) per se were not included, but often belonged to one or more or the included categories.  The current politically correct definition first and foremost characterizes all minorities as being underserved, and therefore needing wealth transfers along with a growing slate of “socially equitable” laws, regulations, rights, and permissions.

Today the underserved minorities are grist for the Democrat voting machine.  But the government’s own wealth transfer data from its myriads of welfare programs tells a markedly different story.  Starting around 1970, when the Great Society laws and programs started kicking in, it turns out that if anything, the minority populations in the big urban areas have been overserved.  (Culture and public education explains away why these monies have not been used more wisely.)  What keeps the underserved Big Lie alive in the lamestream is the way that progressive government bureaus, agencies, and departments keep score on the dispensed cash.

A good illustration of this is the cited statistics on the country’s child poverty rate.  Nationally prominent economists Phil Gramm and John Early debunk (here) the leftwing claim that currently one in six (over 16%) children live in poverty.  When you look more closely, you find for openers that “the Census Bureau’s tallies still don’t include $1.9 trillion in government transfer payments. … If the Census Bureau had included the missing $1.9 trillion in transfer payments, child poverty would have been only 3.2% in 2017, compared with the official rate of 17.5%.”

A similar Big Lie treatment generates the “myth of American income inequality”.  The authors treat this issue in an excellent online version (here) of their similarly titled book.  The income inequality ‘facts’ are cooked from statistics that garble earned income and the myriad of transfer payments that induce people not to work.  The continually cited poverty stats range in the one in five or six level (16-20%), when the actual rates are really less than one fifth (about 3+%) of that.  This fact is known by all illegal aliens who risked life and limb to get here.

The bottom line of all this is that these lies are used by our Left to perennially bolster their voter rolls with the unread and diseducated of the land.  At the same time this narrative forms the basis for the Democrats’ constant drumbeat of promoting vote-buying payments to these populations which require ever more taxes and national debt increases.  You can bet the farm that none of this has been covered in the Dems’ lamestream media, and therefore at least half the country has no idea of who is underserved, and to what extent these populations are actually being overserved.

Comments

[Bill Tozer]

ON FEEDING OUR FUTURE, A BLOCKBUSTER DEVELOPMENT

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/on-feeding-our-future-a-blockbuster-development.php

[The Estonian Fox]

George - you need to watch your words, or I need to read more slowly. UNDESERVED and UNDERSERVED both look identical when scanned quickly.

Maybe when the white producers stop producing, and there are no more benefits for the non-producers, the government might start serving the undeRserved white producers.

[Gregory]

Ef 1104a

Now, now. The least productive folk are white pseudo-liberals in power in Sacramento and D.C.

Some probably even have Baltic DNA.

[George Rebane]

EF 1104am - Good point. But I'm just using the established term of art that now has been embedded in our lexicon across by the lamestream and Dems. I have a hard time finding any significant numbers of underserved, save perhaps the border towns along the Rio Grande.

[Bill Tozer]

IN FREE LUNCH FRAUD: JUDGE CALLS OUT WALZ & STAR TRIBUNE

“I can’t think of anything comparable ever happening in the state’s public life. It is unprecedented.”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/in-free-lunch-fraud-the-judge-calls-out-walz-the-star-tribune.php

[Bill Tozer]

Underserved? Served them so much they have no future in a civilized society.

URBAN DEVOLUTION CONTINUES

“Major portions of many of our large, Democrat-run cities have become unlivable. Crime, lawlessness, and a general breakdown of the norms of civilization are rampant. Many young people in these cities are untrained, ignorant, and, one suspects, unemployable. But they don’t seem to mind, and our society apparently doesn’t expect more from them. Maybe liberals like the prospect of a generation with no prospects, who will forever be dependent on government.

These trends come together in spectacular displays of anarchy like the ransacking and looting of a Wawa store in Philadelphia, one of many misgoverned Democrat cities, on Saturday night. Reportedly something like 100 young people, described as teenagers although some appear older, participated. Watch this, and contemplate the future of a country in which these people are citizens: (1:02 video)”

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/09/urban-devolution-continues.php

[Gregory]

If I was black I expect I would be heartbroken and ashamed.

I'm not, so I'm sad for the folks whose lives will be damaged by the lawlessness.

[Bill Tozer]

Building a Progressive Tower of Babel

https://quillette.com/2022/10/13/building-a-progressive-tower-of-babel/