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Comment by stephencanon

To be fair, he’s describing “non-black, non-latino”, which I suppose most closely aligns with “white non-hispanic” in that table: 19,599/46,180 or 42%. No longer a majority, but still a plurality.

The whole argument is ridiculous, of course:

> If you want to convince white people in this country that doling out free money to the poor is a good idea, you're going to have to convince them that blacks and latinos aren't going to abuse that system en masse. The only way to do that is to try something similar in neighborhoods that are comprised predominately of minorities and cross your fingers that it is a success.

When did we have the double-blind controlled study showing that the mortgage interest tax deduction wouldn’t be abused by the upper middle class "en masse" as a tax-protected store of wealth, contributing to a wildly over-inflated housing market?

Perhaps you can point me to the literature showing that carried interest being taxed as capital gains wouldn’t lead to wealthy fund managers being able to claim zero “income”?

Budget policy in the US (or anywhere, really) isn’t set by enlightened scientists who carefully consider the sociological and economic consequences. Voters and politicians are swayed by pundits and lobbyists, not by scientific studies. Get the right people to endorse an idea with the right (specious but superficially convincing) talking points and you too can help set public policy.

parent stephencanon 12 years ago

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