Notes Last Exam Class Lectures from 4 8 14 and 4 10 14 TANF is the cash assistance program and SNAP is the food stamp program The average income of families in every state is still below the poverty line even with combined TANF and SNAP benefits There is a lot of variation by state though Alaska is the best off and Mississippi is the worst off These benefits are so low why don t we make them a little higher especially since we know all the statistics o One of the biggest arguments is that these assistance programs are meant to be temporary stepping stones If we gave people on welfare enough to be above the poverty line they would be greatly incentivized to stay home and collect their money instead of getting a job o This reflects the shift in the thinking about welfare When these programs were established in the 1940s they were meant to help widowed women be able to stay home and take care of their kids as women weren t expected to work Now although these programs still mainly support women they are meant to help them out while they are out of work looking for future work not so that they don t have to work in the first place o Earned income tax credit has become more popular recently money that is given back to you after you file your taxes if you have certain things such as dependents This is an incentive for people to work to be able to file taxes in the first place Most Americans do really seem to want to work even though the options are not all great Those who are poor are often working currently just in very low wage jobs The debate among economists is if you raise the minimum wage by too much too quickly people may be fired and or prices may go up Small businesses may go out of business if their costs are shifted too much too quickly However large corporation heads are keeping more of their profits than ever before so if the minimum wage were raised they would probably be just fine Some people coming from the structural explanation perspective for inequality say that residential segregation needs to be examined as something that causes poverty and inequality o A poor White American is less likely to live near a poor area than is a middle class Black American o This is part of the reason why Black families have been disproportionately hit by the negative changes in the economy they are living near the hardest hit areas even if they themselves are doing okay History of Residential Segregation Only with the age of industrialization did residential segregation begin to occur Before this although living conditions were not equal Black and Whites lived very close together plantations and slave quarters houses and shanty towns for servants etc However once slavery became illegal many White people felt threatened When Blacks migrated to the North they were corralled to certain areas Restrictive covenants were very popular by the 1920s o These were legal agreements specifying that land could not be owned or occupied by undesirable minorities such as Blacks Jews or Asians People signed documents that said they would not sell their property to someone undesirable for fifty one hundred years o Part 6 from a 1926 deed in Pinellas County FL property could not be rented or sold to anyone from a negro background or of negro extraction excluding quarters for servants maids This document was binding until 1950 o 80 of land in the U S s largest cities was bound by such agreements by the 1950s this explains why minorities lived in such clustered areas Post WWII segregation during the huge housing boom and the wide development of suburbs was maintained by It was not illegal to discriminate on the basis of race at this time in fact the federal government often supported it o Mortgage lending practices Redlining A procedure for ranking the credentials of neighborhoods color coded maps were actually used When people were trying to get mortgage loans from banks the banks examined the neighborhoods to see how likely they were to retain value It was assumed that dominantly White neighborhoods would increase in value that neighborhoods that Blacks were moving into would decrease in value and that neighborhoods that were already composed of many minority groups would stay at about the same value The hazardous neighborhoods were the red ones and banks would not give out mortgage loans to people who wanted to live in these areas This mostly had to do with race a little with class The consequences of this were that most minorities were relegated to renting unless they could pay cash outright for a house because they could not get a loan in the typically Black areas Integration was used as a measure of danger so it was difficult for Black people with resources to buy into a White neighborhood because that would supposedly decrease the value of the neighborhood so they would not be granted a loan o Real estate practices Racial steering and Blockbusting Racial segregation is illegal today but it is still happening People are steered toward areas in which real estate agents assume they would be the most comfortable Blockbusting Suburban marketing to Whites White Flight Major cities often have ring after ring of suburbs White families are increasingly moving out and minority families are increasingly following them causing many Whites to want to move further out Now there is even an idea called the exburbs super far away suburbs The idea of Whites moving out and out and out is called White flight Most new suburbs explicitly excluded people of color in their deeds even if they were GIs or had the money So people of color did not have the opportunity to buy a home to get their investment level up and their nest egg going while Whites did This affects not only one generation but subsequent ones people who could not buy their own homes could then not take out a second mortgage obtain other types of loans because they did have the asset of a home and thus might not be able to send their children to college o Federally sponsored public housing All Black public housing projects By law the housing projects for Blacks were only for Blacks Whites who qualified for public housing were more evenly distributed in different areas Historical residential segregation o Factors that helped reduce segregation during the Civil Rights Era 1968 Fair Housing Act Made redlining illegal Changes in racial attitudes In the 1950s about 44 of White Americans said they would move if a Black family moved in next door to them the