@BG: Did they? Woody Guthrie makes it sound like a bad experience.
This is one of those subjects that no one is willing to discuss calmly and rationally, because in truth there are points to be made on all sides - and no one wants to concede any point to the other side.
On the one hand, there is no doubt that increased social programs lead to moral hazards - some percentage of the population will choose to live off the dole instead of working, even if it means a hit to their standard of living. Give out more welfare, and you’ll get more welfare recipients.
It is also true, however, that without a minimal safety net you will get blighted areas like the inner cities, where it will be very hard for children to grow up as well functioning members of society because they are saddled with bad schools, bad parents (or more likely, parent), have no role models for correct behavior, etc. This is to be avoided.
it’s also true, however, that if people remain on social assistance long enough, they can become unemployable, leading to a permanent underclass of people wholly dependent on political power to provide for themselves. That’s not good for them, or for society.
I grew up just about as poor as you can be in Canada. I lived in the cheapest apartment blocks available in my city, and was surrounded by welfare recipients. A very large number of them were fully able-bodied people who just gave up looking for work - because welfare made it too easy to do so. And after a time, they became unemployable. I’ve been back to the old neighborhood, and some of those people and their children are still there, a generation later. Welfare didn’t do those specific people any favors at all.
However, there were also people who lived there who went on welfare temporarily or sought out assistance on their rent and childcare so they could go back to school, or take a minimum-wage job that kept them in the job market and allowed them to build a resume that eventually got them out of poverty. That’s what my mother did - instead of taking welfare, she worked her ass off, and both her kids were out working by age 12 to help make ends meet. Some people around us thought we were crazy for working when welfare would pay almost as much, but my mother rapidly climbed the ladder and wound up managing a grocery store, I made it to college and my brother became a journeyman. Would we have been the same people if we just came home every night and watched TV? Would my mother still be a destitute person dependent on society if she had succumbed to the temptation to just sit around and collect welfare?
Imagine if there had been extensive welfare available when agriculture was mechanized. How many of the millions of farm workers who lost their jobs would have simply gone on welfare rather than doing the hard thing and perhaps moving to a city, or learning a new trade, or whatever? Would we still have a large permanent underclass of ex-farmers that ‘everyone knows’ are not employable and therefore need permanent support?
There is a test case for this - look at the fishery industries in Atlantic Canada vs the U.S. Canada subsidizes fishermen heavily - allowing them to go on unemployment insurance during the off-season. The result is that there is that there are a lot of angry, unemployed fishermen who sit around in the winter agitating for more assistance.
In the U.S., the fishermen didn’t get that support. So instead, the economy adapted, creating seasonal industries to take advantage of all the available labor. So now if you’re a Canadian fisherman you fish in the summer and go on unemployment in the winter, but if you’re an American you fish in the summer, then repair boat engines in the winter or go to work in another winter-season business - many of which sprung up simply because of all the available labor.
After WWII noted Keynesian economist Paul Samuelson predicted a massive problem, saying “[The aftermath of WWII] will create the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” After all, one out of every two people was somehow involved in supporting the war machine, and ten million soldiers were coming home and none of them had jobs.
The Keynesian analysis said that putting all those people out of work quickly would create a demand spiral that would be very destructive. Samuelson recommended a whole range of Keynesian stimulus measures including extended unemployment benefits, large one-time discharge benefit checks, direct welfare and work subsidies. He also suggested tapering off wartime production very slowly - in essence turning the war machine into a giant welfare program making useless weaponry just to give people jobs.
None of that happened, other than the GI bill which was a much smaller intervention than Samuelson had in mind. He predicted huge unemployment and a very long period of hardship. That never happened. Instead, the economy boomed - just as it did after WWI. What do you think would have happened if Samuelson got his way, and soldiers came home to make-work jobs and welfare benefits? Would they have been incentivized to rebuild their lives and work hard to re-establish themselves and their families? Or would we have seen a rapid growth in a permanent underclass?
The trick with social assistance is that you need to find the right balance. Too much, and you incentivize counter-productive behavior. Too little, and the social compact starts to break down. Finding the right mix is hard - especially when politicians on both sides are not so much interested in the right amounts, but in pandering to their own constituents.
So how soon can you arrange WWIII ?
Mushroom clouds, while indirectly reducing the jobless rate, are counterproductive to overall efficiency. 
Well, I said “eventually.” If Okies in CA ended up forming a permanent underclass there, I’ve never heard of that. California’s economy grew a lot after the Depression, while Oklahoma . . . isn’t nearly as bad off as it was then, but remains an economic shithole by comparison with CA. I expect most of the Okies found good jobs sooner or later and ended up better off than if they had remained in OK.
Sorry, that will take me at least a month. Is this a rush job?
It’s also human nature to be racist. The liberal ideology, as I see it, is an attempt to overcome the darker side of human nature like racism and homophobia and greed, and that starts by recognizing and understanding the forces that lead to it. Scorning them just creates animosity, as we’re now seeing in the Trump supporters’ rejection of liberalism.
Kudos to Exapno for enlightening us on the conditions they’re in and why, but he went a little too far in blaming them for it. If he or you or I were born into a culture with generation upon generation of poverty and marginalization, and the sense of islolation and defeatism that engenders, do you think we’d be any different? Would we deserve to be blamed and mocked for it like those entitled crybaby assholes at the National Review, and some of us liberals, did?
The Beverly Hillbillies poked fun at the Clampetts for their backwoods simplicity but didn’t blame or mock them for it as if we were superior to them. It also poked fun at the superficiality of Beverly Hills, and middle class whites didn’t object to it because it wasn’t done with scorn or disdain. I’ve hardly ever seen Jeff Foxworthy, but I’ll bet the same can be said for him. If he was mocking and condemning people for being the way they are, you can safely bet your life savings he wouldn’t be as popular as he is.
I don’t think you listened to the songs 
“Okie” applied to more than just Oklahomans- also Texans, Kansans, Georgians, Tennessee-ians, more besides, pretty much all the Dust Bowl refugees. Are we really going to promote that kind of internal migration, giving up on whole sections of the country? (Hint: the banks bought up the abandoned farms) At the same time we’re deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants?
I see what you’re saying. I don’t know how well things turned out for them long-term, I do know a lot of people just got sick and died. But why is the GOP answer always for somebody to pack up and leave? Immigrants- out. Muslims- can’t come in. Poor white people who won’t vote GOP anymore? Pack your things. How far does this go before we’re convinced this is nuts?
He’s the one who makes jokes like, “If you have ever been too drunk to fish, you might be a redneck.” “If you prefer to walk the excess length off your jeans rather than hem them . . .” “If you have a home that is mobile and three cars that aren’t . . .” “If your Mom keeps a spit cup on her ironing board . . .” “If there is a transmission in your bathtub . . .” “If you smoked during your own wedding . . .” “If you have ever climbed a water tower with a can of paint to defend your sister’s honor . . .” “If you have ever shot a deer from inside your house . . .” “If you have ever financed a tattoo . . .” They really are funny jokes, but most of them depend on the stereotype that rednecks are not merely poor, but feckless, ignorant, stupid and crude. I’ve never heard of any poor white expressing any resentment over Foxworthy’s material, I think they laugh at least as hard as the rest of us, but there is no doubt that he is “mocking and condemning people for being the way they are.”
What else can we do if countryside living has become economically non-viable? What would it take to make it viable once again? Family farms are not dying out because of a predatory financial sector, but because agribiz is more efficient. Small-town mom-and-pop businesses are dying out because big-box stores are more efficient. Manufacturing jobs are drying up because automation and offshoring are more efficient. I see no way to fix all that short of socialism – not welfare-state social democracy, but full-bore socialized-means-of-production socialism – and that brings its own problems with it.
But, your whole post is about the pros and cons of welfare and public assistance, which is really not the subject of this thread.
Well the way I see it is that even if they scold the Democrats, the job of the Democrats is to continue helping the poor. I do remember amusing cases of poor white Americans voting in favor of Republican governors that promised to end Obamacare in their state, only to complain that their benefits would end indeed.
Well, I would be amused, but even tough some would not like the liberal efforts to help people like him, I can tell you that liberals will continue making efforts to have a better safety net. And in this case I have to tell you that Trump supporters are not rejecting liberals but rejecting the Republicans as Trump has at least the decency to say that there will be health care for poor people. But Republicans have gone to make declarations to get rid of it and of even more things to help the poor in regions around the Appalachians:
http://occupydemocrats.com/2016/03/17/alabama-republicans-file-bill-take-away-food-stamps-car/
But he speaks as a member of the group he’s making fun of, not an outsider. That matters. The conventions of humor allow black comedians to mock blacks, Jews to mock Jews, and rednecks to mock rednecks.
No, this isn’t a “both sides do it” thing. This ONLY comes from the GOP side in significant amounts.
I need to quibble with this because it hides a point that is oddly relevant today.
Almost all sentient economists predicted some version of unemployment and recession after WWII. Not only was it logical but a similar downtown took place after the much smaller build-up of WWI. (The deficit in FY1918 was $13 billion, more than in FDR’s first term combined.) Farms were in recession for most of the 1920s, 1921 was a bad year overall. The boom took several years to fully develop.
They was in fact a short downturn and inflation for a while after the war, along with enormous housing shortages. The boom took several years to fully develop. Pretend, though, that we went straight into the supposed boom years of the halcyon 1950s. Why did this happen after WWII when it didn’t happen after WWI?
Because after WWII the U.S. was in a position unique to all history, at least post technological revolution history, as the only functioning manufacturing economy in the world. The U.S. had no true competition in almost anything for a decade after the war. The 1950s were the most atypical decade in world history and therefore in American history.
This 16-sigma anomaly is the period that too many people look back on as the standard for which everything must be rated against. If you do compare today’s globally competitive and “flattened” world to the 1950s American economy, of course we don’t look as utterly dominant. What’s amazing is that America has the best economy in the world in 2016 and looks to continue being so for years to come.
So, two major points. One is that nobody should ever under any circumstances look back to the 1950s as an exemplar and anybody who does should be swatted down as quickly as a Creationist. Two is that no solutions, programs, plans, or platforms in today’s world can use what did or did not happen after WWII as the basis for future action; it must be based on 2016’s wholly different international outlook.
This is certainly true. It’s platitudinous: everything is politics and social policy depends on finding right balances. But granted that it is true and relevant in general - who here is suggesting a welfare state? I thought welfare as we knew it died two decades ago.
Mocking of poor white people?
A tidbit about the 1950s I find fascinating.
We had three recessions under Eisenhower. You read correctly. Despite having the world’s only functioning economy, a decade of labor piece, and the continuing stimulus that was the unprecedented Baby Boom, Eisenhower managed to lead the country into three separate recessions in eight years.
Imagine if he had been a Democrat. Imagine what would be said about him today. It would break your head. But he was a Republican. And the 1950s were the best decade ever economically. Just keep telling yourselves that.
Any theories as to why?
The post War economy was significantly stronger than the pre-war economy, short and not especially deep recessions notwithstanding. This paper (p. 39) ties the 1955 recession to Fed tightening, which occurred because they felt inflation was ticking up. “Though the Federal Reserve naturally did not say it was trying to cause a recession, in each of these episodes it was clearly willing to accept output losses to reduce inflation.” But once the economy (and inflation) declined, they were happy to reverse course: they weren’t inflation nutters.
The Fed also seems to be implicated in the following downturns:
1953 recession: Recession of 1953 - Wikipedia
1960 recession: Recession of 1960–1961 - Wikipedia
The Fed I think has gotten better at its job. We know this because a) the Fed tightened in the mid 1990s without tipping the economy into recession and b) the last 2 recessions weren’t caused directly be Fed tightening. Arguably the stability provided by the Fed made our nation’s financial geniuses more willing to take on the sorts of haphazard and irresponsible risks that delivered us the 2000 and 2008 collapses. Hip hip hooray for the Fed, sort of!
More generally, there is a very real distinction between the stability of the business cycle and determinants of long run economic growth. Distribution of that income is a third issue. Eisenhower had a great record on the last two, while the first was clearly superior to the decades that preceded him.