White people won’t call themselves poor. The concept of being “poor” is laden with connotations of lack of virtue and/or other personal failings. The poor are to be demonized, and justly so.
So, white people won’t call themselves poor. White Americans call themselves the “working class” because they see their lack of wealth as being a temporary state, such that they would overcome if they were not unjustly denied the means to do so.
Poor black people are poor.
Poor immigrant groups are poor.
White people are not poor. They are the working class.
Social programs that help the poor are unfair because money from virtuous working class people is being redistributed so that lazy unvirtuous poor people can cheat the system.
When working class people (who, of course are not poor because poor people are unvirtuous) benefit from social programs, it is fair because their need for assistance is only a temporary state that they are kept in only because of unjust outside forces. Someday, they will be rich- this justifies the temporary need for social assistance which wouldn’t be needed if they weren’t unjustly put at a disadvantage.
ETA: And This is what the “working class” don’t get about themselves. They’r poor and they have far more in common with poor people who don’t look like them than they have with rich people who do look like them.
There seems to be a giant disconnect between physically hard and hard. Breaking rocks with a hammer is physically hard but there are a bunch of people who can do it. Writing an operating system or building a company are a different kind of hard, and it is hard work, and not a lot of people can do it.
Just because someones arms don’t hurt at the end of the day does not mean they slacked off.
Do you have a cite for this claim? I don’t believe it if it is in reference to government resources. If you are talking all resources (for example, more wood for their 16 mansions that all rich people must have) then they do pay for that.
A lot of it is open to interpretation. The military protects the whole country, but what is a particular individual’s share of that protection? Is it divided equally per person? Proportional to assets? Proportional to domestic property ownership? Property ownership in high-risk countries? I don’t think there are any definite answers here, but it does seem reasonable that the rich use a larger share.