State budgets shifted from welfare to policing and prisons

Evidence

The social welfare state, such as it was in the context of the United States, fixed an increasing proportion of the national budget in programs to sustain the quality of life for broad swaths of the national population. The social safety net included social security or retirement benefits, health benefits, and unemployment benefits. But it also offered broad support for public schooling and higher education, at least nominally for low-income housing projects, mortgage tax writeoffs for the middle class, and subsidies for a wide range of corporate interests. The deva-stating of public resources and revenues today, by contrast, fixes expanding proportions of delimited state revenues in policing and prisons, and in state security (including immigration restriction). These institutional apparatuses, in short, all target a very different modality of managing those racially defined as not white, and most notably the racial poor. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 446

Categorization

• XREF: The welfare-to-carceral budget shift echoes Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow and the mass incarceration literature the reader draws on. — connects to: Tax cuts shift funding from welfare to repressive state functions — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1747; Neoliberal states shifted from citizen wellbeing to policing and surveillance — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 203
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 446