The thing about rural whites is there are far fewer of them, because they are, well, rural. The vast majority of whites live in the suburbs. There are tens of millions more of them than rural whites.
Maybe your experiences suggest that 70 percent of rural whites are on some form of assistance. Even then, I’d like to see the actual numbers.
Altmar-Parish-Williamstown CSD is a pretty poor rural upstate school district. Most everyone in the district and the surrounding districts, Sandy Creek, Camden, And Adirondack Central, were full of people who were just like me. Working class or below. Those who had jobs worked for below average wages, at the wire mill, paper mill, or furniture factory (only the furniture factory remains). Else they were farm hands, or loggers. The men had jobs, a wife, and an ex-wife or two. The rest of the locals were the rural riff-raff who worked in the local Big M Grocery or gas station. While not all of us lived in trailer parks, a great many lived in a trailer on country roads, or a dilapidated old farm house without the means to maintain it.
It wasn’t that different in all of the other districts all the way to the Canadian border on over to Vermont. Everyone got some sort of aid, either in EITC tax credits of thousands of dollars, or outright welfare. Food stamps are the norm. It was/is a full 70% of the population then, and that was 40 years ago. It extended south east and west. The closer you got to the cities, the better things were for the people, but those of us in the woods life was a government handout.
Most of the city/suburb folks don’t realize how many people live out there. This is not Wyoming, Oklahoma or West Texas with miles of open road. This is the very populated Northeast where every hick road has a house or trailer every 1/8 mile. It is like that all the way out into Maine, and south to Alabama/Mississippi. More people than you can imagine live out there.
The sorts of aid that are paid these are not registered as direct welfare, TANF, AFDC, SSDI, or WIC. It is tax credits like EITC, heating assistance like HEAP, Section 8 housing assistance. If you have never lived in it you don’t realize how pervasive it is in the rural areas populated by whites.
It is deliberately masked by the DemocRATS and Republicans. They do not want it exposed. It is hard to quantify and deliberately so. But do not listen to those who say I have some sort of agenda. I do not. I speak from what I have seen, lived. And the feedback of my cousin who runs a small private grocery store in the town of Waddington, NY.