Sunday, March 23, 2014

George F. Will: The left’s half-century of denial over poverty

George F. Will: The left’s half-century of denial over poverty - The Washington Post:
"Critics of Rep. Paul Ryan’s remarks about cultural factors in the persistence of poverty are simultaneously shrill and boring.
Their predictable minuet of synthetic indignation demonstrates how little liberals have learned about poverty or changed their rhetorical repertoire in the last 49 years.
Ryan spoke of a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” adding:
“There’s a real culture problem here.”
This brought down upon Ryan the usual acid rain of accusations — racism, blaming the victims, etc. 
He had sauntered into the minefield that a more experienced Daniel Patrick Moynihan — a liberal scholar who knew the taboos of his tribe — had tiptoed into five years before Ryan was born."

...In March 1965, Moynihan, then 37 and assistant secretary of labor, wrote that “the center of the tangle of pathology” in inner cities — this was five months before the Watts riots — was the fact that 23.6 percent of black children were born to single women, compared with just 3.07 percent of white children.
He was accused of racism, blaming the victims, etc.
Forty-nine years later, 41 percent of allAmerican children are born out of wedlockalmost half of all first births are to unmarried women, as are 54 percent and 72 percent of all Hispanic and black births, respectively.
Is there anyone not blinkered by ideology or invincibly ignorant of social science who disagrees with this?

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