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Paul Ryan had the temerity to call attention to the poverty program’s failures and the left continues to attack him. Power Line calls our attention to George Will’s column defending Ryan.
George Will shows that Paul Ryan was right to contend that a “tailspin of culture, in our inner cities” plays a huge role in the persistence of poverty. Will finds the liberal outrage at Ryan’s unexceptionable remarks to be the product of “malice, ignorance, and intellectual sloth.”
I find them to be the product of ideological necessity. Ryan’s analysis is inconsistent with both the left’s narrative and its prescriptions. Therefore it must be denounced as racist.
Ryan’s analysis undermines the left’s indictment of American society. For example, the left insists that our criminal justice system is horribly stacked against young black men. As proof, it cites — even touts — the high rate of incarceration of this cohort. But if the breakdown of the African-American family in our cities is contributing to high rates of criminal behavior therein, then the left’s indictment of our justice system loses much of its force. …
Here’s Will’s column.
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.
A year from now, there surely will be conferences marking the 50th anniversary of what is now known as the Moynihan Report, a.k.a. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” 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 all American children are born out of wedlock; almost 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:
The family is the primary transmitter of social capital — the values and character traits that enable people to seize opportunities. Family structure is a primary predictor of an individual’s life chances, and family disintegration is the principal cause of the intergenerational transmission of poverty. …
Great post on the subject from Jennifer Rubin.
There has been so much political turmoil among Republicans that it is easy to lose sight of the intellectual disarray on the left. On social, economic and foreign policy, liberals are adrift — and sounding somewhat heartless. The party that envisions itself as a friend of the poor and oppressed is very confused.
The left has gone through five years of the Obama presidency essentially ignoring poverty (the topic was largely avoided in favor of the war on women theme at the Democratic National Convention in 2012) until the issue became reincarnated as “inequality” — a slogan with no programmatic content cooked up for election-year attacks.
Consider how reactionary the Democratic Party now is on poverty — going back pre-welfare reform and even pre-Daniel Patrick Moynihan to insist that the cure to poverty is simply “jobs,” ignoring that those mired in poverty lack the education and life skills to obtain and hold work. (This was the same crowd that opposed welfare reform, the most successful social reform in decades.)
The overlap between fatherless households and poverty seems not to concern them. Leave the poor alone, they seem to suggest. Alas, it’s the conservative reformers who care sufficiently to look at the root causes of poverty and provide educational opportunities available to wealthy children through school choice. The left seems to have forgotten that jobs are not a commodity to be handed out like food stamps. Employment and personal fulfillment are the end products for those who’ve enjoyed a safe, secure, organized and stable childhood in which their physical, intellectual and moral development has been cultivated. (The Jesuits call it “cura personalis” — devotion to the whole person.)
Having ignored poverty and offering no meaningful policy agenda, the left attacks conservatives who are focused and providing batches of policy solutions. It’s not liberals, but Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) who are addressing the issue with serious and varied policy approaches; the left caters to the green elites and defends a health-care plan that discourages work. …
Thomas Sowell points to issues like school choice and minimum wage laws that make it possible for the GOP to appeal to black voters.
Recently former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice added her voice to those who have long been urging the Republican Party to reach out to black voters. Not only is that long overdue, what is also long overdue is putting some time — and, above all, some serious thought — into how to go about doing it.
Too many Republicans seem to think that the way to “reach out” is to offer blacks and other minorities what the Democrats are offering them. Some have even suggested that the channels to use are organizations like the NAACP and black “leaders” like Jesse Jackson — that is, people tied irrevocably to the Democrats.
Voters who want what the Democrats offer can get it from the Democrats. Why should they vote for Republicans who act like make-believe Democrats?
Yet there are issues where Republicans have a big advantage over Democrats — if they will use that advantage. But an advantage that you don’t use might as well not exist.
The issue on which Democrats are most vulnerable, and have the least room to maneuver, is school choice. Democrats are heavily in hock to the teachers’ unions, who see public schools as places to guarantee jobs for teachers, regardless of what that means for the education of students. …
Restaurant CEO explains how the unintended consequences of yet another government over-reach could hurt those it is supposed to help.
President Obama on March 13 signed an order directing the Labor Department to expand the class of employees entitled to overtime pay. Currently, if a salaried employee makes more than $24,000 a year and is part of management—if he manages the business, directs the work of other employees, and has the authority to hire and fire—that employee is exempt from overtime coverage. The president wants to raise this salary threshold, perhaps as high as $50,000, demoting entry-level managers to glorified crew members by replacing their incentive to get results with an incentive to log more hours.
At issue is a growing inequality problem in the United States. Increasingly, Americans don’t have the career opportunities most took for granted a decade ago. Many are withdrawing from the labor force, frustrated because they’re unable to find a job and lured to depend on government rather than on themselves.
Rewarding time spent rather than time well spent won’t help address this problem. Workers who aspire to climb the management ladder strive for the opportunity to move from hourly-wage, crew-level positions to salaried management positions with performance-based incentives. What they lose in overtime pay they gain in the stature and sense of accomplishment that comes from being a salaried manager. This is hardly oppressive. To the contrary, it can be very lucrative for those willing to invest the time and energy, which explains why so many crew employees aspire to be managers. …