1512 Women can stop poverty

As the nation and world watched "poor blacks" (as liberals called them) gathering after Katrina, some of us noticed something else. Mostly, we saw women and children. Young women, old women; thin women, fat women; women in groups, women alone; healthy women, disabled women; well dressed manicured women, and shabby, ill-kempt women. Poverty in New Orleans and anywhere else in the USA is in the control of women, because it only takes three things to wipe out most systemic poverty. 1) Finish high school, 2) get married before starting a family 3) have your first child after age 21. Very few women who do this live in poverty. If they build a good marriage, they have a solid economic base; if the marriage fails, they are better prepared to face adversity with an education. They will be better role models for their daughters. The Democrats would lose their political base if serious inroads were made by black women in controlling their own destiny rather than looking to Uncle Sam to be a negligent step father. This is why for the last 40 years the War on Poverty has been preaching not abstinence, marriage and education, but more money for more programs to help the poor stay poor. As New Orleans rebuilds, you won't hear any politician, local, state or federal, say "our old programs to help the poor failed," they'll just say they were underfunded, like the levees.

Update to my comment: Dan Quale was right.

William Galston, once an assistant to President Clinton, put the matter simply. To avoid poverty, do three things: finish high school, marry before having a child, and produce the child after you are 20 years old. Only 8% of people who do all three will be poor; of those who fail to do them, 79% will be poor. And their lives did not improve if their mother had acquired a stepfather. See the article by James Q Wilson in City Journal. These statistics do not apply just to blacks.