The old Democrat line again

At a Townhall yesterday, Biden said, "No one should work 40 hours a week and live in poverty." According to government statistics, no one does. Even during the Clinton administration decades ago, it was shown that to avoid poverty 3 things are required.

1) Finish high school,

2) be over 21 and married before having children, and

3) have a full time job.

Just those three can lift most children from poverty and break the cycle. If both parents are working 40 hours a week even at minimum wage (the old one) the family won't qualify for poverty programs because their income would be too high. It's not that there aren't exceptions like mental illness or intellectual deficiencies, alcoholism, drug abuse and illness which might prevent full time work, but overall, Joe is lying to us.

This speech was the old Democrat chant and whine for more money to redistribute among their faithful, and that ours is not a land of opportunity. You can never make America great again under Joe because legislation will prevent it.

Democrats continue to make these 3 simple rules, articulated in the 1990s by Ron Haskins in a Brookings report, difficult for the low income.

1) They denigrate and ridicule the value of marriage/children in all the cultural areas they control,

2) they weaken the necessary moral principals to sustain the education system by focusing on intersectional, racial and social issues leaving millions of children uneducated in the basics for employment, and

3) they make it difficult for young people to get good employment through programs that punish the employers, like raising the minimum to job killing levels.

Disparities

I wish every preacher, politician, prophet and prognosticator could read (or re-read) THE UNPRECEDENTED EXPANSION OF THE GLOBAL MIDDLE CLASS: AN UPDATE (2017) by the Brookings Institution,   non-profit organization devoted to independent research and policy solutions.  https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/global_20170228_global-middle-class.pdf   Just as an aside, some conservatives consider Brookings part of the “deep state,” i.e. certainly not a Trump supporter.

I commented on that document at my blog in May 2017. I’d forgotten the eye opening research and conclusions and re-read it today.  In light of the current pandemic and the self-flagellation I hear from educated, comfortably middle-class Christian Americans about health disparities, systemic racism, income gaps, struggling inner cities, and failures to thrive of various populations this report is truly stunning.

Here it is:   About TWO-THIRDS of the WORLD are now middle class.  Think on that a moment.  When my great grandfather (b. 1828) set out as a young man to “go west” about 95% of the world existed in overwhelming poverty and the government provided none of the social services we expect today. All that charity was left to the churches and local communities—taking care of the sick and poor and providing children (who often worked in factories or as farm labor) with an education.

In 1990, more than a third of people on Earth lived on less than $1.90 a day, adjusted for local prices (this is the line the World Bank uses as its main metric). By 2013, barely 10 percent of people did; the rate had been cut by more than two-thirds. And most of the recent growth of the last 2 decades has not been among white people (aka Europe and North America) but among Asians and Africans. Even in the U.S. the riches ethnic groups are Asians—Indians and Filipinos. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-biggest-asian-origin-communities-in-the-united-states.html

Of course, the obligatory reporting on global climate change and the percent of rich households (not middle class) consumption being in the U.S. is reported in the Brookings document.  But then, think on this: “India today (2015) is already richer than Germany was when it introduced social insurance for all workers in the late 1880s. Indonesia is richer than the U.S. was in 1935, when the Social Security Act was passed. And China is richer than Britain was in 1948, when the National Health Service was introduced.”  Social programs did not building the middle class—capitalism did.  Brookings, being left of center didn’t say that, but it’s there, in print, and on-line.

Destroying the Trump economy (which actually came after this amazing report) and attempting to make us more dependent on government rather than the values that built our country and those of the countries rising today are critical for those who want global power. Whether you think that means Soros or a global cabal of capitalists, or “woke” international corporations, we seem to be in the battle for our lives.

We need to get back to work and to stop listening to those who are trying to defeat us.

Is Title 1 failing American school children?

I emailed a Brookings (left think tank) author Mark Dynarski of an article on why Title 1 is failing--not enough money he wrote because administrators fritter it away on staff workshops, equipment, etc. rather than helping students. (Title I provides funding to states and districts to improve education for disadvantaged students.) Need. More. Money. Fifty years and $22 trillion on the War on Poverty, 123 wealth transfer programs, and the poverty rate is higher under Obama in 2016 than under Johnson in 1966. Democrats I know, especially teachers, scream, "it's mean old Republicans," but these programs have been bi-partisan with great eagerness for the pork returned to the states so they can be reelected. My note to the Brookings author won't make any difference because it's always about more money and the researchers get grants for writing this stuff.

It makes me think of the Reckless Bad Boys of Columbus, a study done before the War on Poverty, by famous criminologist Walter C. Reckless. Using two groups of "bad boys" from blue collar, working class and deprived neighborhoods and one group of boys who'd rarely been in trouble (from a total 1700), he showered one group of bad boys with every advantage of extra attention, the best teachers and special classes to lift their self-esteem. The other two groups just continued in school as usual, with no special attention. At the end of four years (10th grade), the two groups of bad boys still had the same number of contacts with police for delinquency, behavior problems, drop out rate, etc. and the good boys still weren't in trouble.

I wrote about this study at my blog in 2008:

"If I'd spent 15 years of my life invested in this self-worth concept to reduce crime, I think I would have been distraught. But as far as I know, the researchers just decided their model program wasn't tweaked right, and I think Dr. Reckless is still being cited in the literature for his self constraint theories of criminal behavior.

What I found most interesting was that when the researchers interviewed both the students and the teachers after 4 years, they thought the program was a success! The teachers rated the bad boys in the experimental group as much improved in behavior, even though there was no evidence, and the boys themselves were enthusiastic and recommended it for their friends! But it didn't translate into better grades or less contact with the police and courts."