Let’s examine some numbers readily available from the Census Bureau’s 2004 Current Population Survey and ask some questions. There’s one segment of the black population that suffers only a 9.9 percent poverty rate, and only 13.7 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor. There’s another segment that suffers a 39.5 percent poverty rate, and 58.1 percent of its under-5-year-olds are poor.

One of these groups is married, the other is not. I’ll give you one guess as to which is which.

Read the rest of the article here.

Starting in about the fourth grade, history teachers taught me that the Articles of Confederation were fatally flawed. The same complaint was inevitably offered up by these history teachers: the Federal government envisioned by the Articles was weak and ineffective. Today while riding the train to work and zoning out, three things occured to me in rapid succession:

1. Weak federal government, you say? Tell me more.
2. My history teachers were a bunch of knee-jerk liberals and proud of it.
3. In all these years, I had never bothered to actually read the Articles of Confederation.

It only took a few minutes for most commentators to explain away the fact that moral values topped the list of voter concerns in the 2004 election with 22% support. There are two main ways in which the importance of moral values was dismissed:
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Here is a great article in favor of abolishing the corporate income tax. It is long but well worth the read. Here is a brief highlight:

The Corporate Income Tax brought in $204.9 billion in 1998. My tax professor (a Democrat) estimated the cost of corporate compliance in that year to be $300 billion. That’s just the direct cost — what corporations paid tax lawyers and accountants.

Europe has a persisently high unemployment rate of about 9%, compared to about 5% for the United States. This is a problem that defenders of European-style welfare states must grapple with. The common method is to invoke hidden unemployment. The claim is that the United States’ Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is fudging the numbers by not counting all of the unemployed. In particular, the BLS is leaving off part time, discouraged and other “marginally attached” workers and part time workers.

The problem with the hidden unemployment defense is that the four main organizations that count unemployment - The BLS, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat), the International Labor Office (ILO) - have harmonized their methods since the 1960’s. They all show that unemployment runs about 4% higher in Europe, give or take a bit. (See the Eurostat data here) See the OECD here

The Bureau of Labor Services looked more deeply into the different methodologies and found that there are still some remaining measurement problems. Correcting for them would lower Canada’s unemployment by 1% and Europe’s by even less, leaving the bulk of the gap unaccounted for except by the relative strength of the economies. Read the full report here.

But the problems with Europe are not just high unemployment. Unemployment in Europe tends to last a lot longer, making it harder to rapidly bounce back after a lost job. Europe also produces more part time jobs and pushes more workers onto extended (government provided) sick leave and early retirement.
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Immigrants are important to the political debate because their success says a lot about the society they immigrate to. Conservatives point to the success of immigrants, including black immigrants, to prove that racism or bad schools does not cause poverty. But second generation immigrants often struggle compared to first generation immigrants. Liberals sometimes bring up second generation immigrants as proof that America is indeed racist, or at least classist. In short, that poverty is caused by external factors and thus can only be cured by external factors. But understanding the nature of the struggles of second generation immigrants provides a powerful insight into the importance of culture.
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I offer the choice of three different bargains to anyone who objects to conservatives legislating morality. The reason conservatives want to legislate morality, particularly sexual morality, is because it is people from broken families that require the lion’s share of charity. Legislating morality is a way for society to make sure that as few people need that charity as possible.
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