In 1965 the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan released the now-famous Moynihan Report which showed that the number one cause of black poverty was the breakdown of the married, two-parent biological family. The Democrats did not recieve this news well. They pilloried Moynihan and called him a racist. Then they went into, in Moynihan’s words, denial mode. 40 years later and out of wedlock childbirths have more than doubled and the Democrats are still in denial mode. The scientific debate is over, even among liberal sociologists. But the silence is deafening. Here is some information that the GOP should be repeating like a broken record.

Link from PBS’s First Measured Century series.

Here are some articles to get you up to date.

• Marriage and Caste. John Edwards is right, there are two Americas. The rich America is married, and the poor America is not.
• Why We Don’t Marry by sociologist James Q. Wilson. Phenomenal article. Debunks the theory that there is no economic connection between welfare and illegetimacy because inflation adjusted welfare benefits declined. If you consider all benefits, from food stamps, to medicaid to public housing, benefits did keep up with inflation. It also notes that rural women leave welfare faster than urban women because in small towns it is hard to dissappear into a community of other single mothers. In other words, social mores matter. Finally, it also rebutts William Julius Wilson’s theory that out of wedlocks increased because of a lack of jobs.
• Dan Quayle Was Right by sociologist Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. This article was originally published in the left-leaning Atlantic Monthly. Tour of the research that demolishes the niave theories of the 1960’s and 1970’s that divorce and single motherhood would not harm children.
• How Welfare Reform Worked by Kay S. Hymowitz. Another tour of the research focusing on welfare. The experts went on records making predictions about rising child poverty, and they were wrong.
• Getting Hitched. Contrary to popular myth, the fathers of out of wedlock childbirths have stable relationships with the mother, high school graduation, and no criminal record. There is no reason - other than loose sexual mores - for them to drift away rather than marry.
• Five Easy Questions About Black Poverty. Article refuting some of the theories that the breakdown of marriage is caused by some other factor, such as a lack of jobs.
• The Moynihan Report Interview with Democrat Patrick Moynihan, who first raised this issue in the 1960’s, only to be attacked by his own party. 40 years later the rate of out of wedlock childbirths has more than doubled and people who speak the truth about marriage and poverty are still attacked.
• Marriage and Poverty. Article by economist Walter Williams.
• Victories in the Marriage Debates by Maggie Gallagher. Some of these articles document how luminaries in the field have come around to the importance of family. This article discusses a more schollarly survey of the research and shows the shift as researchers came to the realization that children need married parents. It also discusses the ongoing denail by the overwhelmingly left-wing scientists. They will dismiss the effect of family structure on poverty by correctly observing that while the statistical trends are there, it is not necessarily the case. But in other contexts, for example, the relationship between growing up in poverty and having a bad life, they do not use the “not necessarily” defense. Instead they recognize the strong connection and want to fix it.
• Raw Census Data on Poverty Rates and Family Structure.

Books

• The Marriage Problem by James Q. Wilson. Author of one of the articles above, this is a survey of the research about family and poverty.
• Life at the Bottom. The culture of poverty has no color lines. Theodore Dalrymple surveys the self-destructive lifestyle of the white underclass in England.
• The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass by Myron Magnet. Surveys the damage that 1960’s style liberalism did to the poor in America.

There are many factors that have to be in harmony to fight poverty: free markets, strong property rights, a strong work ethic, and freedom from oppression. The left is on the wrong side of almost all of them.

• The Breakdown of Marriage. This is the number one cause of poverty in America.
• Progressive Economics. Liberal labor laws such as the minimum wage and lifetime job protection fall victim to the Law of Unintended Consequences. These unintended consequences are sometimes wielded intentionally - the first minimum wage law in the United States, the Davis-Bacon Act, was used by white contruction workers to prevent competition with black construction workers. This still happens today - France has a minimum wage of about $9.00/hour and young Muslims have an unemployment rate of up to 40%.
• Opposing Capitalism. I can’t do any better than quote the economist Walter Williams:
  

  The 20th century saw unprecedented material gains as well. Controlling for inflation, household assets rose from $6 trillion to $41 trillion between 1945 and 1998. Today, more than 98 percent of American homes have a telephone, electricity and a flush toilet. More than 70 percent of Americans own a car, a VCR, a microwave, air conditioning, cable TV, and a washer and dryer. In 1900, no homes had the modern conveniences of today. Today’s poor Americans have choices that yesterday’s millionaires could have only dreamt of, such as cell phones, computers and color television sets. Added to all this progress, most adults have twice as much leisure time as their turn-of-the-20th-century counterparts.

  You say, “Williams, it would take an idiot to deny the human progress Americans made during the 20th century. What’s your point?” The productive people who made this progress possible are often painted as villains. I’m talking about the innovators and the risk-takers, in a word — entrepreneurs. Today’s heroes are often seen as the people who attack entrepreneurs — among them lawyers, politicians, media people, leftist organizations, college professors and others who often contribute little or nothing to human progress. My colleague, Thomas Sowell, calls the entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors the “doers” and their attackers the “talkers.”

• The Curse of Foriegn Aid. Foriegn aid has multiple negative consequences. It makes despots more powerful, particularly for government-to-government foriegn aid. Food relief means that free food puts local farmers out of business, which in turn lowers the foriegn country’s food output and making it more vulnerable to famine in the future.
• Protectionism and Fair Trade. “Fair trade” keeps jobs in America that should be done overseas. It deprives crushingly poor countries of much needed jobs, while driving up the cost of consumer goods for average Americans, all in the name of protecting a manufacturing job in America.

Back in the late 1980’s, Yasser Arafat proclaimed, “the womb of the Arab woman is my best weapon.”

…

Yet a closer look at the demographics of the Middle East shows that the region’s population dynamics may ultimately work to Israel’s advantage, and in any event will present challenges far different from those most commonly feared. Throughout the Arab world, birth rates are plunging.

…

take a look at Iran. Since its revolution, the country has seen its fertility rate plummet by nearly two-thirds, to the point that it no longer produces enough children to sustain its population over timed. As a result, during the first 50 years of the 21st century, Iran will see its median age increase by roughly 20 years, from 20.6 to 40.2 according to United Nations projections.

…

Virtually anywhere one looks in the Middle East, and indeed throughout the developing world, the pattern is the same. True, the Arab regions of the Middle East are expected to increase in population by 150 million by 2020—the equivalent of two new Egypts. But this increase will be caused primarily by bulging numbers of middle-aged and elderly people, not youths. In Egypt, for example, the population of small children will begin falling within 10 years, given current fertility trends. By mid-century there will be roughly 100,000 fewer children under 5 than there are today. But the population of seniors will grow by 18.5 million.

Meanwhile, in countries such as Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Algeria, the median will increase between 15 and 20 years by mid-century, according to United Nations projections, leaving more than half their populations over age 35. Thus all of Israel’s neighbors are aging far faster than Israel itself, and yet all would seem to lack the institutional and financial wherewithal to cope with their coming old-age crises.

Read the full article here.

The CIA factbook has some hard numbers. Iran has a fertility rate of 1.8, and Algeria has a fertility rate of 1.89. By contrast, the United States has a fertility replacement of 2.09 (which is just about replacement level).

As the author points out, the middle east is experiencing falling birth rates. Not all nations have bottomed out like Iran and Algeria. For example, the birth rate of Saudi Arabia is still very high, at 4 children per woman. This is the key insight: the fertility rates in the Middle East are falling, so even though the Muslim population of many nations is still increasing, that will not be the long term trend.

• Taxes Destroy Jobs. It is a basic economic truth that you get less of what you tax, and more of what you subsidize. Taxes on gas cause people to buy more fuel efficient cars and burn less gas. Taxes on businesses and business income cause people to create fewer businesses. Fewer businesses = fewer jobs. Forget the money taken out of your paycheck, this is the real reason to support tax cuts.
• Public Schools Drive Up Housing Prices. One reason to buy a house in a good neighborhood is to send your children to a good quality public school. But this puts couples into a bidding war for houses in good neighborhoods. Town councils and land use boards are reluctant to zone for more housing because that means having to build more schools - which means more taxes. Another problem is that new schools might water down the quality of education - particularly if the newcomers are lower on the socio-economic scale than current residents.

  The lesson is that the supply of schools cannot rise fast enough to meet the demand for good schools, so housing prices rise as couples bid for the limited supply in good neighborhoods.

  School choice and vouchers are the obvious solution. They break the connection between schools and neighborhood, thereby de-escalating the bidding war for houses. Parents could live in the “nice” parts of “bad” school districts and use their voucher to send their children to different public schools or to private schools.

• Dual Income Families Increase the Supply of Labor, Driving Down Wages For Single Income Families. There is a lot of talk these days about 11 million illegal aliens driving down wages of unskilled workers. But having the entire labor pool increase by about 70% as working mothers join the workforce also drives down wages, including the wages of skilled workers. Couples that would like to be a one income family have to become a two income family just to keep up.

  In fairness, cheaper labor has benefits because the cost of labor-intensive goods and services goes down. This will put the two-income family ahead, but will only partially offsets the lower wages for the single income family.

• Taxes and Income Redistribution. There are several problems with income redistribution. The first is that most of it goes to the elderly in the form of Social Security and Medicare, and the elderly are actually wealthier as a group than the average American - their income is lower, but their household wealth is greater. In fairness, there is a huge range of inequality among the elderly. The best solution would be to allow Social Security and Medicare to become means-tested welfare programs for the elderly, rather than income transfers from the (relatively) poor working age population to the (relatively) rich retirees.

  The second problem with income redistribution is that it actually plays a role in creating the root cause of poverty - the out of wedlock childbirths and the general breakdown in culture. A final problem with income redistribution is that much of it goes to industries such as farmers rather than to people who really need it.

There is not much we can do about income redistribution except continue the struggle against Big Government. The other factors can be fixed pretty easily. School choice would drive down housing costs, which would in turn drive down the number of two income families (many two income families would prefer to be one income). That would drive up wages and allow even more families to become one income families.

Alternately, you can simply move to a Red State.