Politics of Envy

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. 
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. 
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”
― Abraham Lincoln

Choices we make and poverty

 I believe every high school girl should read this article from the NY Times.

       Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Jessica Schairer has so much in common with her boss, Chris Faulkner, that a visitor to the day care center they run might get them confused.

 They are both friendly white women from modest Midwestern backgrounds who left for college with conventional hopes of marriage, motherhood and career. They both have children in elementary school. They pass their days in similar ways: juggling toddlers, coaching teachers and swapping small secrets that mark them as friends. They even got tattoos together. Though Ms. Faulkner, as the boss, earns more money, the difference is a gap, not a chasm.

But a friendship that evokes parity by day becomes a study of inequality at night and a testament to the way family structure deepens class divides. Ms. Faulkner is married and living on two paychecks, while Ms. Schairer is raising her children by herself. That gives the Faulkner family a profound advantage in income and nurturing time, and makes their children statistically more likely to finish college, find good jobs and form stable marriages.

Ms. Faulkner goes home to a trim subdivision and weekends crowded with children’s events. Ms. Schairer’s rent consumes more than half her income, and she scrapes by on food stamps.

“I see Chris’s kids — they’re in swimming and karate and baseball and Boy Scouts, and it seems like it’s always her or her husband who’s able to make it there,” Ms. Schairer said. “That’s something I wish I could do for my kids. But number one, that stuff costs a lot of money and, two, I just don’t have the time.”

The economic storms of recent years have raised concerns about growing inequality and questions about a core national faith, that even Americans of humble backgrounds have a good chance of getting ahead. Most of the discussion has focused on labor market forces like falling blue-collar wages and lavish Wall Street pay.

But striking changes in family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns — as opposed to changes in individual earnings — may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

“It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

About 41 percent of births in the United States occur outside marriage, up sharply from 17 percent three decades ago. But equally sharp are the educational divides, according to an analysis by Child Trends, a Washington research group. Less than 10 percent of the births to college-educated women occur outside marriage, while for women with high school degrees or less the figure is nearly 60 percent.

Long concentrated among minorities, motherhood outside marriage now varies by class about as much as it does by race. It is growing fastest in the lower reaches of the white middle class — among women like Ms. Schairer who have some postsecondary schooling but no four-year degree.

While many children of single mothers flourish (two of the last three presidents had mothers who were single during part of their childhood), a large body of research shows that they are more likely than similar children with married parents to experience childhood poverty, act up in class, become teenage parents and drop out of school.

Sara McLanahan, a Princeton sociologist, warns that family structure increasingly consigns children to “diverging destinies.”

Married couples are having children later than they used to, divorcing less and investing heavily in parenting time. By contrast, a growing share of single mothers have never married, and many have children with more than one man.

“The people with more education tend to have stable family structures with committed, involved fathers,” Ms. McLanahan said. “The people with less education are more likely to have complex, unstable situations involving men who come and go.”

She said, “I think this process is creating greater gaps in these children’s life chances.”

Ms. Schairer’s life offers a vivid example of how rapidly norms have changed. She grew up in a small town outside Ann Arbor, where her life revolved around church and school and everyone she knew was married.

“I thought, ‘I’ll meet someone, and we’ll marry and have kids and the house and the white picket fence,’ ” she said. “That’s what I wanted. That’s what I still want.”

She got pregnant during her first year of college, left school and stayed in a troubled relationship that left her with three children when it finally collapsed six years ago. She has had little contact with the children’s father and receives no child support. With an annual income of just under $25,000, Ms. Schairer barely lifts her children out of poverty, but she is not one to complain. “I’m in this position because of decisions I made,” she said.

She buys generic cereal at about half the brand-name price, takes the children to church every week and posts their happy moments on her Facebook page. Inequality is a word she rarely uses, though her family life is a showcase of its broadening reach.

“Two incomes would certainly help with the bills,” she said. “But it’s parenting, too. I wish I could say, ‘Call your dad.’ ”

Path to Single Motherhood

The van with the cracked windshield arrived on a recent day at 7:30 a.m., and three people emerged, the smallest stifling yawns. Several days a week, Ms. Schairer opens the child care center 45 minutes before she can send her two youngest children to school. Bored children in work spaces make mornings tense.

Savannah, 7, crossed the play area on stilts. Steavon, 10, threw a ball. As parents with infants and toddlers hurried past, Ms. Schairer chided the two to stay out of the way. “They’re really not supposed to be here,” she said.

Steavon has Asperger syndrome, a mild form of autism that can lead to sharp mood swings. He slumped on her desk, wanting $2 to buy a bagel at school. Ms. Schairer does not carry cash — one way not to spend it — and handed him pretzels from home. “I don’t like those!” he said, shoving them away.

Ms. Schairer is known for a spotless desk. Steavon found a leaky pen.

“I’m ready for you to go,” she said.

Time away is money lost — Ms. Schairer punched a clock by the door — so she hurried the children to school and returned with a look of relief. A stop in Ms. Faulkner’s office brought a bit of rejuvenating gossip: two teachers were having a tiff. Adult diversions are absent at home.

“I talk to myself a lot,” Ms. Schairer said.

Although she grew up in the 1990s, Ms. Schairer’s small-town childhood had a 1950s feel. Her father drove a beer truck, her mother served as church trustee and her grandparents lived next door. She knew no one rich, no one poor and no one raising children outside of marriage. “It was just the way it was,” she said.

William Penn University, eight hours away in Iowa, offered a taste of independence and a spot on the basketball team. Her first thought when she got pregnant was “My mother’s going to kill me.” Abortion crossed her mind, but her boyfriend, an African-American student from Arkansas, said they should start a family. They agreed that marriage should wait until they could afford a big reception and a long gown.

Their odds were not particularly good: nearly half the unmarried parents living together at a child’s birth split up within five years, according to Child Trends.

Ms. Schairer has trouble explaining, even to herself, why she stayed so long with a man who she said earned little, berated her often and did no parenting. They lived with family (his and hers) and worked off and on while she hoped things would change. “I wanted him to love me,” she said. She was 25 when the breakup made it official: she was raising three children on her own.

She had just answered an ad from a child care center that needed a teacher’s assistant. Ms. Faulkner hired her and promoted her twice, most recently to assistant director.

“She was always stepping out of the classroom and helping,” Ms. Faulkner said. “She just had that drive, that leader in her. I trust her completely.”

Ms. Schairer took night classes and earned a degree from Washtenaw Community College. A supervisor from the corporate office wrote, “We are so lucky to have you.” Still, after nearly six years, she remains an hourly employee making $12.35 an hour, simultaneously in management and on food stamps.

After Ms. Schairer had an operation for cervical cancer last summer, the surgeon told her to take six weeks off. She went back to work five weeks early, with a rare flash of class anger. “It’s easy when you make $500 an hour to stand there and tell me to take six weeks off,” she said. “I can’t have six weeks with no pay.”

A Broadening Gap

Despite the egalitarian trappings of her youth, Ms. Schairer was born (in 1981) as a tidal surge of inequality was remaking American life. Incomes at the top soared, progress in the middle stalled and the paychecks of the poor fell sharply.

Four decades ago, households with children at the 90th percentile of incomes received five times as much as those at the 10th percentile, according to Bruce Western and Tracey Shollenberger of the Harvard sociology department. Now they have 10 times as much. The gaps have widened even more higher up the income scale.

The reasons are manifold: the growing premium a college education commands, technological change that favors mind over muscle, the growth of the financial sector, the loss of manufacturing jobs to automation and foreign competitors, and the decline of labor unions.

But marriage also shapes the story in complex ways. Economic woes speed marital decline, as women see fewer “marriageable men.” The opposite also holds true: marital decline compounds economic woes, since it leaves the needy to struggle alone.

“The people who need to stick together for economic reasons don’t,” said Christopher Jencks, a Harvard sociologist. “And the people who least need to stick together do.”

Changes in family structure do not explain the gains of the very rich — the much-discussed “1 percent” and the richest among them. That story largely spills from Wall Street trading floors and corporate boardrooms.

But for inequality more broadly, Mr. Western found that the growth in single parenthood in recent decades accounted for 15 percent to 25 percent of the widening income gaps. (Estimates depend on the time period, the income tiers and the definition of inequality.) Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution found it to account for 21 percent. Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute, comparing lower-middle- and upper-middle-income families, found that single parenthood explained about 40 percent of inequality’s growth. “That’s not peanuts,” he said.

Across Middle America, single motherhood has moved from an anomaly to a norm with head-turning speed. (That change received a burst of attention this year with the publication of Charles Murray’s new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” which attributed the decline of marriage to the erosion of values, rather than the decline of economic opportunity.)

As recently as 1990, just 10 percent of the births to women like Ms. Schairer (white women with some postsecondary schooling but not a full college degree) occurred outside marriage, according to Child Trends. Now it has tripled to 30 percent, compared with just 8 percent for women of all races with college degrees.

Less-educated women are also more likely to have children with more than one man. Analyzing nearly 2,000 mothers in their mid- to late 20s, Child Trends found that a third of those with high school degrees or less already had children with multiple men. So did 12 percent of mothers with some post-high-school training. But none of the women in the study who had finished college before giving birth had children with multiple men.

“That’s a dramatic difference, and it varies by education more than by race,” said Mindy Scott, a Child Trends demographer. “It tells you these families are on different trajectories. Having men in the house for a short time with ambiguous parenting roles can be really disruptive for children.”

Ms. Schairer did not have a child with another man, but she did find a new boyfriend, who she thought would help with the children and the bills. They dated for a year before he moved in. Kirsten, 11, and Savannah liked him fine, but Steavon adored him.

“I’m not the only boy anymore; we’re going to do boy stuff!” Ms. Schairer recounts him saying.

“What’s boy stuff?” she asked.

“We’re going to play video games and shoot Nerf guns and play Legos,” he said.

“We do that now,” she said.

“Yeah, but you’re not a boy,” he said.

The details of what followed are less important than the disappointment the boyfriend left behind. No Legos got built during his six-month stay, and it took a call to the police to get him to go. The children asked about him a few days later but have not mentioned him since.

Whether measured by Legos or marriage rates, the pattern is similar: the middle is shifting toward the bottom.

Forty years ago, the top and middle income thirds had virtually identical family patterns: more than 95 percent of households with children in either tier had two parents in the home. Since then the groups have diverged, according to Mr. Western and Ms. Shollenberger: 88 percent at the top have two parents, but just 71 percent do in the middle.

“Things remained extremely stable in the top third,” Mr. Western said. “The middle is increasingly suffering some of the same disadvantages as the bottom.”

That is the essence of the story of Ms. Faulkner and Ms. Schairer. What most separates them is not the impact of globalization on their wages but a 6-foot-8-inch man named Kevin.

School Trips and Scouting

Kevin Faulkner works the sunrise shift twice a week, leaving home at 5:30 a.m. for a computer programming job so he can leave work in time to take his sons to afternoon swim practice. Jeremy, 12, is serious and quiet. Justin, 10, is less driven but more openly affectionate. They arrived home recently to a note from Ms. Faulkner about the next day’s Boy Scout trip.

Thursday night:

Pack

Kevin — Pay Home Depot

Chris — Sort clothes

The couple’s life together has unfolded in to-do-list style. They did not inherit wealth or connections or rise on rare talent. They just did standard things in standard order: high school, college, job, marriage and children. “I don’t think I could have done it any more by the books,” Ms. Faulkner said.

The result is a three-bedroom house, two busy boys and an annual Disney cruise.

The secret to their success resides in part in old-fashioned math: strength in numbers. Together, the Faulkners earn nearly three times as much as what Ms. Faulkner earns alone. Their high five-figure income ranks them near the 75th percentile — hardly rich, but better off than nearly three of four families with children.

For Ms. Schairer, the logic works in reverse. Her individual income of $24,500 puts her at the 49th percentile among parents: smack in the middle. But with only one paycheck, her family income falls to the 19th percentile, lagging more than four out of five.

The Faulkners built a house in Livingston County because of the good schools. Ms. Schairer cares about education, too. But with Ann Arbor rents wreaking havoc on her budget, she is considering a move to a neighboring town where the school system lags. She shops at discount grocery stores and tells Savannah to keep away a friend who raids the cabinets.

“I feel bad, like maybe she’s not getting enough to eat,” Ms. Schairer said. “But sometimes I don’t know what I’m going to feed my own kids, never mind another.”

Jeremy Faulkner plays tennis and takes karate. Justin plays soccer and baseball. They both swim and participate in Boy Scouts, including a weeklong summer camp that brings the annual activities bill to about $3,500.

Boy Scouts has been especially important, offering the boys leadership opportunities and time with their father, who helps manage the troop and rarely misses a weekly meeting or monthly camping trip. Jeremy started as a shy boy terrified of public speaking. Now he leads the singalong and is racing to make Eagle Scout.

“He’s just blossomed through Boy Scouts,” Ms. Faulkner said. “I could do the scouting with them, because we have single moms who play that role. But they have different experiences with their dad. Kevin makes good money, but he’s an awesome dad.”

Ms. Schairer tells an opposite story: constraints in time and money limit her children to one sports season a year. That compounds Steavon’s isolation, she said, and reduces her chances to network on his behalf. When she invited his classmates to a park on his birthday a few months ago, no one came.

“He cried and cried and cried,” she said. “I tried the parents I had numbers for, but they didn’t respond.”

Researchers have found that extracurricular activities can enhance academic performance, and scholars cite a growing activities gap to help explain why affluent children tend to do so much better than others in school.

Four decades ago, families in the top income fifth spent about four times as much as those at the bottom fifth on things like sports, music and private schools, according to research by Greg J. Duncan of the University of California, Irvine, and Richard J. Murnane of Harvard. Now affluent families spend seven times as much.

Two parents also bring two parenting perspectives. Ms. Faulkner does bedtime talks. Mr. Faulkner does math. When Ms. Faulkner’s coaxing failed to persuade Jeremy to try hamburgers, Mr. Faulkner offered to jump in a pool fully clothed if he took a bite — an offer Jeremy found too tempting to refuse.

While many studies have found that children of single parents are more likely to grow up poor, less is known about their chances of advancement as adults. But there are suggestions that the absence of a father in the house makes it harder for children to climb the economic ladder.

Scott Winship of the Brookings Institution examined the class trajectories of 2,400 Americans now in their mid-20s. Among those raised in the poorest third as teenagers, 58 percent living with two parents moved up to a higher level as adults, compared with just 44 percent of those with an absent parent.

A parallel story played out at the top: just 15 percent of teenagers living with two parents fell to the bottom third, compared with 27 percent of teenagers without both parents.

“You’re more likely to rise out of the bottom if you live with two parents, and you’re less likely to fall out of the top,” Mr. Winship said.

Mr. Winship interprets his own results cautiously, warning that other differences (like race, education or parenting styles) may also separate the two groups. And even if marriage helped the people who got married, he warns, it might hurt other families if it tied them to troubled men.

“You get back to the question of how many marriageable men there are,” he said.

At the same time, scholars have found that marriage itself can have a motivating effect, pushing men to earn more than unmarried peers. Marriage, that is, can help make men marriageable.

As Mr. Faulkner tells it, something like that happened to him — he returned to college after an aimless hiatus because he wanted to marry Ms. Faulkner. “I knew I had to get serious about my life,” he said.

His experiences as a father so far suggest just how much there is to be said for simply showing up.

“Thank you for coming, Dad,” Justin wrote after a school trip. “I like it when you’re with me at every event and watching me do every activity.”

He added 16 exclamation points.

End of the Day

Left to do the showing up alone, Ms. Schairer makes big efforts. She rarely misses a weekend of church with the children, and she sacrificed a day’s pay this spring to chaperon field day at Steavon and Savannah’s school. “They were both saying, ‘This is my mom, my mom is here!’ ” she said.

In February, she received $7,000 of refundable tax credits, the low-wage worker’s annual bonus. She prepaid her rent for six months and bought plane tickets to Orlando, Fla. After years of seeing pictures of Ms. Faulkner’s vacations, she wanted to give her children one of their own.

“Do you think we’ll see Jesus?” Savannah asked on the flight. “I hope the plane doesn’t run him over.”

They stayed with Ms. Schairer’s brother, visited SeaWorld and Gatorland, and brought back happy memories. But the trip soon began to seem long ago, more a break from their life than an embodiment of it.

Ms. Schairer sank into the couch on a recent Friday night, looking weary, and half-watched a rerun of “Friends.” Steavon retreated to his room to watch “Superman” alone, and Savannah went out to play with the girl who always seems hungry. Kirsten was in her pajamas at 7 o’clock. They had few weekend plans.

Thirty miles away, Troop 395 was pitching tents beside a rural airstrip, where the next day the boys would take glider rides and earn aviation badges. The fields and barns looked as tidy as cartoons, and an extravagant sunset painted them pomegranate.

The clipboard in Justin Faulkner’s hands called for an early reveille. “I’m the patrol leader,” he said, beaming.

Thirty minutes later, a rope appeared. Boys started to boast. Mr. Faulkner snapped on his tug of war gloves, only to discover that Justin had disappeared. He found him sitting in the grass nearby, fighting back tears. “I want to go home,” Justin said.

Mr. Faulkner did not say much. Jeremy used to get homesick, too. Now he is halfway to Eagle Scout. After a while Mr. Faulkner asked, “Are you sure you don’t want to do a tug of war against me?”

Justin watched the other boys tumble. “When?” he said.

“We can do it right now,” Mr. Faulkner said.

It was not much of a contest for a man who outweighs his two sons combined by more than 100 pounds. Justin fell face first and bumped through the cool grass — a laughing tenderfoot pulled along by his dad

Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/us/two-classes-in-america-divided-by-i-do.html?pagewanted=6&hp&pagewanted=all>

Too Many People

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called Saturday for a second "green revolution" to feed the country's burgeoning population that is forecast to overtake China in numbers by 2025.

Under India's "Green Revolution" in the 1960s and 70s -- seen as one of the world's most successful agricultural turnarounds -- planting of high-yield varieties of wheat and rice resulted in a sharp output rise.

"We all look back proudly to our green revolution which helped us overcome food shortages and banish the spectre of starvation," Singh told a conference of agricultural scientists.

But now, "we clearly need a second green revolution that is broad-based, inclusive and sustainable", he said, noting agriculture productivity has plateaued and "yields continue to be much lower than what is attainable".

Experts say India must increase yields to feed its population which already stands at 1.21 billion people. India is expected to supplant China as the world's most populous nation by 2025, according to Indian official projections.

Singh said the agriculture sector is growing at three percent annually -- one percent below target -- helping drive food inflation that has spiralled faster than in most major economies, causing huge misery for India's poor.

India is poised to introduce a food security bill aiming to guarantee cheap food grains for nearly 70 percent of the population which will impose even greater food production challenges.

Last year, India's premier economic policymaking body raised its estimate of the number of Indians living in poverty and unable to meet their nutritional needs from 28 percent to 37 percent -- representing some 440 million people.

The prime minister called for the spending outlay on agriculture research and development to double or even triple by 2020 as he projected demand for food grains will grow to 280 million tons by 2020-21.

The government on Saturday estimated the country's food grain output touched a record 241 million tonnes in the crop year that ended in June -- 23 million tonnes more than the previous crop year.

India recorded bumper food grain output during 2010-11, helped by abundant monsoon rains, and is hoping for another strong monsoon this year.

oopied from Internet July 2011

Vocational vs University

U.S.G. and P.T.A. - NYTimes.com: "As Education Secretary Arne Duncan put it to me in an interview, 50 years ago if you dropped out, you could get a job in the stockyards or steel mill and still “own your own home and support your family.” Today, there are no such good jobs for high school dropouts. “They’re gone,” said Duncan. “That’s what we haven’t adjusted to.” When kids drop out today, “they’re condemned to poverty and social failure.” There are barely any jobs left for someone with only a high school diploma, and that’s only valuable today if it has truly prepared you to go on to higher education without remediation — the only ticket to a decent job."

Bill's thoughts:
I think skilled trades are being overlooked here. Installing and repairing HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) systems jobs can be well paid if the high school graduate has the right combination of vocational training and apprenticeship. This also holds true for auto dealer repair shops and other skilled trade work. There is a shortage of long-haul truckers and they can make good money if they are willing to put up with that life , get a CDL license, pass a background check and a drug screen. Of course, as technology changes some trades will see more demand and others less just as some University degrees are more valuable than others. Of course, the job seeker has to be willing to relocate to where his skills or degree is in demand. Those reluctant to move may be left out. The young drop-out or even the high school graduate who presents himself to the job market with no special skills will find it tough.

Natures Strategy

It is well known that for every plant and animal nature has built-in procreation in greater numbers than can be sustained by their environment. This strategy is meant to overcome the fact that most offspring will never reach maturity. Plants generate thousands of seeds or millions of spores and many of the offspring of animals do not survive the hazards of life.
Human animals have reached a world population of about 6.5 billion and it is projected to be 9 billion by 2050. Most of the increase will be in the third world, which can least afford it. There is real doubt whether the world environment can support these numbers. The pessimistic view is that environmental damage combined with war, famine and disease will result in the premature death of hundreds of millions people. The USA and western Europe may expect millions will seek refuge illegally on our soil. We better be prepared.

Useless, jobless men – the social blight of our age

(article from London Times)
The benefits system has produced an emasculated generation who can find neither work nor a wife
by Camilla Cavendish

Of all the government adverts that have swamped our radio stations these past few years (must be a quick saving there for the Treasury), one of the most irritating was the jolly woman asking us in a sing-song voice if we had remembered to report changes in our circumstances. Like hell. Every time I heard the ad it conjured up a vision of a lonely official waiting in vain at her desk for people to come in and sign away entitlements to which they feel, well, entitled.
This pathetic advert seemed to me to epitomise the politicians’ total loss of control over the monster that is our benefits system. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) presides over a system so complex that it has to issue 8,690 pages of guidance to help its staff to apply its 51 different benefits — the product of the ever more precise targeting of benefits to particular groups.
In the years of plenty, it was easier to placate and complicate than to simplify. Every new benefit and its separate computer system was just bolted on to the mainframe. But the result is that Britain has more than twice the number of sick people as France. The potential for playing the system, defrauding the system and falling foul of the system is enormous.
So in declaring war yesterday on both poverty and the benefits system, Iain Duncan Smith had it right. If the Government is going to make real inroads into the deficit it will have to tackle the nearly £200 billion welfare budget, which is a third of government spending. This week’s £6 billion of cuts was only Round 1: £6 billion is only 1 per cent of government expenditure, so this was a warm-up. Round 2 will need to take on the DWP leviathan.
But the argument for welfare reform is not just one of affordability. In too many cases, welfare has entrenched poverty. Mr Duncan Smith is one of the few politicians who really understand the poverty trap. Gordon Brown made life more bearable for many people on benefits, but he also made it harder to escape from them. Get a job tomorrow earning between £10,000 and £30,000 a year and you’ll take home only 30p out of every extra pound you earn after the first £10,000. Twenty pence will go in income tax, 11p in national insurance, and 39p in lost tax credits. Add in the loss of other allowances (housing benefit, council tax benefit) and you may find it simply doesn’t pay to work harder. Our poverty trap is deeper than that of most other European countries. That is a strange legacy for a government that wanted to make work pay.
The fear of losing benefits — of not being able to scramble back on to the lifeboat if you fall off — is a huge disincentive to change your circumstances, let alone report them. One in seven working-age households is dependent on benefits for more than half its income. More than half of all lone parents depend on the State for at least half their income. William Beveridge would be horrified to discover that the safety net he designed has become a trap, creating generations of worklessness and dwindling self-esteem. It is also creating a glut of unemployed, unwanted, unmarriageable men.
These men were overlooked during a decade of prosperity that did nothing to change their lives. At the beginning of that decade, 5.4 million working-age adults were claiming out-of-work benefits. The same number were still claiming just before the recession struck. Almost a fifth of 16 to 24-year-olds were not in education, employment or training in 1997. The number was identical in 2006. These people stayed put in the Welsh valleys, in Liverpool, in Glasgow, while Eastern Europeans travelled a thousand miles to pick up work on construction sites in London. Immigration reduced the opportunities available to white British men whose poor education made them less attractive candidates, while the benefits system undermined their motivation.
The problem affects the whole of society because of the striking correlation between male joblessness and single motherhood, particularly in the old industrial cities. In Liverpool, male unemployment rose from 12 per cent in 1971 to 30 per cent in 2001. In 1971 11 per cent of families were headed by a single parent; by 2001, 45 per cent were. Similar patterns can be seen in Birmingham, Strathclyde and Newcastle. The epidemic of male joblessness after the collapse of manufacturing industries coincided with an increase in female employment and welfare support to mothers who found that they could manage alone.
Overlooked by society, irrelevant to employers, unwanted by women who can raise families on benefits without their help, the man who has no work or a series of short-term jobs is a problem. Without steady work, he will struggle to acquire a family: unemployed men are less likely to marry or cohabit than employed ones. Without a stable relationship, he is less likely to grow into a good family man and raise good sons. The taxpayer has become the father: one in four mothers is single and more than half live on welfare. A lot of these women describe the real fathers of their children as “useless” or worse. The men have no role.
In the worst cases, the State has helped to create a class of jobless serial boyfriends who prey on single mothers on benefits. When two of these men moved into the flat that Haringey Council had generously provided for Tracey Connelly, Baby P’s mother, the little boy’s fate was sealed. They killed him. Other such men appear in bit parts in tragedies such as that of Shannon Matthews, abducted and drugged by her own “family”. The welfare system has helped to deprive these children of the most effective check on abuse — the family.
Robert Rowthorn, Professor of Economics at Cambridge, has shown that female and male worklessness have been going in opposite directions for 30 years, well before this latest “mancession”. His research suggests that half the rise in lone parenthood in the past 30 years may be due to male unemployment. He believes that governments must start to focus on these men, and question the feminisation of education and the workplace. It is no solution, he says, to say that women don’t need men or that men should become more female. Nor is it any good waiting for economic growth to dig them out of poverty. Those men need a chance, not a benefits system that undermines them.

The Next Generation of Thugs is on the Way

INDIANAPOLIS — A study shows Indianapolis Public Schools have the lowest graduation rate for black male students among 63 urban districts nationwide.
School leaders say they're working to turn around the statistics. In the 2005-06 school year, just 19 percent of black males graduated from IPS, according to the rankings compiled by the Schott Foundation for Public Education.
IPS has introduced dropout prevention programs and has worked to ease the transition into high school.
"This continues to emphasize what I've been trying to emphasize: the urgency of turning this district around as fast as possible," said Superintendent Eugene White. "I think we have the things in place now to do that."
One reason the district's graduation rates may be so low is the district's high concentration of students from low-income families.
That is a key predictor for which students are at risk for dropping out.
Urban districts elsewhere often encompass larger areas of the city, including more wealthy students in the mix. Only about a quarter of public school students in Indianapolis attend IPS, which has about 35,000 students.
IPS School Board President Mary E. Busch said the 2005-06 statistics do not reflect recent efforts, such as the district's push to connect with students and require alternative schools instead of expulsions.
"We're working hard to bring the graduation rates up," she said. "We have special initiatives and strategies in place to truly address the situation. We're not pleased with where we are."
But Mark A. Russell, director of education at the Indianapolis Urban League, said more work needs to be done.
"There is not a person in the state Department of Education charged specifically with addressing the achievement gap between blacks and whites. Does the IPS board have a committee on it?" he asked. "If we're wanting to save these children, where is the effort?"


Pasted from <http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/stories/2008/07/27/statenews.qp-5501176.sto?1217164858>

 

How to be Poor

Ever wonder why the USA has so many poor people? After all, being poor while a citizen of one of the richest countries in the world requires some explanation. The secret is making the right choices early in life. First, turn your back on the free education offered through 12th grade. Achieve this by refusing to do your schoolwork and quitting at age 16. Avoid the GED diploma as well. It is also important to stay away from vocational programs and apprentice work. Caution...during this time you will have to endure the concern and advice of relatives and counselors but you can shake this off if you are really determined to be poor. Of course, lack of high school will keep you out of University which should definitely be avoided .

In your mid to late teens it will help to have a child out of wedlock. After all, many teens are having multiple children with multiple partners so don’t hold back. Another touch is to develop a criminal record. It is easy to do, stays with you forever and eliminates being hired for many jobs. If, despite all of this, you somehow find yourself employed and earning money there are still things that can be done. Showing up late for work is effective. Another effective technique is to cultivate a hostile attitude toward management.

Finally, in the unlikely event you still find you have some money, make sure to avoid saving or investing. Impulse spending and debt are the way to go here. Even substantial sums can be frittered away quite easily so there should be no excuse for accumulating any assets. In conclusion, the road to poverty is not as difficult as it may seem even in the USA. There are two simple rules which will often get you through when you have to make life choices: 1)Always take the easiest path. 2) If it feels good, do it.

Why Poverty?
According to the World Almanac 2005 – which now lists illegitimate birth rates under the politically correct heading "Nonmarital Childbearing" – nearly 70 percent of black children are born outside of wedlock. With Latinos, the rate is almost 45 percent, whites nearly 30 percent, and Asians 15 percent. Overall, about 34 percent of America's children today are born outside of wedlock.

Bearing and raising children has a big economic impact on any normal family of two married people. Out-of-wedlock births to a single mom are devastating to the chance of escaping poverty. We are not talking about mature women with good jobs deciding to have a child that they can support and raise. We are talking about mostly teenage girls who are clueless about work and responsibility and welfare queens having multiple children. This is the largest single factor in family poverty statistics. In the black community, especially, leaders we see or read in the media seem to be in total denial about this.

Education, Work and Crime

Young people hear so much about the value of education and “stay in school” admonitions that they surely get bored by it. And those most in need are most likely to ignore or defy such advice. If I were advising young people I would use a different approach.

I would ask my young audience (I am thinking Junior High to young adult) “what can you do?” What knowledge or skill do you have that anyone would pay wages for? This is a tough question and is perhaps unfair for the youngest but nonetheless it gets at the heart of the matter. University is not the answer for everyone. For many, a skilled trade learned through training or on the job would be better. Good mechanics with documented training credit can make good momey. There is always demand for HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning)technicians who are certified.

I would also ask “can you show up?”. A frequent complaint of employers is that workers cannot get out of bed and get to work on time or at all. It seems a basic enough ability but this is a widespread problem especially in low pay and part time work. A person who is reliable and has a work ethic is a valued employee and is worth training.

Related to this subject is your desired standard of living. Today in the USA basic needs are met for most people even if they do not work. The issue becomes wants...nice car, nice house, nice clothes, vacations, entertainment, etc. So I would say to young people that if you can forgo “wants” then you will not need training, education or a work ethic. But, quoting Shakespeare , “Aye, there’s the rub.” If you want, want ,want then prepare to work, work, work.

There is an alternative to work and it is called Crime. For people who can’t show up, refuse to be trained or educated, have no work ethic and still have “wants” there is this path. From earliest times when it was perceived that one can steal a crop rather than grow it, crime has been part of humanity. When the number of criminals becomes large relative to the number of workers society collapses into chaos and ruin. This includes the purse snatcher and the CEO who is stealing the company assets. A study was published back in the 1970’s that showed that if the number of dishonest workers and businesses approached 20% of the total our country could not function.

What all this buzz about tax cuts favoring the rich?

Do you think federal income taxes unfairly favor the rich? Of course, what is fair is debatable but consider the following: Of the approximately 130 million taxpayers in this country about 48 million pay zero federal income tax. These are almost all low income persons. Is this fair? Another feature of our tax system is the Earned Income Tax Credit. If you qualify you can obtain up to $4,000 back from the IRS over and above any tax you paid. In other words, you can receive a net profit from the tax system. For fairness this credit requires that your income be low and all of it must come from wages. About 20 million returns qualify for this credit.

If your income is over $60,000 you are in the top 25% of taxpayers. This group pays 84% of the total income tax bill. This too is considered fair. Also note that a corporation will pay up to 35% tax on dividends given to shareholders. Shareholders then pay tax on this as personal income. A person in the 39% tax bracket would then see a total of 74% of the dividend go to the government.

Any across-the-board tax cut will have no benefit for people who already pay no taxes. Only persons who pay taxes will benefit. This seems fair to me but as we know, fairness is a very debatable issue.

Update 15Apr2005: According to Rush Limbaugh's website (http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/today.guest.html) 20% of taxpayers pay 80% of taxes and the top 50% pay 96% of the bill.