Prometheus 6

You cannot read this paragraph without coming away feeling Mr. Will is implying the entire quadrupling of welfare rolls was due to the increase in Black children born out of wedlock.

I've read Will's paragraph about ten times now, and it still seems unnatural to read it that way.

There are three ways to read it:
1. increased availability of welfare causes out of wedlock births
2. welfare and out of wedlock births are highly correlated, but not necessarily cause and effect of one another
3. out of wedlock births cause an increased demand for welfare

My natural reading is (1). That the availability of welfare makes out of wedlock birth more attractive compared to what it was before liberalized (federal) welfare, and thus has lead to more such children.

Now it might seem that 1 and 3 say the same thing, even though they literally say something quite different. However, they really do say something quite different. In particular, (1) does not lead to the implication you accuse Will of.

The point I believe Mr. Will was attempting to make, and a point in which the data appears to substantiate, is that the "liberalization of welfare" was the causal factor, leading to the quadrupling of the welfare rolls. Another consequence of that was the increase in the prevalence of out-of-wedlock births.
Based on limited research (http://www.pbs.org/fmc/timeline/ddisruption.htm), it appears that from '65 to '99, the increase in out-of-wedlock births went from 26% to 69%.
It is also important to note that after the liberalization of welfare, for the first time in our nation's history, welfare rolls went up EVEN WHEN black male employment went up.
Without throwing around too many stats ("lies, damn lies and statistics"), the liberalization of welfare has not benefitted the black community one iota, and has done more to destroy the fabric of our community than any other program since slavery. It is a sad but true fact that majority of black folks think the liberal agenda has been their panacea. That agenda is more akin to crack, creating long-term dependency and destroying lives.
That's why I vote Republican, not because I think the GOP is looking out for my best interest, but because the Democrats are killing me with their paternalistic kindness. Rather be a free elephant that one on a chain.

"Without throwing around too many stats ("lies, damn lies and statistics"), the liberalization of welfare has not benefitted the black community one iota, and has done more to destroy the fabric of our community than any other program since slavery. It is a sad but true fact that majority of black folks think the liberal agenda has been their panacea. That agenda is more akin to crack, creating long-term dependency and destroying lives.
That's why I vote Republican, not because I think the GOP is looking out for my best interest, but because the Democrats are killing me with their paternalistic kindness. Rather be a free elephant that one on a chain."

I suppose that I should first declare that I am not a Democrat and that I have no interest in defending Democrats even if I saw a group of gang bangers threatening to kick Harold Ford, Jr.'s ass. The continuing effort to lay all the misguided provisions of the welfare state at the door of the Democrats is one of the more pervasive political myths, like Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction, that Republicans love repeating ad infinitum, if not ad nauseum.

The Aid to Families with Dependent Children program (remember AFDC?) began as a modest effort to ensure that the most vulnerable people in our society, i.e., children were not penalized and allowed to suffer because their parents or other adult guardians, whether through no fault of their own or their own volition, either could not or would not care for them. (The process by which this program came to be seen as a "Negro welfare program" despite the fact that whites were the major recipients of the program's benefits is long and convoluted and entails more than a small degree of racism.)

One of the hidden motivations for the program's inception was the tacit recognition of both Democratic and Republican policy makers that our so-called free market capitalist system simply could not provide gainful employment to all able bodied men and women. In other words, there weren't enough jobs to go around and there never would be. African Americans were doubly cursed because the pervasive overt racism that then reigned in American society worked even harder against their chances of securing gainful employment.

The lack of work was certainly a huge factor in the uprisings that took place in America's cities beginning in the mid-1960s and this fact was recognized by bipartisan and nonpartisan groups and organizations like the Kerner Commission and the National Urban League. One of the institutional responses to this condition was to gradually expand various welfare programs rather than directly address issues such as racial discrimination in the craft and trade unions and the financial services industry. Democrats and Republicans both supported these incremental adjustments, in part, because they were far less risky than confronting the institutional racism of some of their key constituent groups such as unions and banks. Although Richard Nixon, for example, made noises against the "welfare system" during his campaign in 1968, his administration actually expanded many of these programs once he was elected.

The majority of black people in this country have worked hard since the day a group of Spanish pirates sold their stolen human cargo to a group of white Christian settlers in Jamestown, Virginia. What we believe and have always believed even in the darkest hours of our time in the American Diaspora is that showing compasson and charity to those less fortunate than oneself is what distinguishes us, among other things, from our oppressors. We may condemn the behavior of a crack addicted mother or a neglectful, absent father but we believe down to our core being that the children of these parents deserve to be fed, housed and treated with care. We don't vote for Republicans because they do not share our values, not because the ghosts of FDR, JFK, RFK and the great Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (yes, I am quite aware of his flaws) have insinuated themselves into our dreams.

The sooner that black Republicans stop projecting their inability to attract other blacks into the Republican fold onto the black electorate and begin giving black folks concrete, viable reasons to support the Republican Party then some further progress in this area might be achieved. At this point, as Mr. Ellison wrote, you are just "buggy-jiving." Your decision to vote for Republicans doesn't really faze me but why do you believe that your voting behavior warrants some special attention as if you have sworn off the demon rum or internet pornography.

Gentlemen:

The problem with Mr. Will's "analysis" is he does none. He simply gives a sequence, knowing you've all been trained to think sequence = causality. And you go for it, of course.

"All other things being equal" reasoning fails on its face because all other things are NOT equal. There was a general rise in out of wedlock birth…the rate of increase was the same for Black and white folks. The diference is, Black folks have always had a fairly fixed multiple of white folks' out of wedlock births. That multiple is a cultural thing. The explosive increase across the whole of society had a larger set to work on with Black folks.

Simple example: if I got one, you got ten and both our holdings are multiplied tenfold by forces neither of us control, then I have ten and you have one hundred.

And of the three ways to read it which way does this:

But DeParle says people mistakenly thought people like Jobe were organizing their lives around having babies to get a check. Actually, he says, their lives were too disorganized for that.

support?

You make a lot of good points. But let me be clear: I am not an apologist for the apathy that the Republicans have shown the Black community. Generally speaking, at the surface, Democrats appear to side with the Black community; Republicans appear indifferent. However, examination of the scores of data using the pre-civil rights period as a baseline indicates that those Democratic programs (Tricky Dick was an anomoly) that sought to "gradually expand various welfare programs" have severly damaged the fibre of the Black community, destroyed the Black family and extinguished a good deal of the entrepreneurial spirit that had taken hold.

I freely admit that, historically, Republicans years have shown cowardice in the fight for justice. However, the argument today has shifted away from fundamental rights to economic policies, and I made the choice to evaluate the policies and determine which party's policies would best serve me and my community.

The economic and political reality is that Blacks make up about 12-20% of the population in this country (depending on how you classify Latinos who are Black), and, as such, politically should not rely on the benevolence/guilt of white folks to advance their agenda. And as far as sharing "our values", I respectfully disagree. On a number of issues, the Black community is far more in line with the Republicans than the Democrats (gay marriage/vouchers/prayer-in-schools/welfare reform/tough on crime/abortion). What keeps most Blacks from the Republic party is their belief, clearly justified over the last 40 years, that Republicans don't care about them, and at least the Democrats are trying.

Here is an interesting aside which makes my point:
from http://www.americandaily.com/article/2240
I used to work with a guy named Euwell. We hung out and talked about a variety of things and one day the talk turned to politics. Euwell told me that he thought “welfare was a trap” for black people that kept them down, he was tough on crime, he was against Affirmative Action, & he thought reparations were a joke. In short, he was very conservative – yet he told me that he voted for Democrats. When I asked him why, you know what he told me? “Republicans don’t want black votes. We’re not welcome in the Republican Party.”

In essence, I believe that feeling is what is keeping the GOP from capturing about a 1/3rd of the black vote. Even if the Democrats have the wrong solutions, I think there are a lot of black Americans who feel that, “Well, at least they’re trying. The Republicans aren’t even doing that much.”

Let's not confuse analysis of Will and DeParle with "falling for" something.

For the record, I agree that changes in welfare during the '60s have had a negative effect, but the effect was not caused by liberalization. It was caused by depersonalization. When a source of money comes to be where all you have to do is to stay poor, there's going to be a lot of people staying poor.

I agree fully with you p6 that out of wedlock birth was stimulated by this change. That the effect crossed all racial boundaries. What happened was that having children out of wedlock went from being a financially burdening event to being what appears on the surface to be a financially positive event. It doesn't turn out that way, but for a 17 year old girl with no income, any income looks welcome. Once trapped, there's no obvious way out.

And we all (p6, me, Will, and DeParle, maybe more) seem to agree with DeParle that these women are not making a career of childbirth. The mechanism involves getting pregnant in a variety of dysfunctional relationships, then figuring out what to do, and factoring welfare into that decision.

Now p6, this seems to me to support my reading (1). That welfare causes out of wedlock births, and not the other way around. The implication Will asks us to buy is that this is a negative result. That an observation that a huge majority of black births are out of wedlock is proof that we're doing something wrong. He could have pointed to the dramatic rise in white out of wedlock births as well, but that 70% number is way dramatic.

Now I've not read DeParle. I don't know what his main thesis is, except that he makes it clear that the problem isn't a gaming of the system, and that getting out of welfare isn't especially financially rewarding compared to staying on welfare.

The real questions of course are:

1. If the current welfare mechanism isn't working, shouldn't we try something else?

2. Even if people don't make much more in a real job than on welfare, aren't we all better of with that result than a continuation of the existing welfare system?

"However, examination of the scores of data using the pre-civil rights period as a baseline indicates that those Democratic programs (Tricky Dick was an anomoly) that sought to "gradually expand various welfare programs" have severly damaged the fibre of the Black community, destroyed the Black family and extinguished a good deal of the entrepreneurial spirit that had taken hold."

If nearly two hundred-fifty years of chattel slavery and more than one hundred years of Jim Crow didn't fatally damage the "fibre of the Black community" or the "Black family", I find it diificult to believe that 40 years of allegedly misguided welfare programs would accomplish the trick. I think that P6's observation about the way in which many of these programs were operated is well worth further consideration. I think the recipients, by and large, were treated in a humiliating and degrading manner by the system and that their efforts to extricate themselves from that same system only tended to push them further into it. I have friends who today still talk about their feelings of shame as children when social/eligibility workers visited their homes. The failures of AFDC and other similar programs were too broad and pervasive, however, to attribute solely to one political party or the other. The Democrats and the Republicans were equally to blame but the reasons for blame grow less from partisan politics than from the peculiar and odd way in which the American people regard and treat their fellow citizens who find themselves in need of public assistance.

The post was about George Will, not welfare reform.

George Will won't. He's a gasbag and never owns up to being wrong.

He's one of AWOL's biggest schills. He is part of the think tank buddy lunch and drink circuit. He is an example of social welfare at the high level and its negative effects.Subsidized media and subsidized business in an interlocked embrace.

Granted we should scrap all social programs, and leave it to business who would be every bit as kind and ethical as the ordained George Will.

Success stories in social programs go entirely ignored also. There are countless examples in every community of people who help sustain society, the market consumption rate, and are the peaceable fabric of family support/encouragement.

Aging people deserve the most direct value transfer available. In real terms many of these programs help provide this.