Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

What is the “root cause” of poverty and inequalities of wealth?

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The Heritage Foundation explains – it’s not what you think.

Excerpt:

New data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau show the largest increase in poverty in U.S. recorded history. Under President Obama’s watch, an additional 3.7 million Americans fell into poverty in 2009.

Buried in the Census report are startling figures revealing the principal cause of child poverty: the collapse of marriage. Single mother families are almost five times more likely to be poor than are married couples with children; overall, nearly 70 percent of poor families with children are headed by single parents.

The big secret in the Census report is that marriage is America’s number-one weapon against child poverty. But marriage has been rapidly declining in our society as the number of women who have children without being married has skyrocketed.

Historically, unwed childbearing was rare. In 1964, when the federal government launched its War on Poverty, 6.8 percent of births were to single mothers. Today, the unwed birth rate has soared to 40 percent: four of every 10 births are to a single mother. For Hispanics and African Americans, it’s significantly higher.

This trend is extremely detrimental for society. When compared to children raised by married parents, children raised by single parents are more likely to have emotional and behavioral problems; be physically abused; smoke, drink, and use drugs; be aggressive; engage in violent delinquent and criminal behavior; have poor school performance; and drop out of school.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, nearly all unwed fathers are employed, and most earn enough to lift mother and child from poverty. Tragically, however, few unwed parents marry.

Many commentators will say teen pregnancy accounts for most single motherhood, but this is false. Less than 8 percent of new single moms are under 18. In fact, most unwed births are to young adult women in their 20s. The majority of unwed moms don’t have much education; most end up on welfare.

If Americans are serious about reducing poverty and getting control of federal welfare spending, we must strengthen marriage. We can do this in several ways, beginning with reducing anti-marriage penalties currently in welfare programs and providing factual information to low-income communities about the benefits of marriage.

Do you know who is pretty good on this issue? Maggie Gallagher, that’s who. She knows everything about why people should get married.

Excerpt:

5. YOU WILL EARN MORE MONEY. Men today tend to think of marriage as a consumption item—a financial burden. But a broad and deep body of scientific literature suggests that for men especially, marriage is a productive institution—as important as education in boosting a man’s earnings. In fact, getting a wife may increase an American male’s salary by about as much as a college education. Married men make, by some estimates, as much as 40 percent more money than comparable single guys, even after controlling for education and job history. The longer a man stays married, the higher the marriage premium he receives. Wives’ earnings also benefit from marriage, but they decline when motherhood enters the picture. Childless white wives get a marriage wage premium of 4 percent, and black wives earn 10 percent more than comparable single women.

6. DID I MENTION YOU’LL GET MUCH RICHER? Married people not only make more money, they manage money better and build more wealth together than either would alone. At identical income levels, for example, married people are less likely to report “economic hardship” or trouble paying basic bills. The longer you stay married, the more assets you build; by contrast, length of cohabitation has no relationship to wealth accumulation. On the verge of retirement, the average married couple has accumulated assets worth about $410,000, compared with $167,000 for the never-married and $154,000 for the divorced. Couples who stayed married in one study saw their assets increase twice as fast as those who had remained divorced over a five-year period.

Yet another reason for fiscal conservatives to take social conservatives seriously. Marriage makes people more independent, and that means smaller government, lower taxes, and more liberty. What we need to do is block feminists from undermining marriage to serve their gender-neutral ideology, and stop socialists from undermining marriage with the welfare programs which incentivize single motherhood.

Commentary

Victor Davis Hanson explains Obama’s opposition to business

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From National Review.

Excerpt:

Obama, the supposedly savvy politician, oddly has little appreciation of the psychology of business.

[…]Obama’s policies are also seen as malleable and predicated on notions of social justice rather than on absolute adherence to the law — as in the reordering of the Chrysler creditors and the recent threats against health insurers who do not toe the federal line. Employers are human. Call them greedy, undeserving of their profits, and prone to party at Vegas — and in hurt they will sit on their money and wait such castigation out.

There also seems to be little appreciation of how one creates wealth — not surprising, since Obama and his economic architects are mostly salaried elitists who have spent much of their lives on various tenured government payrolls. Almost none were entrepreneurs who had built businesses from nothing.

The result is that Obama has little insight into the mentality of a businessperson, whose values and world view are antithetical to those of the salaried and tenured employee who accepts stability and a monthly check as he does the changing of the seasons. But to the self-employed, the world is an often hostile place in which a bad back, a chance fire, an unethical employee, a wrong guess, or a national recession can destroy years of hard work in a blink.

Nor do the Obamians appreciate that the possibilities for wealth creation are infinite: The more rewards the audacious see, the more they take risks to turn ideas into new products and services. That energy enriches us all. Instead, there is now the return of the old peasant mentality of a limited good. With a finite pie, one slice to someone must mean one less to someone else. The relative wealth of a few, not absolute wealth for all, is what matters.

Implicit here is Obama’s progressive notion that wealth is unfairly allotted, ill gotten, and ill spent, and therefore should not be entirely one’s own. Surgeons in countries without socialized medicine, he has told us, make money by gratuitously slicing off limbs or ripping out tonsils. High earners can go to Vegas or the Super Bowl without thinking twice about it, given the superfluity of their riches. “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” the president pontificates — a variation on his earlier lament that the Supreme Court had never demanded “redistributive change.” Where that “certain point” rests, we do not know, though we suspect it is high enough to allow vacationing at the Costa del Sol and Martha’s Vineyard.

In his mind, government simply cannot allow one person to make $10 an hour digging a ditch, and another $300 an hour sitting behind a desk closing a deal. The old tragic justifications of the inequality in compensation inherent in capitalism — one rises up the job chain, and recompense is not rigid and fixed; the successful entrepreneur takes more risk, may have greater skills and education, can create more wealth for others, is luckier, more motivated, or healthier, accepts more stress, does not necessarily want the more moral or enjoyable life — mean little to the therapeutic Obama. His Manichean world is fixed: suspect rich and noble poor.

As a materialist he judges equity in life by income. Thus he sees the government’s proper moral obligation not as ensuring equality out of the starting gate, but as guaranteeing that we all reach the finish line at the same exact moment.

This article is the top article on National Review right now. It’s worth a look.

This post on the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher may also be helpful. Maggie cut taxes and busted up unions. And everybody – rich and poor – saw their standard of living go way, way up! A JOB IS THE ULTIMATE STIMULUS PROGRAM.

Commentary

What does the Bible say about using evidence when witnessing?

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Clay Jones of Biola University makes the case that the use of evidence when preaching the gospel was standard operating procedure in the early church. It’s only the modern church that is kind of lazy about the way they talk about Christianity as personal preferences and feelings. (H/T Apologetics 315)

Intro:

In 1993 I started working for Simon Greenleaf University (now Trinity Law School) which offered an M.A. in Christian apologetics (Craig Hazen was the director). Much of my job was to promote the school and although I had studied Christian apologetics since my sophomore year in high school, I decided I needed to see whether an apologetic witness had strong Biblical precedence.

It does.

As I poured through the Scripture I found that Jesus and the apostles preached the resurrection of Christ as the sign of the truth of Christianity.

What follows are some of the passages which support the resurrection witness.

Here is my favorite verse from his massive list:

Mat. 12:39-40: A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a miraculous sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Jesus is saying that the resurrection was deliberately given as a sign to unbelievers to convince them. (The Sign of Jonah)

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