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News

Report: Women more likely to live in poverty than men

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Here's the left-wing media
Young women vote overwhelmingly for Democrats – is it working for them?

Brad Wilcox tweeted this article from the leftist The Daily Progress. Let’s see what it says, then I’ll comment.

The article identifies three reasons why women are poorer than men: single motherhood, divorce and the “pay gap”.

Look:

During their working years, women tend to earn less than men, and when they retire, they’re more likely to live in poverty.

These are women who raised children and cared for sick and elderly family members, often taking what savings and income they had and spending it on things besides their own retirement security.

The National Institute on Retirement Security, a nonprofit research center, reports that women are 80 percent more likely than men to be impoverished at age 65 and older. Women age 75 to 79 are three times more likely.

While experts cite a pay gap as a major cause for retirement insecurity, other factors play a role, from single parenthood and divorce to the fact that women typically live longer than men.

Dr. Wilcox makes the point that this poverty is due to a retreat from marriage. That’s true. But look at the three factors the left-wing article itself cites: single motherhood, divorce and pay gap. Are these policies instances of women being victimized, or are their problems self-inflicted?

1) Single motherhood is caused by the welfare policies that young women favor when they vote overwhelmingly for bigger government. If we take money from working taxpayers, or borrow it from the next generation, and we give it to women to pay them to have fatherless children, then more women will do this. And of course this is a path to poverty. There just isn’t enough money to steal from taxpayers or borrow from future taxpayers to pay for women to have children with no man in the home who can provide for those children. People do more of what you pay them to do. The more money we give to single mothers, the more fatherless children we get, and it creates a host of problems that we can’t continue to pay for as a society, e.g. – crime. The mistake was paying women to make poor decisions in the first place, but welfare spending a policy that most young, unmarried women support. They’re not victims, they’re doing this to themselves.

This new Prager University video from Larry Elder explains why women embrace single motherhood:

We’re paying them to make bad decisions, and it creates more poverty.

2) No-fault divorce was caused by the radical feminism that many young, unmarried women support. This policy was brought in to make it easy for women to divorce without having to have a good reason (70% of divorces are initiated by women, mostly over “unhappiness”). Feminists don’t like the idea of being “constrained” to marry a man because he is a good provider, protector and moral/spiritual leader. A strong man is intimidating – he will want to make decisions and lead, and we can’t let him do that. A better idea is to marry a man who doesn’t provide, protect or lead – that way, we don’t have to respect him or let him lead. Naturally, when this entertaining, irresponsible man is unable to provide, then women divorce him and find themselves poor and unable to remarry – having lost their youth and beauty to “fun” men. No-fault divorce is not a policy that men supported. It is a policy that feminists supported, because they want to be able to nuke relationships that don’t make them feel happy. The most volatile, short-lived relationships are lesbian relationships, because women naturally expect relationships to fulfill them instead of expecting relationships to be tough and challenging. There just isn’t a path to prosperity for women into old age if they value feeling happy over self-sacrificial love and moral obligations. We need to teach women to prefer marriage-capable of men instead of fun, entertaining, no-leadership men. We need to teach women to make commitments that override their changing feelings. The problem of divorce is self-inflicted.

3) Lastly, the pay gap. I have written before about how the pay gap is largely related to women’s own choices about what to study, what job to take, and how many hours to work. It is simply not possible for a woman to earn as much as a man when she does a degree in English, women’s studies or other nonsense. Men don’t study what we want to study. We study things we hate – like petroleum engineering and software engineering. We do this so that we can provide for a wife and children, so that we can get what we we want most: respect and the (earned) authority to lead a home. Most men are commitment machines. We hate fun, we want to do hard things, and to be respected for being reliable and steady. The problem of the “pay gap” is self-inflicted.

So, in conclusion, yes – many women are poorer than men, especially as they age. But their poverty is self-inflicted. They are poor because they embraced ideas that would make them poorer. Three ideas destroyed their prosperity: single mother welfare, no-fault divorce, and following your heart in education and career. None of these things will provide women with security or prosperity – especially now that the debt has doubled to $20 trillion, and there is no more to borrow to continue the government-as-sugar-daddy plan of feminists. No amount of reassurance from pious pastors and permissive parents can save women from the consequences of their own irrational embrace of radical feminism. It turns out that there is no escape from economics, and the universe does not magically adjust to make the feelings and intuitions of entitled Disney princesses “work out”.

News

Daleiden: organ trafficking scheme “an illicit, for-profit scheme all the way through”

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Planned Parenthood senior executive: organ harvesting so she can get a Lamborghini
Planned Parenthood senior executive: organ harvesting so she can get a Lamborghini

I spent a lot of time last year blogging about each of the sting videos released by the Center for Medical Progress. Following the release of the videos, there was a Congressional investigation. David Daleiden, the man responsible for leading the effort to expose Planned Parenthood, gives us an update  on what has been discovered so far.

The Blaze has the story:

A year after his first video went viral, the filmmaker behind the Center for Medical Progress’ undercover videos said that he didn’t quite anticipate how much of an impact the videos would have.

“A year later, a year after the initial release of the videos, all of the best evidence available shows that not only is Planned Parenthood guilty of harvesting and selling baby body parts for profit, that they’re even more guilty than any of us ever really imagined starting this out,” David Daleiden, the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, told TheBlaze in an interview.

[…]“The work that’s been done by the Select Panel in Congress is just incredible,” Daleiden said, noting that the panel uncovered contracts between Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, Planned Parenthood Shasta Pacific and Planned Parenthood Santa Barbara, Ventura, & San Luis Obispo and StemExpress detailing their financial arrangements.

“We tried so hard to get those contracts,” Daleiden said, calling them the “final proof” of a financial benefit to Planned Parenthood.

“A year later, Planned Parenthood has yet to acknowledge whether or not their senior-level leadership implicated in the undercover videos, whether or not any of them have been fired or disciplined, or if they’re still working at Planned Parenthood,” he said. “We have none of those details from Planned Parenthood, no accountability about the leadership of their organization.”

“Planned Parenthood has yet to disclose exactly how much money their affiliates received from companies like StemExpress and Advanced Bioscience Resources and Novagenix,” he continued, “and they have yet to produce any documentation whatsoever showing that they had any shipping costs or transportation costs or any reimbursable costs whatsoever under the law for the transfer of fetal tissue, which is what they’ve been insistantly claiming. They’ve provided no proof whatsoever, they’ve only provided short press releases.”

“Meanwhile, we have hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents – from the select panel and other sources – showing that this was an illicit, for-profit scheme all the way through,” he added.

If you somehow missed the original videos last year, CMP has released a 5-minute re-cap showing some of the highlights:

The Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media have been trying desperately to cover up these videos and to prosecute Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress. Remember, if you vote Democrat, you’re voting for Planned Parenthood to continue selling the body parts of innocent unborn children for money.

Barack Obama supports Planned Parenthood:

Barack Obama speaking to Planned Parenthood
Barack Obama speaking to Planned Parenthood

Hillary Clinton supports Planned Parenthood:

Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood
Hillary Clinton speaking to Planned Parenthood

Be careful who you vote for.

News

The link between single mother welfare, fatherlessness, poverty and crime

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Does government provide incentives for people to get married?
Government pays people welfare not to get married before having kids

What is the root cause of criminal behavior? This article by sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who points out the link between fatherlessness and crime.

The article appears in National Review.

Wilcox writes:

Another shooting, another son of divorce. From Adam Lanza, who killed 26 children and adults a year ago at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Conn., to Karl Pierson, who shot a teenage girl and killed himself this past Friday at Arapahoe High in Centennial, Colo., one common and largely unremarked thread tying together most of the school shooters that have struck the nation in the last year is that they came from homes marked by divorce or an absent father. From shootings at MIT (i.e., theTsarnaev brothers) to the University of Central Florida to the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy in Decatur, Ga., nearly every shooting over the last year in Wikipedia’s “list of U.S. school attacks” involved a young man whose parents divorced or never married in the first place.

[…]The social scientific evidence about the connection between violence and broken homes could not be clearer. My own research suggests that boys living in single mother homes are almost twice as likely to end up delinquent compared to boys who enjoy good relationships with their father. Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson has written that “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.” His views are echoed by the eminent criminologists Michael Gottfredson and Travis Hirschi, who have written that “such family measures as the percentage of the population divorced, the percentage of households headed by women, and the percentage of unattached individuals in the community are among the most powerful predictors of crime rates.”

Why is fatherlessness such a big deal for our boys (almost all of these incidents involve boys)? Putting the argument positively, sociologist David Popenoe notes that “fathers are important to their sons as role models. They are important for maintaining authority and discipline. And they are important in helping their sons to develop both self-control and feelings of empathy toward others, character traits that are found to be lacking in violent youth.” Boys, then, who did not grow up with an engaged, attentive, and firm father are more vulnerable to getting swept up in the Sturm und Drang of adolescence and young adulthood, and in the worst possible way.

So where do fatherless children come from? It turns out that government programs incentivize women to make them.

Dr. Michael Tanner of the libertarian Cato Institute explains how welfare causes fatherlessness in his testimony to Congress:

Welfare contributes to crime in several ways. First, children from single-parent families are more likely to become involved in criminal activity. According to one study, children raised in single-parent families are one-third more likely to exhibit anti-social behavior.(3) Moreover, O’Neill found that, holding other variables constant, black children from single- parent households are twice as likely to commit crimes as black children from a family where the father is present. Nearly 70 percent of juveniles in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes, as do 43 percent of prison inmates.(4) Research indicates a direct correlation between crime rates and the number of single-parent families in a neighborhood.(5)

As Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted in her seminal article for The Atlantic Monthly:

The relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation’s mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime.(6)

At the same time, the evidence of a link between the availability of welfare and out-of-wedlock births is overwhelming. There have been 13 major studies of the relationship between the availability of welfare benefits and out-of-wedlock birth. Of these, 11 found a statistically significant correlation. Among the best of these studies is the work done by June O’Neill for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Holding constant a wide range of variables, including income, education, and urban vs. suburban setting, the study found that a 50 percent increase in the value of AFDC and foodstamp payments led to a 43 percent increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.(7) Likewise, research by Shelley Lundberg and Robert Plotnick of the University of Washington showed that an increase in welfare benefits of $200 per month per family increased the rate of out-of-wedlock births among teenagers by 150 percent.(8)

The same results can be seen from welfare systems in other countries. For example, a recent study of the impact of Canada’s social-welfare system on family structure concluded that “providing additional benefits to single parents encourages births of children to unwed women.”(9)

The secular left in this country believes that fathers need to be separated away from their children, and that’s why they support welfare programs that redirect money from husbands in intact families to single mothers. They believe that fathers are harmful because they set boundaries on children, and judge them and punish them when they act immorally. To the secular left, boundaries, judgments and punishments on children are bad, and must be stopped. So how can the secular left discourage men from marrying and teaching their own children morality? Well, they can tax married men, and they can give the money to single mothers.

Not only is crime caused by fatherlessness, but poverty is. as well.

Here is Dr. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation to explain:

Census data and the Fragile Families survey show that marriage can be extremely effective in reducing child poverty. But the positive effects of married fathers are not limited to income alone. Children raised by married parents have substantially better life outcomes compared to similar children raised in single-parent homes.

When compared to children in intact married homes, 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; be expelled from school; and drop out of high school.[19] Many of these negative outcomes are associated with the higher poverty rates of single mothers. In many cases, however, the improvements in child well-being that are associated with marriage persist even after adjusting for differences in family income. This indicates that the father brings more to his home than just a paycheck.

The effect of married fathers on child outcomes can be quite pronounced. For example, examination of families with the same race and same parental education shows that, when compared to intact married families, children from single-parent homes are:

  • More than twice as likely to be arrested for a juvenile crime;[20]
  • Twice as likely to be treated for emotional and behavioral problems;[21]
  • Roughly twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school;[22] and
  • A third more likely to drop out before completing high school.[23]

The effects of being raised in a single-parent home continue into adulthood. Comparing families of the same race and similar incomes, children from broken and single-parent homes are three times more likely to end up in jail by the time they reach age 30 than are children raised in intact married families. [24] Compared to girls raised in similar married families, girls from single-parent homes are more than twice as likely to have a child without being married, thereby repeating the negative cycle for another generation.[25]

Finally, the decline of marriage generates poverty in future generations. Children living in single-parent homes are 50 percent more likely to experience poverty as adults when compared to children from intact married homes. This intergenerational poverty effect persists even after adjusting for the original differences in family income and poverty during childhood.[26]

People on the left claim that poverty causes crime, but they don’t look for the root cause of poverty. The root cause of poverty is the decline of marriage, which produces fatherless children.