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Democrat-run California now leads America in poverty rankings

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From the Daily Caller, a story about what happens when you allow Democrats to dominate at every level of government for years and years and years.

Excerpt:

The Golden State has reached a poverty rate that is now twice as bad as West Virginia’s and substantially worse than the rates of poverty in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas, according to a new measure of poverty developed by the federal Census Bureau.

Democrat-run California earned its last-place rank under the federal government’s new measure of poverty, which incorporates more detailed analyses of welfare payments and the local costs of food, gasoline and housing. (View the new census data report)

The state’s costs are boosted by its environmental and workplace regulations, and by 38 million residents’ competition for housing close to the sea.

[…]Democratic California Gov. Gerry Brown’s office did not release a comment Nov. 15 about the new ranking, but did note that he would be attending a housing conference, the “Greenbuild International Conference and Expo,” in San Francisco Nov. 16.

[…]The report estimates that roughly 8.8 million people in California were poor during between 2009 and 2011, when Democrats controlled the state legislature and governorship, as well as the White House.

The stunning reversal in fortunes for the Democrat-dominated state — once a worldwide symbol of glitz and wealth — is underlined by previous census reports, which showed that only 11.1 percent of the state’s population was poor in 1969.

Only 13.7 percent of Americans were poor in 1969, and many of them were found in the agricultural states of the Old South. A third of Americans in Mississippi, and a quarter of Americans in Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Western Virginia, were poor.

Forty years later, after waves of federal and state regulations on housing, banking, health care and air quality, and amid increased financial aid for unmarried parents, youth, immigrants and unskilled people, the national poverty rate has climbed to 15.8 percent, according to the new Census Bureau measure.

The new measure supplants a poverty gauge developed in the 1960s. It incorporates the economic impact of welfare programs, transportation and child-care costs, changes in child-rearing practices — especially the impact of single parents raising kids — plus differences in the region’s average prices and health care costs.

The new ranking leaves California at the bottom, along with and close to the 23.2 percent poverty rate in the District of Columbia.

[…]The well-being of Californian children has also shriveled in recent decades, partly because of the state’s declining education sector, according to a July report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

California just voted to raise their state income tax. Because they do not understand economics. They do not ask how a policy impacts all people. They do not think beyond stage one. They do not learn from history and experience. Economics is just not what socialists *do*. The primary goal of the socialist is to demonize the other, to feel good about himself, and to project an image to others of being “nice” in order to be liked. When you elect narcissists like this, all you get is rhetoric, never results.

That rhetoric certainly seems to work on certain segments of the electorate – those who don’t follow current events and who don’t understand economics. The truth is that hard-headed capitalism, the rule of law, free trade and property rights, helps the poor more – by growing the economy so that the poor will have jobs. We need to learn as a nation that demonizing “the rich”, raising taxes and spending ourselves into enormous debt is not going to help the poor. Self-aggrandizing talk doesn’t help the poor.

Commentary

67% of single / unmarried / divorced women vote for pro-abortion, pro-gay-marriage Obama

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Did you know that most single / unmarried  / divorced women are pro-abortion and pro-gay-marriage?

Excerpt:

Two-thirds of single women voted for President Barack Obama on Tuesday – showing that unattached women are a powerful Democratic voting bloc.

These women were galvanized not only by traditional “women’s” issues such as birth control and abortion rights, but also by Obama’s jobs message and health reform, analysts say.

NBC News national exit polling shows that 67 percent of unmarried women said they voted for Obama. That’s in line with the 2008 election, when 70 percent of single women helped usher the president into office. This proves it wasn’t a single-election phenomenon: unmarried women have solidified into a powerful voting force, experts say.

“One of the reasons for that is the birth control issue,” says American Association of University Women Policy Director Lisa Maatz. “Abortion — reasonable people can disagree on that and do. But the whole issue of access to birth control…is something that most women thought was a settled issue.”

By the way — this isn’t just young women, Maatz pointed out. Many of the single women voters were over 50 — divorced, widowed or never married.

In the rest of this post, when I say “women”, I mean “67% of single / unmarried / divorced women who voted for abortion and gay marriage”. Please keep that in mind.

So what is it that these single / unmarried / divorced women really want these days?

Here’s what they want:

  • they want taxpayer-funded contraceptives, paid for by Christians and provided by Christians
  • they want taxpayer-funded abortions, paid for by Christians and provided by Christians (no conscience protections)
  • they want children to be raised by single mothers, supported with taxpayer money
  • they want children to be raised by same-sex couples, and harsh laws preventing anyone from disagreeing with gay marriage
  • they want no-fault divorce laws, so that they can easily get out of any marriages that don’t make them happy
  • they want taxpayer-funded day care, so that they can get back to their careers as quickly as possible

In the UK, you can also get taxpayer-funded breast enlargements. And in some parts of Canada, you can get taxpayer-funded in-vitro fertilization. Both countries have single-payer health care, which is very popular with single women because women typically need more health care and men need less – but you pay into these systems based on income, so it is a redistributive system that punishes work and rewards those people who require more health care – sometimes as a result of their own poor choices.

So women basically want to be unchaste, to depend on government handouts, to dismiss the traditional roles of men in marriage (protector, provider, moral/spiritual leader) and to dismiss the needs of children for their mother and father (either through day care, single motherhood or divorce).  If their plan to have a ton of recreational sex results in a baby, then they want to kill that baby, so they won’t be burdened by the consequences of their own choices. Women don’t  want to stay home with very young children. They don’t want to care for their husbands’ needs. In fact, most of them would prefer to have money extracted from working men through taxation, and then distributed back to to women through government programs and handouts. What they really mean is that they want to marry the government, and escape from the authority of husbands and fathers, and the obligation to respect them, too.

Now, speaking as a chaste Christian man, marriage is my goal and so I read a lot of research about how marriage succeeds or fails, as well as research on what children need in order to succeed. The evidence that I’ve written about before shows that marriages are more stable and better quality if both the man and the woman have no previous sexual experience. The evidence also shows that children need a mother for at least the first two years of life, and preferably the first five years of life. The evidence shows that fatherlessness is tantamount to child abuse. And the evidence shows that divorce scars children for life. And the evidence shows that men feel better about themselves when they are recognized and respected by their family as the protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader of the home.

Therefore, we should be encouraging men and women to be chaste prior to marriage. Not only is this good for marital stability and quality, but fewer unborn children will be murdered by women. We should encourage women to stay home at least two years with new children, and five would be better. We should be encouraging people to be more careful about choosing the right man for the roles of husband and father, and not telling them to choose a man based on superficialities like appearance, emotions and cultural approval. We should be making it harder for women to divorce men by removing the financial incentives to divorce and requiring a demonstration of fault.

That’s what we would do if we wanted a marriage that is good for God, good for society, good for men and good for children. But let me be clear: that is not what women want. They say they want “marriage”, but they don’t want what marriage actually is: husbands caring for wives, wives submitting to husbands, and protecting and nurturing children. Marriage, to a woman, means that government will make sure that no one can obligate her to do anything that doesn’t make her feel happy. Not husbands. Not children. No one.

I think that Christian men like me need to be very careful about knitting our souls to a single woman today. Lots of women label themselves as “Christian” and even attend church. But if they haven’t taken the time to get informed about men and marriage, you shouldn’t be fooled by them. They are opposed to God, men, morality, marriage and children. They are pro-abortion. They will kill to make recreational sex consequence free. They are pro-gay-marriage. They don’t believe that children have a right to a mother and a father to whom they belong, and who are obligated to care for them.

Single men: be careful about marrying single women today – the odds are that you are going to get hurt. You can see the danger they pose to you and your children by looking at what they vote for. You might as well go to the zoo and marry an alligator and hope for love for you and your children from that. Don’t be stupid. Look how they vote and think about what it tells you about their priorities and sense of obligation. Marriage made sense when women were self-controlled and cared about the needs of men and children and their obligations to men and children. Now they don’t. If you want a traditional marriage, and the happiness of being a real man to a woman, and the joy of seeing your children cared for by someone you love and trust, then think carefully before you get married. Because that old definition of marriage is dead. The word remains, but the meaning is lost.

Please also check out my previous post on why single women vote for higher taxes and bigger government, and my previous post about how single women view traditional marriage with traditional roles as a threat to their personal autonomy.

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Polemics

Obama’s policies ignore the needs and concerns of men

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Christina Hoff Sommers
Christina Hoff Sommers

Christina Hoff Sommers re-caps Obama’s history of introducing anti-male policies at the American Enterprise Institute blog.

Excerpt:

The Affordable Care Act mentions “breast” 44 times, “prostate” not once. It also establishes an elaborate and expensive network of special programs to promote women’s health. Programs for men are nowhere to be found. What explains the imbalance?

When President Obama took office, he promised to insulate his administration from organized lobbyists. Yet, from day one, he granted the women’s lobby unprecedented influence. The results should trouble fair-minded feminists.

The 2009 stimulus program set the pattern. The president had originally called for a two-year “shovel-ready” plan to modernize roads, bridges, electrical grids, and dams. Women’s activists were appalled. Op-eds appeared with titles like “Where Are the New Jobs for Women?” and “The Macho Stimulus Plan.” More than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Mr. Obama not to favor a “heavily male-dominated field” like construction: “We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges.” Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), attacked the “testosterone-laden ‘shovel-ready’ terminology.” Christina Romer, who chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, would later say, “The very first e-mail I got . . . was from a women’s group saying, ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’”

The president’s original plan was designed to stop the hemorrhaging in construction and manufacturing while investing in physical infrastructure. It was not a grab bag of gender-correct transfer programs. The whole idea was to get Americans back to work, and it was “burly men” who had lost most of the jobs following the financial collapse of 2008. But as protests mounted, the president’s team reconfigured the bill according to NOW’s specifications. In a column entitled “Economic Recovery: What’s NOW Got to Do with It?” Gandy could hardly contain her elation: “As we looked through the act, over and over we saw reflections of the very specific proposals that we had made, and with big numbers next to them. Numbers that started with a ‘B’ (as in billion).” To read Gandy’s column is to understand why shovels are still standing idle and the stimulus was such a disappointment

A year later, the 2010 Affordable Care Act created an Office of Women’s Health, a National Women’s Health Information Center, a Coordinating Committee on Women’s Health, and more — right down to the mandate that universities pay for students’ birth-control pills.

The average lifespan of American men is five years shorter than women’s, and men contract the big diseases several years earlier. According to the American Cancer Society, men’s lifetime risk of developing cancer is approximately 1 in 2; for women, it is 1 in 3. But the Act is informed by the spirit of NOW and other women’s organizations such as the American Association of University Women. It would never occur to these groups that the health and longevity of men are matters of interest to women. To them, relations between the sexes are a zero-sum game — and their role is to fight for women and against men.

Most striking of all is the Obama administration’s blindness to the growing problem of male academic underachievement. Girls outshine boys by nearly every measure of classroom success. They earn better grades, take more advanced-placement and honors courses in high school, and are far more likely to go to college. Women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 63 percent of master’s degrees, and 53 percent of doctoral degrees. According to a recent Harvard study (“Pathways to Prosperity”), the new passport to the American Dream “is education beyond high school.” Today, far more women than men have that passport.

Yet the president persists in acting as if our schools are a hostile learning environment for girls, one that warrants aggressive federal intervention. Pressured by groups like the AAUW and the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), the White House recently announced that the Department of Education would be adopting a more rigorous application of Title IX to career, technology, and engineering programs in high school and college — to stop the alleged boy-favoritism that is shortchanging girls. To avoid federal investigations that threaten withdrawal of financial support, programs will simply enroll fewer males.

Male readers, did you know about these issues, and the others that Christina brings up in her article? Probably not. It’s a funny thing but sometimes I think that men do need to be a little more vocal about how laws and policies discriminate against us. After all, if we are poor and sick and unemployed, as Obama seems to want, then we cannot do much good for anyone. We need to take care of ourselves even if our ultimate goal is to serve others.