There are two parts. The lecture and then the Q&A.
Let’s learn a bit about Brad first:
W. Bradford Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, and a member of the James Madison Society at Princeton University.
He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. Prior to coming to the University of Virginia, he held research fellowships at Princeton University, Yale University and the Brookings Institution.
Mr. Wilcox’s research focuses on marriage, parenthood, and cohabitation, and on the ways that gender, religion, and children influence the quality and stability of American marriages and family life. He has published articles on marriage, cohabitation, parenting, and fatherhood in The American Sociological Review, Social Forces, The Journal of Marriage and Family and The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. His first book, Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago, 2004), examines the ways in which the religious beliefs and practices of American Protestant men influence their approach to parenting, household labor, and marriage. With Nicholas Wolfinger, Wilcox is now writing a book titled, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Children, & Marriage among African Americans and Latinos, for Oxford University Press. With Eric Kaufmann, Wilcox is finishing a book on the causes and consequences of low fertility in the West.
The number of Americans living below the poverty line rose to a record 46 million last year, the government said on Tuesday, underscoring the challenges facing President Barack Obama and Congress as they try to tackle high unemployment and a moribund economy.
The Census Bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage said the national poverty rate climbed for a third consecutive year to 15.1 percent in 2010 as the economy struggled to recover from the recession that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.
That marked a 0.8 percent increase from 2009, when there were 43.6 million Americans living in poverty.
The number of poor Americans in 2010 was the largest in the 52 years that the Census Bureau has been publishing poverty estimates, the report said, while the poverty rate was the highest since 1993.
The specter of economic deterioration also afflicted working Americans who saw their median income decline 2.3 percent to an annual $49,445.
Since the low point in the labor market downturn in February 2010, nonfarm payrolls have increased by 1.9 million, showing that without stronger growth, it will take years to recoup about 8.7 million jobs lost as a result of the recession that began in December 2007 and ended in June 2009.
The jobless rate rose to 9.6 percent in 2010 from 9.3 percent in 2009. Long-term unemployment, the percent of those without a job for 27 weeks or longer, increased to 43 percent from 31 percent, according to the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.
This is the third consecutive annual increase in the poverty rate. Keep in mind that the Democrats took over Congress in January of 2007 and their first budget was in 2008, the beginning of the recession. But at least we had turtle tunnels to nowhere.
What about Obama’s new 447-billion stimulus? Will it create jobs?
Let’s see, using this article from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Excerpt:
Tom Porcelli, an RBC Capital Markets analyst, told The Wall Street Journal that he expected it to have “little” effect on hiring. “Mr. Porcelli was skeptical that the short-term employer tax breaks would prompt job growth. ‘I don’t think that you’re at the stage where small businesses are incentivized to hire,’ because demand is still so low, he said. ‘These companies are basically still trying to hunker down and hope that they’re around in the next year.’” “Larry Schaffert, owner of Schaffert Construction, said Obama is ‘totally clueless of what it takes to run a business.’”
Business leaders do not think Obama’s plan would succeed in getting America’s economy growing, nor do they think it would get “unemployed people back to work”: “Business executives say it will take more than tax credits proposed by President Barack Obama to convince them to expand their payrolls to help get thousands of unemployed people back to work. Instead, they’d prefer an easing of the regulatory environment and an overhauling of the business tax structure, which would lead to lower operating costs.”
Employers cited in The New York Times said Obama’s jobs plan would not result in their hiring any additional employees: “David Catalano, who helped found Modea, a digital advertising company in Blacksburg, Va., said that he was wary of the president’s pledge to ask the ‘wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share.’ His company was organized as an S Corporation, in which profits are passed through to shareholders, so it would face higher taxes under the president’s proposal, he said. He added: ‘My partner and I have reinvested 100 percent of the profits that our agency has made over the last five years back into the company. If the government takes a bigger share of that from me, it directly impedes my ability to grow the agency.”
[…]People should take Obama’s claims about “job creation” with a grain of salt. His earlier claims about creating jobs turned out to be false. The Obama administration said that if the $800 billion stimulus package passed, unemployment would not go above 8 percent, but it actually skyrocketed to 10.3 percent less than a year later. The “green jobs” the Obama Administration promised to create in the stimulus package are largely non-existent. Indeed, the stimulus package’s green-jobs provisions ended up inadvertently outsourcing American jobs to China. As the Associated Press notes, Obama is also not leveling with the American public when he minimizes the budget-busting nature of his so-called “American Jobs Act.” That lack of fiscal honesty is nothing new for Obama, who falsely promised a “net spending cut” in 2008, only to immediately propose massive budget increases once he was elected, including proposed budgets that would add $4.8 trillion to the national debt.
This is from Hans Bader, so I removed all his links – he likes to put lots of links to lots of facts, because he’s a lawyer. You have to click on his post to get all the links.
I don’t think numbers like those will help the Democrats. I am watching the election results come in for Anthony Weiner’s seat right now and the Democrat has lost in BROOKLYN and QUEEN’S. Can you believe that? New York is Republican. I wonder if M.C. Spinster is still a Democrat.
Have the rich gotten richer? Indeed they have, Bill Whittle says in his latest Afterburner — but so have the poor. As wealth expands, living standards rise, and Whittle shows just exactly how it did over the last 40 years in the US. In fact, he argues that the better comparison is not between the rich and the poor in this country, but between the American poor and the average citizen in Europe, Asia, and Africa…
The ultimate arguments are this: what exactly does “poor” mean, and what is the best way to alleviate poverty? If poor in the US is defined such that 97.7% of those households have televisions, 98% have refrigerators, almost 40% have computers, and 78% have air conditioning, then we’re defining “poverty” rather loosely — and that’s the point. The Left wants the definition as wide as possible in order to keep more Americans on public-subsidy rolls, which then incentivizes them to support larger and more intrusive government.
What is the best way to alleviate real poverty? The data Whittle presents shows that a dynamic economy based on private property and capital choice lifts the living standard for everyone. Europe went in the nanny-state direction, and now their average qualifies as our poor, at least by living-standard metrics. That’s something to keep in mind while we debate the nature of safety nets, government spending, and fiscal reform.
WINTERY KNIGHT 