Tag Archives: Welfare

News

New CBO study: top 40% of earners paid 106.2% of net income taxes collected

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CNS News reports on a new study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

Excerpt:

The top 40 percent of households by before-tax income actually paid 106.2 percent of the nation’s net income taxes in 2010, according to a new study by the Congressional Budget Office.

At the same time, households in the bottom 40 percent took in an average of $18,950 in what the CBO called “government transfers” in 2010.

Taxpayers in the top 40 percent of households were able to pay more than 100 percent of net federal income taxes in 2010 because Americans in the bottom 40 percent actually paid negative income taxes, according to the CBO study entitled, “The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010.”

[…]When the the negative 9.1 percent in federal income taxes paid by those in the bottom 40 percent is subtracted from the 109.1 percent paid by those in the top 60 percent, federal tax revenues net out to an even 100 percent.

[…]The households in the bottom 40 percent of income—which on average paid negative federal income taxes—were on average receiving many thousands of dollars in what the report calls “government transfers.” These transfers included, among other things, benefits from unemployment insurance, Medicare and Social Security, as well as from means-tested programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), and Medicaid.

“Government transfers increase income in all groups, but those increases, both in dollars and as a percentage of market income, are larger for groups with lower market income,” says the report.

According to the CBO, households in the bottom quintile received an average of $22,700 in government transfers in 2010 (including $14,300 in payments from Medicare and Social Security and $8,500 in payments from other government programs); and households in the second quintile received an average of $15,200 in government transfers (including $10,300 in payments from Medicare and Social Security and $4,900 from other government programs).

Now I have been reading articles like this one in National Review by James Pethokoukis, which talk about Obama’s rhetoric about “income inequality”. And I think that when the President goes on a rant about how much he wants to fix “income inequality”, you have to keep in mind what he is actually fixing. He thinks the people who earn the most need to be taxed more and he thinks that the people who earn the least need to be given more benefits. That’s what he is trying to fix.

News

UK woman stops man from seeing their daughter for 12 YEARS

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Dina sent me this trouble article from the UK Daily Mail, that serves as a warning to men about getting involved with the wrong woman in a feminist welfare state.

Excerpt:

A father yesterday spoke of his anguish over an extraordinary £100,000 12-year court battle for the right to see his daughter.

The man, described as ‘irreproachable’ by a senior judge, has endured years of legal fighting with his ex-partner, who has refused to allow  contact between him and their 14-year-old daughter.

Incredibly, the family courts have made 82 orders that he be allowed to see the girl, known only as M. But none was enforced by a system which senior judges agreed had ‘failed the whole family’.

[…]The Court of Appeal three months ago ordered that the case be resolved, saying the teenager’s childhood had been ‘irredeemably marred’ by years of litigation.

Lord Justice McFarlane, presenting a written judgment, said the mother had ‘doggedly refused to allow M to develop and maintain a relationship with her father without any good reason’.

He quoted the findings of a child psychiatrist, who said: ‘The mother appears to want an unhealthy exclusive relationship with M. The mother hides her opposition to contact behind her daughter’s stated “wishes and feelings”.’

But the father, a 61-year-old professional who cannot be named, has now been told the legal process faces more months of delays as the family courts seek expert advice.

[…]The father – who, unlike the child’s mother, cannot claim legal aid – estimates he has spent more than £100,000 in legal costs trying to see his daughter.

He said: ‘It is financially penalistic, as a private individual, to fight for your rights through the family courts.’

I can’t imagine what that would be like. I put a lot of effort into my mentoring relationships. My only pet lives with my parents, and I try to see him on Skype every night. He can’t be moved, because he is so old. I can’t imagine what I would do if the mother of my children took the children away from me. I’m not surprised at all that this man spent six figures trying to get access to parent his daughter. And I don’t need to tell you that intentionally depriving a child of a relationship with her father is nothing less than child abuse. Yet that’s what the system allows.

Now just to get this out of the way, I fully blame the man for this. There are plenty of clues in the article about bad decisions he made in choosing that woman. A smart man doesn’t choose a woman who thinks that cohabitation is OK, and that having an out-of-wedlock child is OK. And when you take 10 years of a woman’s life and then don’t commit, she will do anything and everything she can to get revenge on you.

Men seem to be woefully oblivious to these laws affect them until it’s too late. Maybe we need to be a bit more aware and politically engaged to keep these things from happening to us? These anti-male courts didn’t come out of nowhere. The UK is well-known for its anti-male government. A lot of men voted the Labour Party and Harriet Harman into power. A lot of men voted for EHRCs, too. We need to be smarter when it’s election time, and vote for smaller government, lower taxes, and less regulation. That’s the only way to stop the state from doing this.

For young men, I recommend that you read Stephen Baskerville’s “Taken Into Custody” before you get married. Find out from research what a woman does that makes her more likely to divorce you, and avoid those things. Some women have seen what the state does to men, or they’ve read about it, and they mind even have taken action to oppose it. That’s the kind of woman you’re looking for. The ones who don’t blame men for everything, but who are aware of the situation that men are facing under these laws and policies and are determined to act against it with their marriage and family.

Polemics

New study: the presence of a father helps improves children’s mental health

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Science Daily reports on a new study from McGill University.

Excerpt:

New findings from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) show that the absence of a father during critical growth periods, leads to impaired social and behavioral abilities in adults. This research, which was conducted using mice, was published today in the journal Cerebral Cortex. It is the first study to link father absenteeism with social attributes and to correlate these with physical changes in the brain.

[…]Dr. Gobbi and her colleagues compared the social behavior and brain anatomy of mice that had been raised with both parents to those that had been raised only by their mothers. Mice raised without a father had abnormal social interactions and were more aggressive than counterparts raised with both parents. These effects were stronger for female offspring than for their brothers. Females raised without fathers also had a greater sensitivity to the stimulant drug, amphetamine.

“The behavioral deficits we observed are consistent with human studies of children raised without a father,” says Dr. Gobbi, who is also a psychiatrist at the MUHC. “These children have been shown to have an increased risk for deviant behavior and in particular, girls have been shown to be at risk for substance abuse. This suggests that these mice are a good model for understanding how these effects arise in humans.”

In pups deprived of fathers, Dr. Gobbi’s team also identified defects in the mouse prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that helps control social and cognitive activity, which is linked to the behavioral deficits.

“This is the first time research findings have shown that paternal deprivation during development affects the neurobiology of the offspring,” says Dr. Gobbi. These results should incite researchers to look more deeply into the role of fathers during critical stages of growth and suggest that both parents are important in children’s mental health development.

This study is important because although we have a lot of data showing that fatherlessness children exhibit many problem behaviors when compared to children in married households, corelation doesn’t imply causation. Now we know about the causation that is behind the corelation. It’s the progress of science. It might not fit with feminist ideology, which claims that men in the home are dangerous and harmful to children. But you can’t argue with science – especially not with ideology.

Let’s talk another look at some of the problems with fatherlessness.

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]

My next post talks about the rise of women-perpetrated domestic violence in the UK. Maybe the increase in fatherlessness in the UK is to blame for women becoming more violence? And what causes fatherlessness? Well, the main driver of it is social programs that literally pay women welfare money to have children before they are married. Maybe we should stop doing that, because that seems to be causing children to become more violent – especially the next generation of women, as we’ll see in tomorrow’s article. In the meantime, I would just urge men to be very very careful about getting involved with women who grew up without a father. It’s something you need to account for.