TV & Pregnancy

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/02/AR2008110202592.html?wpisrc=newsletter

TV & Pregnancy

Shocking news. Teen who watch programs with high sexual content are more likely to get pregnant or cause a pregnancy!

Young, unwed mothers are the most common factor in extreme poverty. I’ve read that 3% of female college graduates have babies out of wedlock. That goes up to 10% of high school graduates, and a whopping 15% of high school drop-outs. The rate is higher among minorities, but any attempt to focus on cultural change is met with charges of “racism.” You’d almost think that some politicians want black kids trapped in poverty, so they will go on being reliable voters for politicians offering things like “tax rebates” to people who didn’t pay taxes.

When I was in high school, I was about equally determined to have sex as soon as I could, and not to become a father. But the sixties removed the stigma to having children outside marriage, and welfare made it possible to get by, though not well. And the kids become trapped in poverty. It was “change we could believe in.”

I write this before the election, holding the post until afterwards, but it looks like the poverty pimps will be in firm control of the government. God help poor folks, black, white or brown.

The other thing the poverty pimps say is that so many black kids born into single parent homes are a legacy of racism, when the black family was destroyed by slavery. That’s a comforting theory for those who help create black poverty through their liberal policies. But the brilliant economist, Dr. Thomas Sowell points out in his books that a generation after the Civil War, blacks had a slightly higher marriage rate than whites, and that the vast majority of black kids then grew up in homes with two parents, though most were desperately poor.

The explosion of single-parent black families is a modern trend, created by modern policies, starting with the Great Society.

Sowell also points out that before minimum wage laws, blacks had a slightly higher employment rate than whites. It may have been at a dirt poor level, but it created pride, and they were able to learn some skills, and develop a work ethic and work history that gave them a shot at moving up the economic ladder, despite discrimination. Today, a third-generation welfare family, white or black, has almost no route to economic mobility.

Sowell should know. He was born into a poor black family in NC, where they didn’t have electricity, an indoor privy or hot water. He was on his own in NYC at 17, worked his way through Harvard before affirmative action, and earned a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

I again urge everyone to read his books on economics, intellectual history and race.