Actually, the more conservative states TEND to have the highest levels of poverty, divorce, high school dropouts, and children born out of wedlock. There are exceptions, like Texas. Compare Mississippi to Minnesota, Alabama to Rhode Island, Maryland to South Carolina. Compare the Deep South with New England states. The difference is striking. The states with the best systems of education tend to have higher taxes, too. There is no free lunch.
Soo... if people move from Red states to get away from the problems, they will move to Blue states, but they will still vote the same. Will not the Blue states become Red states eventually? That makes the Blue states, though educated better, dumb really, because they cannot continue in their blueness.
Ok, this will resolve this "debate" concerning the "dumbness" of red states. http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/elections/maps/ 1. Click on 1976 2. Click on 1980 Can anyone explain the significance of 1980? Forgot to mention, the founder of the Republican party, Lincoln, waged war against all these dumb red states not too long ago .... BLAH ! At least check your damn historical evidence ....
If blue states are so smart, why is the violent crime rate so much higher in their states? That is rate, as in per 100,000. Is it that the smarter you are, the more you want to kill someone?
The irony fhl is that liberal "blue staters" are moving to "red states" like Az, TX, Fla, Ala, NC, SC, GA in record numbers. What attracts those libs? The virtues of redstatism. Low taxes, low crime, fiscally responsible state governments, job creation because of business friendly policies and affordable housing in mild climates. Unfortunately these NY, NJ, IL and MASS transplants will probably screw up these red states as badly as they did the northern states they are now fleeing.
The relevance of 1976 to 2006 is not evident. The Republican party has changed in the last thirty years. Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, Hawaii and other now liberal states voted Republican, and North Carolina, Texas and other now conservative states voted Democrat. Yes, things change. They always do. If you go back further on the U Va map history, you will see that the four Southern states that voted for the racist candidates Wallace and Thurmond are now among the most reliable socially conservative states, almost always voting Republican.
I'm not sure I understand your point. The fact that rich liberals live one way but favor policies for the "poor" that encourage a diametrically different outcome is hardly inconsistent. DC in fact proves my point. It has among the worst public schools in the nation and one of the worst governments. The local population suffers from high social dysfunctionality, eg drop outs, teen pregnancies, drugs, and of course, poverty. It may have a lot of college grads, but almost all of them were educated elsewhere and moved here. And you can bet they don't send their own kids to the public schools. Now I am sure the rich liberals in DC wish the poor would stay in school, just as conservatives do, but for some reason all the compassion and an enormous education budget produce only increasing levels of failure.
So you believe political philosophy is the factor that correlates to poverty in these poor states? I'd suggest you dig a little deeper. There is little correlation between education budgets and actual quality of education. Catholic school systems in urban areas produce a quality education at a fraction of what the public schools spend per student. Anyway, we digress. I have tried to make two points. One is that conservatives share liberals' desire for the poor to be better off. The difference is in how to achieve that shared goal. Two, research has shown that there is a 90% chance of avoiding poverty if you do a few simple things, like graduate from high school, don't have a teen pregnancy, avoid prison and drugs. I'll try to dig up a cite for the study. It's not a matter of the govenment spending a fortune, but of the people at risk doing a few simple things.
A painful anniversary Aug 17, 2004 by Thomas Sowell August 20th marks the 40th anniversary of one of the major turning points in American social history. That was the date on which President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation creating his "War on Poverty" program in 1964. Never had there been such a comprehensive program to tackle poverty at its roots, to offer more opportunities to those starting out in life, to rehabilitate those who had fallen by the wayside, and to make dependent people self-supporting. Its intentions were the best. But we know what road is paved with good intentions. The War on Poverty represented the crowning triumph of the liberal vision of society -- and of government programs as the solution to social problems. The disastrous consequences that followed have made the word "liberal" so much of a political liability that today even candidates with long left-wing track records have evaded or denied that designation. In the liberal vision, slums bred crime. But brand-new government housing projects almost immediately became new centers of crime and quickly degenerated into new slums. Many of these projects later had to be demolished. Unfortunately, the assumptions behind those projects were not demolished, but live on in other disastrous programs, such as Section 8 housing. Rates of teenage pregnancy and venereal disease had been going down for years before the new 1960s attitudes toward sex spread rapidly through the schools, helped by War on Poverty money. These downward trends suddenly reversed and skyrocketed. The murder rate had also been going down, for decades, and in 1960 was just under half of what it had been in 1934. Then the new 1960s policies toward curing the "root causes" of crime and creating new "rights" for criminals began. Rates of violent crime, including murder, skyrocketed. The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life. Government social programs such as the War on Poverty were considered a way to reduce urban riots. Such programs increased sharply during the 1960s. So did urban riots. Later, during the Reagan administration, which was denounced for not promoting social programs, there were far fewer urban riots. Neither the media nor most of our educational institutions question the assumptions behind the War on Poverty. Even conservatives often attribute much of the progress that has been made by lower-income people to these programs. For example, the usually insightful quarterly magazine City Journal says in its current issue: "Beginning in the mid-sixties, the condition of most black Americans improved markedly." That is completely false and misleading. The economic rise of blacks began decades earlier, before any of the legislation and policies that are credited with producing that rise. The continuation of the rise of blacks out of poverty did not -- repeat, did not -- accelerate during the 1960s. The poverty rate among black families fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960, during an era of virtually no major civil rights legislation or anti-poverty programs. It dropped another 17 percentage points during the decade of the 1960s and one percentage point during the 1970s, but this continuation of the previous trend was neither unprecedented nor something to be arbitrarily attributed to the programs like the War on Poverty. In various skilled trades, the incomes of blacks relative to whites more than doubled between 1936 and 1959 -- that is, before the magic 1960s decade when supposedly all progress began. The rise of blacks in professional and other high-level occupations was greater in the five years preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than in the five years afterwards. While some good things did come out of the 1960s, as out of many other decades, so did major social disasters that continue to plague us today. Many of those disasters began quite clearly during the 1960s. But what are mere facts compared to a heady vision? Liberal assumptions -- "two Americas," for example -- are being recycled this election year, even by candidates who evade the "liberal" label
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Poverty in America -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: February 19, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com If you're a poor adult in America, for the most part, it's all your fault. That's true, at least today, whether you're black, white, brown or polka dot. According to the definition the U.S. Bureau of Census uses, a family of four with an income over $18,244 is not poor. The poverty cutoff for a single-person household is $9,359, and that for a two-person household is $12,000. With those definitions, the poverty rate was 11.7 percent, or about 33 million Americans living in poverty in 2001. The greatest percentage of poverty is found in female-headed households. Over 70 percent of female-headed households are poor. A large percentage of poor people are children (17 percent); fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household. Is poverty preordained? I think not. A married couple, both working full time at a minimum-wage job that pays $5.15 per hour, would earn an annual income of $20,600. Keep in mind that few adults earn wages as low as the minimum wage and those who do, earn a higher wage after a few months on the job. If a married couple both working at the minimum wage had no children, they would not be poor; if they had two children, they wouldn't be living in the lap of luxury, but neither would they be below the poverty threshold. Let's look at poverty in female-headed households. Divorce and death of the father might explain a small part of why there're so many female-headed households. But the bulk of it is explained by people having children and not getting married in the first place. Having children is not an act of God. It's not like you're walking down the street and pregnancy strikes you; children are a result of a conscious decision. For the most part, female-headed households are the result of short-sighted, self-destructive behavior of one or two people. They might have bought into the nonsense of "experts" like John Hopkins University sociologist Professor Andrew Cherlin, who said, "It has yet to be shown that the absence of a father was directly responsible for any of the supposed deficiencies of broken homes." The real issue, according to Cherlin, "is not the lack of male presence but the lack of male income." That's a call for fathers to be replaced by a government welfare check. According to a NPR/Kaiser/Kennedy School Poll, the leading cause of poverty identified by both the poor (75 percent) and non-poor (65 percent) was drug abuse. Again, it's not like you're walking down the street and you're struck with drug addiction; to use drugs is a conscious decision. Drug-users tend not to be very productive. They drop out of school, abandon their families, have scrapes with the law and don't hold down jobs. Would anybody be surprised that poverty is one result of drug usage? Most middle-class Americans, including black Americans, are no more than one, two or three generations out of poverty. How did they manage this feat; what's the secret for avoiding poverty? I think it's a no-brainer. Finish high school and take a job, any kind of a job. Today, but not when I graduated in 1954, if a person graduates from high school, with even a C average, there is a college or some kind of skills training program somewhere for him, and often financial assistance to boot. So if a person doesn't take advantage of today's available opportunities, particularly those during the boom of the 1990s, and engages in self-destructive behavior, whose fault is it? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------