The dreadful truth of Moynihan’s prophecy Broken families breed broken cities like Baltimore

On the 50th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous report on the breakdown of the black family in urban ghettos, Baltimore has descended into the tragic violence and chaos he predicted. In a report titled, “The Negro Family: The Case for Action,” Assistant Secretary of Labor Moynihan, warned that the deterioration of the black family, would result in soaring crime rates if it continued unchecked.

In the most famous passage of the 1965 report, Moynihan, who would later become a Democratic U.S. senator, wrote, “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: A community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder are not only to be expected, they are very near to inevitable.”

When he wrote these words, the illegitimacy rate among African-Americans was 25 percent while illegitimacy nationwide, stood at 7.7 percent. In the mid-1960s thanks largely to Great Society welfare policies, the out-of-wedlock birth rate began to climb rapidly. Today the out-of-wedlock rate for blacks is over 72 percent with even higher rates in inner cities. Illegitimacy among Hispanics is now over 50 percent, and for whites it has risen from the 3 percent in 1960 to 36 percent today.

Moynihan’s words were prophetic. As family structure virtually disintegrated, Baltimore’s core has become a center of poverty and violence. Recent unchecked rioting in Baltimore has been followed by a crime spree with 32 people shot and nine killed just over the Memorial Day weekend.

In the month of May, there were nearly 120 shootings and 43 murders. Sadly, Baltimore is just the latest face of urban violence in America. Other urban areas like Detroit, New Orleans, Newark and Chicago suffer from the same pathology.

That pathology is clearly linked to children growing up without fathers. The data is clear that children born to teenage single women are more likely to live in poverty, to fail in school, to become involved in drugs and crime, and to end up in prison. According to the National Fatherhood Initiative, 60 percent of rapists, 72 percent of adolescent murderers, and 70 percent of long-term prison inmates are men who grew up in fatherless homes. Yet this “politically incorrect” evidence is virtually ignored by policymakers.

 

Most of the hand-wringing articles addressing the problems of Baltimore have focused on the need for better schools, more jobs and even more gun control. Black leaders blame racism and call for more tax money and business investment in the city. But what does this matter if the family is not there to impart healthy values, personal responsibility, a hunger for education, a work ethic and a strong sense of right and wrong?

Until the 1960s, there were strong social sanctions against unwed motherhood. But when Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society, welfare payments, food stamps, government housing and Medicaid enabled unwed teens to have their babies without fear of consequences.

Since a father in the house virtually disqualifies a woman from collecting her government check, the welfare system encourages men to abandon their children. Welfare checks to young women destroy the sense of responsibility for young men, who are transformed from essential breadwinners to useless financial burdens. Fatherless communities are deprived of the traditional authority figures that discourage threatening gangs and control delinquent kids.

The human cost of these policies is found in the hopeless, uneducated, unmotivated young men aimlessly roaming the streets of Baltimore, devoid of a moral compass. Historically, individuals are restrained from anti-social behavior either by fear of punishment or by a strong moral upbringing. When both of these break down, so does society. Moynihan wrote that as long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself.

If future generations are to be saved, community leaders and character-forming institutions — churches, synagogues and charities — must take a strong public stand in support of marriage and restoring the two-parent family.

• Ellen Sauerbrey, a two-time Republican nominee for governor of Maryland, was born and raised in Baltimore.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jun/3/ellen-sauerbrey-baltimore-broken-families-breed-br/#ixzz3cDsRPW6t
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter

Minimum Wage, Maximum Stupidity (American Thinker)

 

June 3, 2015

 By Gene Schwimmer

Take the left’s penchant for form over substance, combine with a fundamental ignorance of what money is and what it does, stir with hammer and sickle, and what do you get?

You get a crusade to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour.

One would have thought, after decades of minimum wage increases, that America’s class warriors would have noticed the futility of printing money (which, as a practical matter, as we will see momentarily, is what artificially raising the minimum wage does) as a way to improve the target wage earners’ standard of living.  But no.

And actually, merely failing to improve the standard of living is a best-case scenario, one that, in the real world, has never occurred, as evidenced by the very fact that every past minimum wage increase has been followed by calls for yet another increase – including, predictably, the one being demanded now.

For in fact, raising the minimum wage not only fails to make things better; it actually makes them worse, as can be seen in the following table:

Buying power of $1.00, compared to 2013, in
Year	Purchasing power of $1.00 in 2010	Minimum Wage (Nominal)	Minimum Wage (2013 dollars)
1940	$15.58	0.30	$4.99
1950	9.05	0.75	7.25
1960	7.37	1.00	7.87
1970	5.62	1.60	9.61
1980	2.65	3.10	8.76
1990	1.67	3.80	6.77
2000	1.27	5.15	7.20
2010	1.00	7.25	7.75

Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CNN Money.com, “Minimum wage since 1938.”

A simple comparison of 2010 to 1940 amply illustrates the futility of minimum wage increases – and, not incidentally, the liberal penchant for form over substance.  Comparing the second and third columns, 2010 against 1940, we see that the minimum wage would need to be 15.58 times the 1940 minimum wage for a person earning the minimum wage today to have the buying power his grandparents enjoyed in 1940.  And examining the third column, we see a minimum wage increase, from 1940 to 2015, from 30 cents/hr to $7.25/hr., a multiple of 24.17, significantly greater than the 15.58-fold increase needed to live as well as the 1940 minimum wage earner.

By rights, if minimum wage increases actually did what its proponents believe, Starbucks baristas would be living, if not extravagantly, at least able comfortably to afford the basic necessities, and we would not be assaulted with so much “income inequality” hoop-de-doo.  Obviously, neither one is the case.  Why?

The answer can be found in the last column, which translates the minimum wage for each listed year into 2010 dollars – i.e., adjusted for inflation.  Comparing 2013 to 1940, we see an increase in the hourly minimum wage, in 2010 dollars, from $4.99 to $7.75, a multiple of 1.50.

That’s right: during a period when the buying power of the dollar declined by 1,558 percent, the buying power of the 1940 minimum wage, intended to offset the decline in buying power, actually increased by a mere 55.31 percent.

Is it any wonder, then, that today’s young whelps are struggling?  Didn’t used to be that way, as the writer, born in 1952, can attest from his own whelphood.  To wit:

In 1977, the year I, at the age of 25, moved to New York, the minimum wage was $2.30/hr., though I, personally, was earning $5.00/hr, or $10,400/yr.  A 25-year-old Starbucks barista, struggling to survive today on $10.00/hr, might well wonder how I lived on half as much.  How well can a person live on just $10,000/yr.?  Let’s see: on the day I left Detroit for New York, I lived in a townhouse (no roommates), rent $175/mo.  I had a car, a Ford Maverick, bought new, cost $1,740, monthly payments $75.  Insurance was so cheap that I don’t even remember the cost – $200/yr?  Gas was 65 cents a gallon.  My typical dinner was two rib-eye steaks.  The townhouse, by the way, was an upgrade from my previous dwelling, an apartment, rent $65/mo.

Point being, I was not rich – far from it – but neither was I, nor anyone else, complaining about “income inequality,” even though the “wealth gap” was much, greater in times past.  For example, the richest American living today, according to Forbes, is Bill Gates, net worth $79.6 billion.  An amount not to be sneezed at, to be sure.  But compare Bill Gates’s wealth to that of John D. Rockefeller, whose wealth, in 2014 dollars, was $340 billion.  And the minimum wage at the time of Rockefeller’s death?  Unfortunately, the table to which I linked doesn’t go back to 1937.  But in 1938, the minimum wage was 25 cents – $4.20 in 2015 dollars.  Three hundred forty billion dollars at the top, $4.20/hr at the bottom – that’s not “income inequality”; that’s income inequality on steroids.

And again, in this writer’s youth, nobody obsessed over “income inequality.”  Why should one?  If a man can live comfortably on what he makes, of what concern is it to him what another man makes?  On the other hand, if a man cannot live on what he makes…

Sadly, that is the unfortunate position in which all too many of us find ourselves, hence the susceptibility of all too many of us to the raise-the-minimum-wage chimera.  And it is an illusion.  For as the historical numbers in the above table clearly show, the liberal nostrum of raising the minimum wage not only will not solve the problem, but will in fact make it worse.

What liberals so sorely lack is a fundamental understanding of what money is and what it does.  Money – currency – contrary to minimum-wage increase advocates, really is nothing but pretty pieces of papers with dead statesmen’s pictures on them.  It has no intrinsic value beyond the values of the paper and ink it is printed on and with, and assuming that the amount needed to print a $1 bill and a $500 bill is the same, there is no intrinsic reason why a $500 bill should buy any more than a $1 bill will.  Money/currency, as Kevin Williamson explains, is no more than a conduit to facilitate the exchange of one good or service for another (emphases mine):

Dollars have value because of the things for which we can trade them: Picasso paintings …, coffee, cotton, cheeseburgers, sofa beds ... checks, chickens, or pesos … goods are paid for in goods … we manufacture widgets or grow tomatoes or write novels because we wish to consume shoes and poached salmon and Buicks.  The dollar or the euro is just a way to avoid the difficulties of trading a truckload of chickens for Les Femmes d’Alger.

So, at the risk of sounding simplistic, a person earning $10/hr who uses a $10 bill to buy a wicket priced at $10.00 is really trading one hour of his labor for the wicket.  The currency he pays with serves merely as the means of transferring his hour of labor to the merchant rather than having to perform an hour of labor for the wicket-seller.

A person earning $15/hr, on the other hand, can buy 1.5 wickets with his hour of labor because his hour of labor is that much more valuable than that of the $10 worker, presumably because the $15/hr guy’s skills are more in demand than the $10/hr guy’s, or demand is the same, but the $15/hr guy works harder and/or better and produces more in his hour of labor.  Logically, then, if the $10/hr worker wants to be able to afford to buy 1.5 wickets with his hour of labor, he must – and this is the key point – raise the value of his labor to that of the $15/hr worker through some combination of learning a more in-demand skill or producing more with the skills he has.

Now suppose the government simply orders the $10/hr guy’s employer to pay him $15/hr while the $10/hr guy continues to produce at the same rate and in the same amount as before.  Since the worker has not increased the amount of goods or services produced in an hour – nothing additional of value that the employer can exchange for $5.00 – where will the $5.00 come from?

If you guessed, “The government will print it,” go to the head of the class.  Absent a 50% increase in the real value of the product of the $10/hr worker’s labor, the employer may absorb some of the loss, but ultimately, he will have no choice but artificially to raise his nominal sales price.

The conceit of minimum-wage increase advocates is that the government can arbitrarily “raise” the $10/hr worker’s wage to $15/hr – in effect, print five additional dollars – and the value of one hour of the $10/hr worker’s labor, without his doing anything to increase the real value of his work, magically becomes equivalent to the real value of the $15/hr worker’s work.  But what actually happens is that each dollar that formerly represented one tenth of the $10/hr guy’s one hour of work now represents one fifteenth.  The hour of work that had been divided into ten $1.00 increments has not been divided into 15.

And the real $15/hr worker, the “forgotten man,” the value of whose hour of work was a true $15?  Thanks to the $10/hr worker’s artificial 50-percent wage hike, the “true” $15/hr worker has been hit with a 33.3-percent wage cut.  So expect him to demand a raise, too, which raise, to reflect the value of his one hour of work, would have to be, in percentage terms, the same as the $10/hr. worker’s: 50 percent, to $22.50/hr.

Anyone who expects such a raise to happen, and within the same time as the proposed minimum-wage increase to $10/hr...well, let’s just say that the odds are not good.  What will happen is that merchants will see their suppliers’ costs rise and be forced to raise their sale prices.  What also will happen is so-called rounding, where, when supplier price increases would dictate a sale price increase of, say, two cents, the merchant will “round” the increase to five cents.

It’s called inflation, and anyone who expects wages, including, if not especially, the minimum wage, to keep pace with inflation needs to take another look at the above table for a quick – and painful – reminder of what has happened in the past.

The right strategy is to stop destroying the currency to support the liberals’ welfare state, not to legislate an artificial increase in the minimum wage.  And to appoint a non-Keynesian Fed chairman.  Expect neither one to happen any time soon.

Minimum wage, maximum stupidity.

Gene Schwimmer is a New York licensed real estate broker and the author of The Christian State.  Follow Gene Schwimmer on Twitter.

Take the left’s penchant for form over substance, combine with a fundamental ignorance of what money is and what it does, stir with hammer and sickle, and what do you get?

You get a crusade to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour.

One would have thought, after decades of minimum wage increases, that America’s class warriors would have noticed the futility of printing money (which, as a practical matter, as we will see momentarily, is what artificially raising the minimum wage does) as a way to improve the target wage earners’ standard of living.  But no.

And actually, merely failing to improve the standard of living is a best-case scenario, one that, in the real world, has never occurred, as evidenced by the very fact that every past minimum wage increase has been followed by calls for yet another increase – including, predictably, the one being demanded now.