| the fact remains that the majority of fatherless children are born out of wedlock. Men have the ability and the choice to prevent 100% of this. That many choose not to can't be blamed on the divorce courts.
Apparently there was a concept in the housing projects called "liberty day," or something like that. Liberty day was a girl's 14th birthday, because once she turned 14 she could get her own apartment and move out of her mother's place. She did this by getting pregnant. Once pregnant, she was a "mother with dependent children" for welfare purposes, and out came the government bennies: her own apartment, a monthly income, free medical care... all kinds of stuff. You or I might laugh at the amounts involved and wonder how anyone sane could put themselves in that position at that age, but to a 14-year-old living in a ghetto, an apartment and $1200 per month sounds like the promised land. But note the requirements: she has to be pregnant, and she can't be married. Can you think of a more perverse set of economic incentives to dangle in front of young people? Anyway, this "irresponsible young male" they are interviewing explains that it is his job to get these girls pregnant. The girls all agree with this. This is how the free apartments happen in their world. The boys get the girls pregnant, and that's how housing is provided. The benefits were sufficiently generous that no young ghetto male could possibly compete with them. He'd have to make $38,000 a year or something like that to provide her with the same lifestyle. Out of the question. So this is how they adjusted. Thank goodness we finally ended that program. I've forgotten what the age is now, but unwed teen pregnancy has taken a dive since that reform went into effect. And now the unwed mothers are told that they have only a few years to get themselves on their feet, and here's the job training program, so get busy. So now the government policy is to compete with males as providers only after age 18, and to provide the women with job training so they can support themselves. As for the men in these neighborhoods, the government's policy is as it has always been: let them rot, and then jail them when they screw up. So this is how a man in that environment arranges his own government benefits: he knocks over a 7-11. For that he gets two years' free room and board, and mostly what he has to do all day is watch TV. For many, it's a better life than the one outside. We used to pay poor women to get pregnant. We're still paying poor men to commit robbery. It's easy to sit here in our middle-class enclaves and criticize the behavior of these people, but paying them to behave this way was the liberals' idea of "caring" for the poor. For decades we had waved sums in front of poor women that their men could not match. Why marry some guy who went to the same lousy schools you did, who has no more future than you do, when Uncle Sam will marry you and give you the the equivalent of $38,000 per year? We had illegitimacy rates approaching 95% in those neighborhoods. Was that moral turpitude, or a perfectly sane response to the economic incentives provided by government? Liberals called that system "compassionate." It was anything but. |
They might well be caused by other anti-family government policies. I remember reading an article about welfare reform's impact on teen pregnancy. You'll recall that it used to be government policy to pay teenaged girls to get pregnant, provided they did not marry.