LAW VS. MORAL VALUES

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There is a slight problem with the argument by heritage Fox..

Quote:

Increasing Marriage Would Dramatically Reduce Child Poverty

You argued that most mothers were married in the 50s.
You argued that the poverty programs put in place since the 60s increased poverty.

Yet, the figures for poverty show that 1959 had 31.1% poverty compared to the 16% today.

If marriage would reduce poverty, why was there more poverty when you claim marriage was more common? Your arguments start to fall apart Fox when reality is examined.

1 Reply

@parados,

I have provided my sources Parados. Please provide your sources for rebuttal that factor in the changing criteria used to establish poverty threshholds and your evidence that the 'war on poverty' rather than other factors decreased poverty, and that the poor that were targeted in the 'war on poverty' have decreased in number specifically due to government action.

I offered my opinion and I have already acknowledged that it was my opinion, though not necessarily an uninformed one.

Or perhaps we can just accept my opinion as my opinion and your opinion as your opinion for that if that would be easier.

I also pointed out the that war on poverty has now expended more than $6 trillion tax payer dollars--by some estimates as much as $10 trillion--and yet the poor are still with us. Why is that?

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@Foxfyre,

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/correlation.png

((Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.))

http://www.xkcd.com/552/

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@Foxfyre,

Lets see..

If we look at the chart - prior to 1965, child poverty was higher.
If we look at the marriage argument you made - children were more likely to be in 2 parent households prior to 1965
If we look at the other argument you made children in single family households are more likely to be in poverty.

That leads us to:
There should be more poverty today because there are more single family households.
However there is NOT more poverty.
What caused there to be less poverty?
The largest expenditure against poverty has been by the US government on welfare programs.
The largest expenditure is the most likely reason for something if we apply Occam's razor.

If you have evidence that shows the most likely reason is not the reason, please present it Fox. Otherwise logic leads me to the conclusion you say can't exist.

2 Replies

@parados,

Your opinion is noted Parados. Thank you. If it would make you feel any better, I always know that my opinion could be wrong in the face of better information. Usually highly biased opinion doesn't easily sway my highly biased opinion though. C'est la vie.

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@parados,

So then parados... if your theory is correct, why would childhood poverty go up so much in the Reagan/Bush years?

1 Reply

@Foxfyre,

Foxfyre wrote:

But pregnancies almost all involved at least a ring and a date if not marriage, and/or a ring and a date were usually quickly produced if an unwanted pregnancy occurred.

or adoption

Quote:

Of Black women with premarital births,
From 1952 to 1972, 1.5% placed their children for adoption.
From 1973 to 1981, this percentage fell to .2%
From 1982 to 1988, it rose to 1.1%.

Of White women with premarital births,
From 1952 to 1972, 19.3% placed their children for adoption.
From 1973 to 1981, this percentage fell to 7.6%.
From 1982 to 1988, it fell further to 3.2%. (Bachrach, Stolley, London, 1992)

http://statistics.adoption.com/information/adoption-statistics-placing-children.html

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

Quote:

The age of unmarried mothers has increased with time. In 1970, half of nonmarital births were to teens; by 1993, the highest proportion of unmarried mothers were women in their twenties, a significant change. The birth rate for unmarried teens declined in 1995. Teen mothers, however continued to make up the largest single group of all first births to unmarried women.(Freundlich, 1998)

from the same source

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Everyone else has already lambasted you for this, Fox, but since you addressed me--the links you provided not only do not make your case about "measurably better off," they contradict your case. Continually referring to "the war on poverty," a program long since abandoned (most specifically by a Democratic President and a Republican Congress in 1996) does nothing to help your case, since by objective standards applied, once again even in the linked material you provided, poverty has been dramatically reduced since 1950, nearly cut in half.

It is true that we have been constantly demanding that you provide evidence. But simply providing links does you no good if the evidence provided by those links contradicts your position.

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

Quote:

The demand by childless couples for infants also led to radical changes in adoption practices. The baby boom, beginning in the mid-1940s and reaching its peak in the late 1950s, saw a dramatic rise in marriages and births and created an increased demand for adoptable children. Adoption agencies were inundated with requests, and adoptions rose spectacularly: between 1937 and 1945 adoptions grew threefold, from 16,000 to 50,000 annually; a decade later the number of adoptions had nearly doubled again to 93,000 and, by 1965 the number had increased to 142,000.

Although adoptions increased in number and popularity in the twenty years after World War II, the availability for adoption of white, out-of-wedlock infants declined radically in the decades after the 1960s.

http://www.faqs.org/childhood/A-Ar/Adoption-in-the-United-States.html

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@Setanta,

Whatever Setanta. I believe the links do support my opinion. You obviously don't believe my sources support my opinion. Nor have you provided any evidence rebutting my sources. So I have my opinion plus my sources. And you have your opinion. And that's the way it usually goes doesn't it?

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@Foxfyre,

Your sources show that poverty has been reduced in the last 60 years, nearly cut in half. Why should i rebut that? That's what i and others have been saying to you all along.

My advice to you is that when you provide links to what you claim is evidence for your position, you read it carefully first so that you don't do what you've just done--provide evidence which contradicts your opinion.

Of course i'm not going to attempt to rebut something which supports what i've been saying. Get a brain.

1 Reply

@Setanta,

The sources I gave you addressed the issue of marriage or a mom and dad at home producing measurable benefits which is what you asked for. Try to keep up dear.

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No they don't. They support what people have been saying all along--teenage pregnancies are down, poverty is down, and that despite the fact that births out of wedlock are up.

Try to keep up, Dearie.

Jesus, you quote sources and apparently don't even know what your sources are saying. If the illusory "measurable" benefits you claim are there, why are births out of wedlock up, while poverty is down?

0 Replies

@ebrown p,

Quote:

If we look at the chart - prior to 1965, child poverty was higher.
If we look at the marriage argument you made - children were more likely to be in 2 parent households prior to 1965
If we look at the other argument you made children in single family households are more likely to be in poverty.

If we assume that single parent households are more likely to be in poverty, the way to test the theory would be to predict that if government spending stayed the same then single parent households should have increased during the time Reagan and Bush were President.

I haven't checked that data specifically but this seems to point to that being true

Quote:

The percentage of households headed by single parents showed little variation from 1994 through 2006, at about 9 percent, up from 5 percent in 1970, according to the latest data on America’s families and households released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/families_households/009842.html

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LAW VS. MORAL VALUES

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