POVERTY IN AMERICA

Half D.C. families have single parents
Minorities increasingly dependent on government welfare programs

An alarming report coming out of the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that more than half the family households in parts of the District of Columbia and Prince George's County are run by single parents.

That these areas have a high minority population, largely African-American and Hispanic, is not a coincidence, Ron Haskins, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, told the Washington Examiner.

"About 70 percent of black kids are born outside marriage, and then you have those born in a marriage, about half of them end in divorce," Haskins said. "And first-generations Hispanics have a relatively low divorce rate … but once you get into the second generation that disappears."

Red Alert has repeatedly predicted that increasing dependence on government welfare programs will lead to family disintegration in the minority communities, a phenomenon that is increasing in speed and intensity under the Obama administration.

Red Alert has also warned repeatedly that the attack on the family launched by the far-left is part of the agenda to turn the U.S. into a godless, secular society with a socialist orientation to expanding social welfare programs in the name of "social justice," with the result that minority poverty in the United States will unfortunately only intensify in coming years.

Clearly, this is not a racial problem as much as it is a direct result of the socialist agenda that has been imposed on America over the past few decades, largely by Democrats, with the assistance of an increasing number of centrist Republicans in Congress.

Money does not solve poverty

Reducing poverty has been a national policy goal since 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in his first State of the Union address, delivered to a joint session of Congress on Jan. 8, 1964, less than two months after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in the streets of Dallas, Texas.

We have now had more than 50 years to determine if Lyndon Johnson's social welfare formula is an effective way to combat poverty.

The debate over poverty in America has swung between the political left that has argued for the need to establish at public expense a national guaranteed minimum income for every American and the political right that has seen the only solution to poverty rests in creating strong families among the poor, educating children and providing jobs.

With more than four decades of experience since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the U.S. has returned once again to debating the question, as Democratic President Barack Obama has launched a massive redistribution of income social welfare program at the heart of his economic stimulus package.

On Jan. 25, 1988, President Ronald Reagan delivered a State of the Union address in which he declared that the war on poverty had failed: "My friends, some years ago, the federal government declared a war on poverty, and poverty won."

After the trillions of dollars that had been spent since 1964 to fight poverty, we are left with an inescapable conclusion: Ironically, money alone does not solve poverty.

Reagan continually returned to a simple but critically important theme: Without strong families, the poor would never emerge from poverty.

Even more damaging, Regan directly stated that federal antipoverty programs actually function to destroy families, thereby perpetuating a culture of poverty that persists across generations.

Poverty and dysfunctional families

Minority inner-city poverty has been perpetuated by an escalating problem of a growing abortion rate and an alarming rate of births to mothers out of wedlock. The problem is compounded when the unmarried mother is a teenager.

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then serving under a presidential appointment as assistant secretary of labor heading the Office of Policy Research and Planning, wrote a report titled "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action."

Moynihan created a national firestorm of angry backlash and criticism, simply because he argued the cause of African-American poverty was the deterioration of the African-American family, not white prejudice and discrimination.

Moynihan began his controversial report with a sentence that left little doubt: "At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family."

According to the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, nearly 70 percent of all African-American babies were born to unmarried mothers.

While the percentages are going up in the non-Hispanic white community as well, the comparable figures showed that in 2005, approximately 37 percent of the births were to unmarried mothers. The rate of births to white unmarried mothers are today where the comparable African-American births were over four decades ago, when Moynihan first wrote his report.

The statistics on African-American abortions are shocking. Even though African-Americans are only about 13.5 percent of the population, one of every three abortions in the United States is performed on an African-American woman.

According to the federal government statistics on abortion maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the abortion for African-American women is three times the abortion ratio for white women.

Had the approximately 13 million African-American babies aborted since Roe v. Wade in 1973 been allowed to live, the 40 million African-Americans in the U.S. in 2007 could reasonably be projected to exceed 50 million today.

Moreover, with abortions an alternative for unmarried pregnant women, the possibility of an abortion contributes to the destabilization of the African-American family.

Still, President Obama is on the record arguing the right of a woman to choose an abortion is absolute.

With the rates of births to unmarried mothers rising among the white population to levels experienced by minority populations some 50 years ago, the problem is clearly not a problem of race, but of family dysfunction.

When half of all babies born are born to unmarried mothers, family disintegration will be a major cause of poverty, with unmarried mothers forced to struggle to both give sufficient time and attention to child care and the economic costs of earning a living and educating children.