The Goat Pen

College graduates are more likely than ever to marry college graduates, statistics show. High school dropouts are more likely to marry high school dropouts.

Think of marriage like any other contract or investment. It's most likely to happen when gains are big. So we should expect marriages among low-income Americans to decline if women perceive declining gains from hitching themselves to the men around them. That's precisely what we have seen.

Low-skill men have had a rough two generations. The evaporation of manufacturing work has gutted their main source of employment, while globalization has held down their wages. Marriage has declined the most among men whose wages have declined the most - see graph comparing change in earnings (the RED LINE) and change in likelihood to be married (the BLUE BARS).

It is hardly easy to do anything with earnings near the poverty level. But it is relatively easier to raise a child and keep up a home with modern household innovations. The connection between Lunchables, detergent and marriage rates is not often made, but perhaps it should be. The development of time-saving technologies -- cheap prepared foods, cheap clothes, machines to wash, dry, and vacuum -- has not only encouraged more women to seek work, but also made it relatively easier for single parents to raise a child. Put starkly, technology makes it cheaper and easier than ever to be single. It makes marrying a financially unstable man even more risky.

So Ari Fleishmann has it backwards. Declining marriage since '64 didn't cause these people's poor financial straits....poor financial straits led to less marriages.

Meanwhile..

In terms of the Great Recession, 93 percent of the US economic growth during the first three years of the recovery went to the richest 1 percent of families, and only 7 percent went to the rest of us.

and

While US Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is accurately targeted to serve the poor, these cash benefits are the least effective at reducing [income] inequality. The reason is that they are so meager. The entire budget for cash assistance for families in the United States amounts to one-tenth of 1 percent of the nation's economic output. The average across the O.E.C.D. nations is 11 times higher. Even including tax breaks and direct government services. we spend a much smaller share of our economic output on family assistance than almost any other advanced nation.

This graph shows how much we are spending on poverty over the years



With flat line results



Everyone knows, including liberals like tick but they can't admit it, is that two parent families, by simple math, help in the child's development because it doubles up financial and emotional resources for them. Here is the recommended steps by the study refered to by the WSJ:

7 Steps to Reduce Child Poverty through Marriage
Given the importance of marriage in reducing child poverty, the following steps should
be undertaken to strengthen marriage in low income communities.
1) Reduce anti-marriage penalties in welfare programs.
2) Create public education campaigns in low-income communities on the benefits of
marriage.
3) Require welfare offices to provide factual information on the value of marriage in
reducing poverty and welfare dependence.
4) Explain the benefits of marriage in middle and high schools with a high proportion of
at-risk youth.
5) Require federally funded birth control clinics to provide information on the benefits of
marriage and the skills needed to develop stable families to interested low-income clients.
6) Require federally funded birth control clinics to offer voluntary referrals to life
planning and marriage skills education to all interested low-income clients.
7) Make voluntary marriage education widely available to interested couples in lowincome
communities.


Which of those do you have a problem?

Key to end poverty is to stop giving them money! FREE MARKET! Let them work or starve!

Well, a record number of people are not bothering themselves to look for employment. I wonder how they are getting by?

Doesn't the Senate Intelligence Committee understand that they must vette anything related to Benghazi through the New York Times? The pig-ankled harrigan will not be pleased...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... story.html

Heh, bigger fish (traffic jams on the GW bridge) to fry my friend.

sardis wrote:Doesn't the Senate Intelligence Committee understand that they must vette anything related to Benghazi through the New York Times? The pig-ankled harrigan will not be pleased...

Actually it's pig-ankled harridan. \hair-re-dan\ n: a vicious and scolding older woman; a harpy

Harrigan is that irritating interruption when the wife/gf comes up for air while trying to spit out a pube.

The report also noted, chillingly, that the FBI’s investigation into the attacks has been hampered in Libya, and that 15 people “supporting the investigation or otherwise helpful to the United States” have since been killed in Benghazi. The report said it was unclear whether those killings were related to the investigation.

At this point, what does it matter?

A good example of the greed this admin is fighting to marginalize.(We must work smarter) This is what keeps wimmen and minorities and the poooor (the mascots) from realizing the american dream.



THREE RIVERS, Texas — Not long ago, Richard Dockery was a real estate and insurance broker in this town of 1,800 residents, putting together small land deals and cobbling together a nest egg for retirement.

Today, Dockery, 47, lives in a new, 2,400-square-foot home that he bought with cash and will have his 23-year-old daughter's medical school bills covered before she steps into her first classroom.

Once a month, a six-figure check in his name arrives in his mailbox from an energy company — royalties earned by leasing his property to oil companies and co-owning wells. It's one of several that appear in his box each month that, added up, equal roughly the annual salary of a midlevel NBA player.

"It's crazy," Dockery says. "And I'm small fry. There are literally thousands of people out here who are millionaires, and some who are going to be billionaires. It's the wild, wild West."

Dockery and this small city, 75 miles south of San Antonio, are at the epicenter of one of the biggest oil booms ever to hit Texas — and possibly the USA. A vast oil and gas reservoir in South Texas known as the Eagle Ford Shale, along with another in West Texas known as the Permian Basin, is driving the boom and could make Texas one of the leading oil producers on the planet.

To me, the best aspect of the oil boom in the US is it can drastically reduce our economic dependence on the middle east. That part of the world has always been unstable, and these days they're getting downright crazy. I'd love to leave them to their own devices and not be affected by it at all.

Liberals should support domestic energy because, if we no longer need to maintain a very expensive military designed to keep our middle eastern oil lifeline open, we can significantly reduce military spending and still be safe. Gutting the Pentagon has always been a liberal dream.

Drill baby drill! Frack baby frack!

Look for The Wolf of Texas, coming to a theater near you, soon.

Liberals should support domestic energy...


Can't afford another Ralph Nader. They're committed (publicly) to crucifying carbon.....still fun to watch'em dance.

From the uber-liberal American Lung Association website:

The American Lung Association is working to protect the public health from air pollution. We are defending the Clean Air Act to ensure that all Americans can have air that is safe and healthy to breathe. The Clean Air Act has provided the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with the authority and the responsibilty to protect and clean up the nation's air [while forever fighting repubs and their corporate coal-burning masters]. Thanks to that law and later amendments that strengthened it, people throughout the nation breathe cleaner, healthier air [and asthmatics and lungers rejoice, and urban dwellers can see distant horizons].

"Everyone knows, including liberals like tick but they can't admit it, is that two parent families, by simple math, help in the child's development because it doubles up financial and emotional resources for them."

By that logic, I take it you are a proponent of polygamy...

I actually can see no constitutional problem with it based on the latest Supreme Court ruling

"A vast oil and gas reservoir in South Texas known as the Eagle Ford Shale, along with another in West Texas known as the Permian Basin, is driving the boom and could make Texas one of the leading oil producers on the planet."

This can't be true. If there was that large of an oil reserve in Texas, JR Ewing would've found it years ago...

bluetick wrote:From the uber-liberal American Lung Association website:

The American Lung Association is working to protect the public health from air pollution. We are defending the Clean Air Act to ensure that all Americans can have air that is safe and healthy to breathe. The Clean Air Act has provided the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with the authority and the responsibilty to protect and clean up the nation's air [while forever fighting repubs and their corporate coal-burning masters]. Thanks to that law and later amendments that strengthened it, people throughout the nation breathe cleaner, healthier air [and asthmatics and lungers rejoice, and urban dwellers can see distant horizons].

Ahhhh, and right on queue, the dancing savant appears shouting faux altruism for all to hear.

The Tea Party is Modern Conservatism in a Nutshell



The Classical Greek definition of an 'idiot' was a person uninterested in the common good. In other words, modern conservatives. -- Economist Umair Haque

The very word -- "conservative" -- doesn't fit for most people, as we seriously ask ourselves what exactly is it that they are conserving? The answer is nothing but the social order, with those on top remaining on top and those below remaining below. The only question of distinction among conservatives is: How far down should the lower and working class be? How dirt poor is too dirt poor? How powerless is too powerless? How disenfranchised is too disenfranchised? How little money is too little money? How far can we push this and not have to worry about blood spilling on our Louis Vuittons?

Though it is often claimed that the left stands for equality while the right stands for freedom, this notion misstates the actual disagreement between right and left. Historically, the conservative has favored liberty for the higher orders and constraint for the lower orders. What the conservative sees and dislikes in equality, in other words, is not a threat to freedom but its extension. For in that extension, he sees a loss of his own freedom.