Legacies
From Andrew
Klavan:
Now, we don’t want to dwell on the distant past when Democrats defended slavery against Abe Lincoln and his Republicans… or when they formed the Ku Klux Klan or passed oppressive Jim Crow laws… or when Democrats like Al Gore Sr. or Robert Byrd… or George Wallace or Lester Maddox… or Bill Clinton’s mentor J. William Fulbright… stood as staunch segregationists.
The modern Democratic party is much different. Appalled by the way evil slavemasters once tore black families apart, Democrats fashioned welfare to subsidize unmarried motherhood so that free African Americans could tear their families apart themselves.
Kinda turns the parable about giving a man a fish vs teaching him to fish on it's head, huh?
ReplyDeleteIs Klaven coming with a solution, here? The modern Republican party will eliminate welfare to unmarried mothers, so as to force family formation?
ReplyDeleteI mean, it might work, but is he going to own the logical consequence of the argument?
The logical consequence of his argument being that, however hard life is for unmarried mothers not on the dole, it's even harder in the long run for those on the dole? I doubt he thinks he has a solution to offer that will make life a paradise even for people who screw up in the most egregious ways; at most, he seems to advocate ceasing to do things that make their lives worse.
ReplyDeleteThe modern Republican party will eliminate welfare to unmarried mothers, so as to force family formation?
ReplyDeleteNo false dichotomy there....
Eric Hines
"...I doubt he thinks he has a solution to offer that will make life a paradise even for people who screw up in the most egregious ways;..."
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize life was supposed to be a paradise no matter what kind of decisions - egregious or otherwise - that one makes.
Why doesn't somebody tell me these things?!?
I blame Cass.
But seriously, it may make me seem a hard ass, but I'm all for taking all the welfare money away right now. All at once. Send notices saying in 3 months, the program will cease to exist. And then do it. If people don't get off their butts and take care of the upcoming change themselves, then they deserve the consequences that come their way. I'm tired of the boat analogy of the welfare system: A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour all your money.
It's time to sink the boat.
The argument is that Democrats fashioned welfare to subsidize unmarried motherhood "so that" free blacks would tear apart their families. Logically, then, the solution to that problem is to repeal what is a wicked and evil program -- one that doesn't just happen to foment chaos and the dissolution of families, but was designed for it.
ReplyDeleteI know, Klavan is just being a smart ass like always. Still, this is a piece of rhetoric that doesn't help his cause -- even if you believe, as Sly, that the programs should in fact be ended in short order.
The false dichotomy is completed by the so as to force family formation bit.
ReplyDeleteOf course there are other alternatives. One that comes to mind is eliminate welfare to unmarried mothers. Full stop.
This is SLY's suggestion, as I understand it.
Another alternative is to alter the welfare, keying it to a characteristic wholly within the unmarried mother's control in a way that encourages her to break her welfare dependency rather than rewards her for being dependent. Means testing application of welfare, as currently conceived, is an obvious failure--the welfare cliff and marginal tax thing. The unwed (I'd include single, as well) mother can control her place on the clock. Thus, she gets the welfare only for so long, then it disappears. How long is so long? She gets reducing amounts for each child born (recall ADC and its renamed AFDC). She gets reductions greater than the cost of sending the child to school when the child comes of age. She gets reductions greater than her pay raise when she gets a (better) job. And, as with TANF, it expires after a time, whether she's working or not.
A similar schedule would work, it seems to me, for unemployment insurance. Since most laid off workers find work within a relatively short period of time, I'd be inclined to pay the man a significant portion of his just-lost wage--say 75% of it, or roughly match his take home pay--for that initial period (4 weeks? 6 weeks?), and then reduce the payments on a rapid pace over the next several weeks so that he gets no more payments at all after, say, 13 weeks. Quit holding out for his dream job, and get to work.
Eric Hines
The false dichotomy is completed by the so as to force family formation bit.
ReplyDeleteA false dichotomy is a logical fallacy. I'm not asserting one; I'm asking the question. Is this what Klavan intends to suggest?
I doubt it, because I think he's just being playful. But it's what is most naturally suggested, given his phrasing and given his failure to refine his target, and it isn't helpful to his overarching cause.
Not that Dems fashioned it for that purpose, but that they blinded themselves to the real results and then refused to abandon the bad program, whether because they couldn't bring themselves to face the truth, or because the dependency was too convenient. And it's not rhetoric, it's what a lot of us believe.
ReplyDeleteIn that context, it's exasperating to be accused of cold-heartedness for opposing them. They're doing damage and refuse to stop.
Depends on who the "we" is. Lots of people still think being Southern is a genetic and loyalty test above all else, color grades of blood and consanguinity.
ReplyDeleteAll that caning of Republicans did some good after all. It's like the Mohammedan myth of instant virgins and marriage goods.
Logically, then, the solution to that problem is to repeal what is a wicked and evil program -- one that doesn't just happen to foment chaos and the dissolution of families, but was designed for it.
The Left tore apart black families to make the slaves adhere to authority more and rebel less often. Thus the logical conclusion is that to counter this, one either removes the vote from blacks while giving them 500X the welfare they get now, or remove the welfare and make them less reliant on the authority for goodies.
Welfare is neither good nor evil. How it is currently used, in order to buy votes so that Reid can shatter opposing businesses and so Hussein can have vacations while watching reruns of his favorite tragic comedy the Benghazi embassy deaths with Americans being dragged in the streets, is different.
Why people refuse to understand this, I cannot say. They should have figured it out long ago. Klavan himself is... pretty slow. Those slower than Klavan... unimaginable. Pitiful too.
"It's time to sink the boat."
ReplyDeleteHey... at least let me get enough time to get off this boat before you sink. What kind of Survivor vote and choice is this?
It's not Survivor, Ymar, it's the game of Life and you should have learned to swim.
ReplyDeleteheh
"One that comes to mind is eliminate welfare to unmarried mothers. Full stop."
No, this is not what I said, although they would obviously included. I said it should stop to everyone. And while I understand what you're attempting to do with a phasing out plan, that leaves open too many opportunities to game the system with waivers given out based upon *somebody's* opinion that this person needs more...time, money, whatever. And as soon as one gets it.... So, now, stop it all at once. Yeah, it seems cold-hearted, but if the opposite is to considered "warm-hearted", to what end has that gotten us?
Wait- so we don't think the Democrats started the welfare programs of the 'War on Poverty' for self-serving ends of binding the poor and blacks into an endless cycle of dependency to lock them in as a reliable voting block even though LBJ pretty well said as much?
ReplyDelete"To put it mildly, LBJ was not a consistent advocate of racial equality. Bartlett (both in his book and in this article) quotes LBJ's explanation of why he backed the Civil Rights Act of 1957:
"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."
I think it's honestly pretty difficult to say Klavan's factually wrong here- he may be generalizing where more specificity is preferred, but he's not wrong.
He also said something to the effect that he'd "have them niggers voting Democrat for a hundred years."
ReplyDeleteSeems to me, as ugly as his thought process is, he had a better insight into the average black man on the street than most given how well his plan has worked to date.
Sanger was going to have them blacks killing each other via abortion and eugenics. That's, in a way, more diabolical than the whole buying votes Johnson thing.
ReplyDeleteAnd Sly, I ran out of RPG points when I first generated a character for this Life game. Pretty sure I couldn't have "Swim" and "Shark killer" on at the same time. This is some cracktastic game, this Life is.