The Causes of Crime
A number of friends have posted about Chicago's suggestion to arm thousands of police officers with military-style weapons in an effort to deal with the high crime rate.
I don't know how often the Chicago police get into shootouts -- and how often they lose -- but it doesn't seem that the plan addressesthe underlying problem.
Our welfare system as currently constructed rewards broken families. If you don't live in a regular "husband and wife" arrangement, you can qualify for welfare or more welfare payments.
As a result, to take one example, we've driven the child-born-out-of-wedlock rate in one part of the population from about 15% to about 70% in a few decades. I started to prepare a chart from data I have, but found one instead:
But it's not hispanics, or blacks, or whites, or gays, or poor people, or any other population group in that sense that's really correlated with crime -- it's the large number of children of the families we've incentivised into being. That image above is from this interesting collection of charts on the general topic.
According to the studies presented here (and many others I've seen), race and income do not correlate well with crime statistics; if you divide up the population by family structure instead, the problem becomes obvious. It happens that black families have a much higher percentage of single parent households than do white families -- but single-parent households are equally likely to engender problems regardless of race.
We can fix this, by reforming how welfare works. (Notice the effect in that chart of the small dose of welfare reform in 1994 as part of the "Contract with America".)
It is abundantly clear that the welfare system is causing the problem! But it has become a bloated government industry and is deeply entrenched, sadly, in continuing this syndrome.
Amusingly, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have said, in speeches and papers, that welfare contributes to or causes these problems. But then we have their actual voting records...
===|==============/ Level Head
I don't know how often the Chicago police get into shootouts -- and how often they lose -- but it doesn't seem that the plan addressesthe underlying problem.
Our welfare system as currently constructed rewards broken families. If you don't live in a regular "husband and wife" arrangement, you can qualify for welfare or more welfare payments.
As a result, to take one example, we've driven the child-born-out-of-wedlock rate in one part of the population from about 15% to about 70% in a few decades. I started to prepare a chart from data I have, but found one instead:
But it's not hispanics, or blacks, or whites, or gays, or poor people, or any other population group in that sense that's really correlated with crime -- it's the large number of children of the families we've incentivised into being. That image above is from this interesting collection of charts on the general topic.
According to the studies presented here (and many others I've seen), race and income do not correlate well with crime statistics; if you divide up the population by family structure instead, the problem becomes obvious. It happens that black families have a much higher percentage of single parent households than do white families -- but single-parent households are equally likely to engender problems regardless of race.
We can fix this, by reforming how welfare works. (Notice the effect in that chart of the small dose of welfare reform in 1994 as part of the "Contract with America".)
It is abundantly clear that the welfare system is causing the problem! But it has become a bloated government industry and is deeply entrenched, sadly, in continuing this syndrome.
Amusingly, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have said, in speeches and papers, that welfare contributes to or causes these problems. But then we have their actual voting records...
===|==============/ Level Head