If you do these four things, it's almost impossible to remain poor ...

1.Finish high school,

2.Get a job,

3.Get married, and

4.Don’t have children until you get married.

Those who do these things have only a 2 percent probability of remaining in poverty and a 75 percent probability of joining the middle class.

This is like saying you can go to heaven if you just don’t sin. The problem is that people do. The right seems to just scream back “Don’t sin!” The truth is, people do. What are we going to do about that? Cuz screaming at people to just change their behavior isn’t working as much as government subsidies from the left aren’t working.

It is good to know that these things correlate with doing well in life. (That’s not necessarily obvious. For example, some people think that abolishing the nuclear family will free of us cultural encumbrances and make us all happier.) Thus, they can be useful benchmarks for measuring human flourishing. When we see that certain demographics of society aren’t doing these things that tend toward flourishing, it can perhaps lead us to consider why that is the case. Given the correlations, it is clearly not the case that some people are just “choosing” against these things. External factors are exerting significant pressure.

So, it is wrong to look at those correlations as a plan of action or a set of imperatives (“Be Cool… Stay in School!”). To the extent that the article portrays them that way, with its self-help rhetoric, I think it is silly.

Maybe behind WSJ paywall:

The ‘Progressive’ War on Kids - Milwaukee would rather lose money than sell to a private school.

The longest line in the U.S. isn’t outside a Super Bowl stadium. It’s black parents lining up for a chance to get their kids into a charter school or a school choice program. The lines form in places as varied as New York City, New Orleans, Washington, D.C. and Milwaukee. Only one thing is guaranteed: opposition, whether it’s New York’s new “progressive” mayor Bill de Blasio or the Justice Department leaning on Louisiana’s voucher program. Today we’ll visit Milwaukee. St. Marcus Lutheran, one of Milwaukee’s successful independent schools, tried to buy a vacant former public school on the city’s north side. The public school system said—get lost. The 130-year old St. Marcus has become a much-sought school for kids in Milwaukee’s Parental Choice Program, thanks to a graduation rate of over 90%, compared to 65% at Milwaukee Public Schools. The school currently enrolls some 730 students grades K-8, and has hundreds more on the waiting list. Ninety-percent are black and 89% are low income. In 2013, St. Marcus made a bid on the nearby Malcolm X school building, vacant for six years. The school offered $1.25 million for the vacant building and pledged another $5 million to $7 million toward improvements. But rather than accept the offer that would have expanded a successful school, the public school district opted to sell the building to developers at a loss. … According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, the action is part of a strategy by the Milwaukee public schools to prevent school-choice and charter school operators from getting vacant school buildings for expansion. The school district has at least 15 former schools standing empty because of the union’s fear that selling them would draw more kids from failing public schools. To prevent the school buildings from falling into other hands, the school system has attached deed restrictions to future sales of vacant school buildings, specifying that the buildings may never be sold for a “competing use.” Competing use, the document goes on to say, is “use by any school operating under Wis. Stat 119.23,” that is, the city’s parental choice program, or to any other school that could have the effect of “diminishing Pupil Enrollment as compared to Pupil Enrollment in the immediately preceding School Year.” Public school board President Michael Bonds said in 2011 that letting private education success stories flourish would be like “asking the Coca-Cola company to turn over its facilities to Pepsi.” He flatters himself. Unlike the soda wars, the education battle in Wisconsin is between a failing union monopoly and schools that are actually educating children. If the Milwaukee public schools think that preferential real-estate regulations are the definition of competition, it’s no wonder they’re failing the kids.

The rise of the welfare state in the 1960s contributed greatly to the demise of the black family as a stable institution.

The most devastating by-product of the mushrooming welfare state was the corrosive effect it had (along with powerful cultural phenomena such as the feminist and Black Power movements) on American family life, particularly in the black community.
 As provisions in welfare laws offered ever-increasing economic incentives for shunning marriage and avoiding the formation of two-parent families, illegitimacy rates rose dramatically. For the next few decades, means-tested welfare programs such as food stamps, public housing, Medicaid, day care, and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families penalized marriage. A mother generally received far more money from welfare if she was single rather than married. Once she took a husband, her benefits were instantly reduced by roughly 10 to 20 percent.

As an inner-city missionary, I struggle with this article, not because of its truth, but because I work with many urban young men that have no father, or any other male figures in their family that are modeling these four things. Finishing high school, working, getting married, and having kids before one gets married cannot be effectively taught unless it is modeled. Also, all of these men (when they were younger) went to schools that were labeled drop-out factories by John Hopkins university. The school system required that their teachers pass every student to the next grade, whether they were ready or not. I wonder how easy it would for the author to make these behavior choices if he had no one to model it to him.

[Jason Janz]

1.Finish high school,

2.Get a job,

3.Get married, and

4.Don’t have children until you get married.

Those who do these things have only a 2 percent probability of remaining in poverty and a 75 percent probability of joining the middle class.

This is like saying you can go to heaven if you just don’t sin. The problem is that people do. The right seems to just scream back “Don’t sin!” The truth is, people do. What are we going to do about that? Cuz screaming at people to just change their behavior isn’t working as much as government subsidies from the left aren’t working.

So much of this is a result of just plain bad decisions. The dissolution of the family in low income areas is such a huge factor for young people and just perpetuates the process. Even living in poverty doesn’t have to be bad. My dad lives solely on Social Security, lives comfortably, has enough money to purchase a Corvette and still has money to put away in savings, and he doesn’t have a paid off house or anything, just rents like everyone else does. Giving more and more income isn’t the answer. My dad’s saying has always been, “People spend money on things that they want to spend money on!”

It is a mess though. I live in an impoverished area, and I constantly have poor people trying to bum money off of me for cigarettes and alcohol, while homeless. I stand in line while woman are purchasing snacks and candy with their EBT cards, I see the scores of children running around with no father. Many of these kids start out in a reality that is built on poor decision making and they have never seen proper decision making modeled or displayed in their lives. Imagine, if for 18 years, you had never once seen a nuclear family operate. How at the age of 19 do you throw out those elements that crafted you and revert to an individual who can put together a family. These kids have the entire world stacked against them by the age of 18, that it is almost impossible to escape. Not because it is physically impossible to change, but because they have no concept to change their reality. A few do escape and make it out and we parade those around as model citizens to appease our guilt. Since I live among it, it can be overwhelming, but the only thing I can drive home is to raise my family up in such a way as to provide them all of the opportunities to make the right decisions.

Detroit proper is at an 85% illegitimacy rate. The churches in Detroit have for the most part been bought and paid for by the Democratic party and no longer speak out on the real moral issues of their own community. There are some notable exceptions such as “Joshua’s Trail”. Nationally, the illegitimacy rate is near 75% for the black community, 50% for the Hispanic community, and 40% for the Caucasian community. These numbers are devastating and partly responsible for much of the poverty in the USA. I grew up on the Southside of Chicago. Even though we were considered poor, the intact family did much to avoid the devastating effects of poverty and the welfare state.

Wow Mike those numbers are incredible.