Spot on and well written - my favorite excerpt.... is Nicholas Kristoff stupid or devious?? Bold Emphasis Mine.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof anticipated Obama’s speech with his own leap from the shootings into liberal bromides. America’s greatest shame in 2015 is not the persistence of the Confederate flag in the South, Kristof wrote, but the fact that “almost two-thirds of black children grow up in low-income families.” Kristof saw this statistic as a manifestation of racism: “The larger national disgrace,” he said, is that “so many children still don’t have an equal shot at life because of the color of their skin.” (Sigh, here we go again....)
Skin color has nothing to do with it. The overwhelming reason why children grow up in poverty “in 2015” is that they are being raised by single parents. Children with no father at home are between four and five times more likely to be poor as the children of married parents, whether they are black or white. But with 72 percent of black children born to single mothers — nearly three times the white out-of-wedlock birthrate — blacks’ higher poverty level is inevitable.
The formula for escaping poverty as an adult also has nothing to do with race: Graduate from high school, wait until you are married to have children, and work full-time. Whites who eschew those bourgeois behaviors are as likely to be poor as blacks who eschew them. Only 2 percent of individuals who follow those rules are in poverty, according to Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution; 72 percent of those who follow them earn at least $55,000 a year. The American poverty rate would be cut by 70 percent if the same percentage of Americans engaged in those responsible behaviors as did in 1970, regardless of race.
