It's a Cultural Battle not an Economic one

Fire of Liberty

George Will has a good column on why there is an overabundance of poverty in the inner city, namely New Orleans. Now you have people like Senator Obama, who appeared on ABC News' This Week, kept on noting that the US government has let down the poor people in New Orleans because they didn't care about them. That's pretty funny because Will notes that since January 1964 when President Johnson launched the federal government's "War on Poverty," this nation has poured some $6.6 trillion into anti-poverty programs with little result. Though Senator Obama can continue to spout out remarks about spending more money on the poor to pull them out of their depravity he fails to realize that the problem is a culture/social problem rather than an economic problem. Here's a sample of Will's argument:

Liberalism's post-Katrina fearlessness in discovering the obvious — if an inner city is inundated, the victims will be disproportionately minorities — stopped short of indelicately noting how many of the victims were women with children but not husbands. Because it was released during the post-Katrina debacle, scant attention was paid to the National Center for Health Statistics' report that in 2003, 34.6 percent of all American births were to unmarried women. The percentage among African American women was 68.2.

Given that most African Americans are middle class and almost half live outside central cities, and that 76 percent of all births to Louisiana African Americans were to unmarried women, it is a safe surmise that more than 80 percent of African American births in inner-city New Orleans — as in some other inner cities — were to women without husbands. That translates into a large and constantly renewed cohort of lightly parented adolescent males, and that translates into chaos in neighborhoods and schools, come rain or come shine.

What the Senator should be focusing on is the decline of the culture of the folks in the inner city and as a whole in which people find it ok to have children out of wedlock, drop out of high school, turn towards crime and the outright refusal to seek a job because they prefer the dole. Until leaders like Senator Obama take a long hard look at the cultural decline in these regions, there will be a continued decline in the inner city. Maybe he should read Nathan Glazer's Beyond the Melting Pot, Charles Murray's Losing Ground, as well as Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion to get a better understanding of what it takes to tackle these problems in the inner city. Thanks to George Will for bringing this observation to light.

Also check out these pieces here and here to learn more.