Barack Obama signing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at the White House
Yeah, about that...the Leftists from Barky on down are all on the same page, yammering about "income inequality" and the destruction of the American Dream by greedy capitalist pigs.
Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has stressed his commitment to data-driven decision-making, not ideology. Similarly, progressives like Krugman have stressed their scientific bona fides, as against the "anti-science" right.
As usual, they've been lying all along; they're driven not by data, but purely by ideology, as their ramming through of Obamacare demonstrates conclusively. And the same is true of their yammering about "income inequality" today. Because if they bothered to look at the data, they'd be forced to admit that "income equality" has little to do with holding down poorer Americans; it's almost entirely down to the policies that they've enacted over the past five decades or so.
What are the factors preventing poor children from getting ahead? An important new Harvard study that looks at the best community data on mobility in America – released this past weekend – suggests a cause that progressives may find discomforting, especially if they are interested in reviving the American Dream for the 21st century.
Uh-oh; here comes trouble: the top predictor for failure is...wait for it...being raised in a single-parent household. Remember when the Left was puking all over Dan Quayle for having the idiotic audacity to claim that television's "Murphy Brown"'s decision to have a kid on her own was a bad thing? Oh, the hooting and hollering went on for years!
And yet...he was right. The evidence is stronger than any supposed "proof" of Mann-made global warming: single-parent families result in dramatically lower rates of upward mobility, and it is entirely on the Left - with their policies encouraging married people to split up and their spittle directed at the Dan Quayles of the country, who dare to suggest that single-parent families aren't anything to be proud of - that has produced this unassailable demographic truth. Moreover, they're doubling down on the strategy with Obamacare, which is actually designed to save couples money if they divorce.
In fact, there are four strong predictors for failure - all of which have been enthusiastically supported by Leftists for years - before we ever get to the fifth predictor, which is by far the weakest. That, of course, would be the one thing that they're yammering about: income inequality. Yet fixing any or all of the prior indicators renders the dreaded "income inequality" issue moot.
But they don't wanna talk about that.
