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Critics of Rep. Paul Ryans remarks about cultural factors in the persistence of poverty are simultaneously shrill and boring. Their predictable minuet of synthetic indignation demonstrates how little liberals have learned about poverty or changed their rhetorical repertoire in the last 49 years.

Ryan spoke of a tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, adding: Theres a real culture problem here.

This brought down upon Ryan the usual acid rain of accusations racism, blaming the victims, etc. He had sauntered into the minefield that a more experienced Daniel Patrick Moynihan a liberal scholar who knew the taboos of his tribe had tiptoed into five years before Ryan was born.

A year from now, there surely will be conferences marking the 50th anniversary of what is now known as the Moynihan Report, a k a The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. In March 1965, Moynihan, then 37 and assistant secretary of labor, wrote that the center of the tangle of pathology in inner cities this was five months before the Watts riots was the fact that 23.6% of black children were born to single women, compared to just 3.07% of white children.

He was accused of racism, blaming the victims, etc.

Forty-nine years later, 41% of all American children are born out of wedlock; almost half of all first births are to unmarried women, as are 54% and 72% of all Hispanic and black births, respectively. Is there anyone not blinkered by ideology or invincibly ignorant of social science who disagrees with this:

The family is the primary transmitter of social capital the values and character traits that enable people to seize opportunities. Family structure is a primary predictor of an individuals life chances, and family disintegration is the principal cause of the intergenerational transmission of poverty.

In the 1960s, as the civil rights movement dismantled barriers to opportunity, there began a social regression driven by the explosive growth of the number of children in single-parent families. This meant a continually renewed cohort of adolescent males from homes without fathers; this produced turbulent neighborhoods and schools where the task of maintaining discipline eclipsed that of instruction.

In the mid-1960s, Moynihan noted something ominous that came to be called Moynihans scissors. Two lines on a graph crossed, replicating a scissors blades. The descending line depicted the decline in the minority then overwhelmingly black male unemployment rate. The ascending line depicted the simultaneous rise of new welfare cases.

The broken correlation of improvements in employment and decreased welfare dependency was not just bewildering, it was frightening.

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Liberals cant wrap heads around cultural causes of poverty