When a politician is worried about your kids, you should be worried about your rights and freedoms. Not only for your own sake but for your kids too!
I do believe we should allow for a lot more nuance in our political opinions and avoid most statements that can be made in the constraints of a short comment on social media.
What rights and freedoms should I worry about when a politician wants to make sure my child is fed by supporting food stamp programs or free hot lunches at school?
The idea that any attempt to help a child is inherently suspect honestly says something distrubing about your own worldview. You can't imagine someone genuinely caring for a child that isn't there own?
The “Welfare State” is nothing but modern share cropping from the party of Jim Crow.
That it destroyed black families (among others) is merely happenstance rather than intentional racism — stemming from the overall failure of technocratic managerialism.
Embellished: marriage rates are 33.8% for Black women and 37.8% for Black men, neither of which I would round to 25%.
Uncorrelated: marriage rates dropped sharply among people of all single races on the Census except for Asians. It has dropped more sharply for Black respondents, but anything disproportionately affecting the lower and middle economic classes would disproportionately affect Black families.
Show me some data, and not outdated welfare policies from the 1980s, that supports the "social engineers" causal narrative better than plain deindustrialization. Or deindustrialization combined with good old American racism and mass incarceration. I am willing to change my position on this.
1: https://usafacts.org/articles/state-relationships-marriages-...
You can see the collapse of black marriages started earlier and is steeper than other demographics — though eventually white marriages enter a similar decline, along with Hispanic marriages. (Asians hold roughly equal.)
This strongly suggests the effect is correlated with poverty and not race — especially with the white effect starting during the collapse of US manufacturing.
But if we agree the correlation is with poverty you haven't refuted my point — as welfare is a strong incentive structure on those experiencing poverty. That chart is perfectly consistent with what I said.
So your criticism is wrong at two levels:
- you didn’t even discuss the correct time period
- you showed data consistent with my claim
I just said the opposite. I can imagine many people genuinely caring for a child that isn’t their own.
I am skeptical when a politician who does not know my children claims to care about them.
To borrow an LLMism: It’s not cynicism, it’s the reality of history. We the people have been duped many times over. Caveat Emptor.
Sure, but limited to "family and friends". Following that up with "who does not know my children" indicates you clearly view empathy as extending to merely one's personal relationships and you seemingly can't imagine caring for a stranger's child. I'll grant you cyncism is not the correct description of that worldview, but I stick by the general label of disturbing.
If you’d stop straw-manning me for a moment you might notice you still misunderstand my point.
I work with those politicians. They have kids too and they are just as susceptible to media/propaganda/fearmongering as you are. However, unlike you and I, they can do something (usually wrong) about it.