Posted on 02/16/2012 6:02:01 AM PST by blam
The Trashing Of The White Working Class
February 15, 2012
By Russ Winter
There is a revealing book by Charles Murray called Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010″ . This has a big focus on what nobody really wants to talk about, the white American working class. Santorum’s preaching about social values has merits but he panders and makes it mostly about black people or illegal immigrants. And so does Gingrich. Obama is an enabler. This is just one more elephant in the room that is being politically ignored: the ghettoization of the white working class. I am not even sure the 99% term really defines this one.
In the book the white working class is defined: no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist. Murray calls this community Fishtown. People who qualify for Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. Some of this data is from 2008, it is worse now, see food stamps chart below.
-In 1960, an extremely high proportions of whites in Fishtown were married— 84% in Fishtown, now just 48%.
- In 1960, just 2% of all white births were non-marital. In 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education—women, that is, with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital.
- Men 30-49, not available for work—they are “out of the labor force.” That percentage went from a low of 3% in 1968 to 12% in 2008. 10% worked fewer than 40 hours a week in 1960, a figure that grew to 20% by 2008.
-Fishtown, today has a violent crime rate that is 4.7 times the 1960 rate.
-”De facto secular” is someone who either professes no religion at all or who attends a worship service no more than once a year. For the early GSS surveys conducted from 1972 to 1976, 38% of Fishtown fell into that category, now 59%.
According to Murray, the best thing that the educated upper class can do to provide that reinforcement is to drop its condescending “nonjudgmentalism.” Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.
This is hard hitting stuff although I DO NOT AT ALL AGREE with this strange Murray observation: “Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won’t make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won’t make a difference.
If there is a silver lining for the less educated working class, it is that they haven’t incurred a trillion plus in student loans to feed the “so called education” beast.
All Bam-Bam wants is the corporations’ money and the deadbeats’ votes.
All part of the larger issue: the social fabric of America is rapidly coming unraveled, with all the historically verifiable, attendant negative trends - and consequences.
There is really a simple formula for success that I pounded into my kids’ heads a long time ago and still tell them. In order to be successful and prosperous, you have to sequence your life in this order:
1. Education
2. Job/career
3. Marriage
4. Home
5. Kids
If you put any of them, especially the kids, out of this sequence you are screwed.
There is so much common sense in this that it’s self-evident. But starting with the blacks, and now as this article shows, extending to the whites, people have been lied to and told they don’t have to do it this way any more. But the consequences are still the same. The Rules Have Not Changed.
I do. Soaking the rich in order to make wards of the state out of the lower classes is pure evil.
More scholarships for the children of the increasingly corrupted lower class will not help them. It will only increase Leftist indoctrination levels and turn morally corrupt adolescents into morally corrupt adult Leftists. And the cycle repeats.
I don’t need a man;I have my Uncle Sammie!
As an employer of “Fishtown” men, it’s clear that their demographic segment is headed for the toilet bowl. They live like teenagers; spend all of their paychecks in a week, drink a lot, have numerous kids on child support, and float from one job to the next.
the scholarships are not for the kids, the scholarships are for the educators.
The whole educational establishment is for the educators....... not for children
Gee, do you think outsourcing our industrial base to the third world and communist countries had anything to do with it? How about the open border? How does a teen get started if the brown wave soaks up all the lower wrung jobs? Gardening and dish washing were never meant to be careers.
Stop complaining and pay your taxes, you white racist/sexist/homophobe/misogynistic Tea Partier, you!
What I see around me is a steadily declining white working class and a continually growing white trash class which has all of the same problems which have been plaguing the black community for the past half-century.
Dana Milbank wrote an article today chastising the GOP for ignoring “latinos. “Does the GOP care about Latinos?” was the title.
First of all, when you start identifying groups to be appeased, you are venturing outside of the worldview of conservatives generally. All being treated the same is the worldview of conservatives.
But, I would ask “Dana”: Does 0bama care about White Taxpayers?
I worked with “Fishtown” men back in the late 70’s and early 80’s doing commercial construction to pay my way through college. Now I encounter the Fishtown men by representing them in Court. A good portion of the Fishtown men then were “white trash,” drinking from paycheck to paycheck and going through the serial relationships. But there are two things I did notice about them then and compare to the Fishtown men now.
Back then, it appeared that most of them worked. They may not have been bright workers, they may not even have been good workers. You would not have wanted to turn the “means of production” over to them as they would have wound up in the parking lot with a keg of beer and bucket of chicken. But they did work. Today, far too many of them are drinking and drugging not from paycheck to paycheck, but from disability check to disability check. They have no interest in working and once they get that check, they probably will never again rejoin the labor force.
Back then, it was mostly the younger Fishtown men who were most irresponsible. It may have taken some time for the life lessons to be learned, but as they got older, they got more responsible. You would see that they had settled down and were raising families. I sensed that many of them felt they had wasted their younger years. Today, as I stated above, as they age, they are not learning the same lessons and applying them to their lives. They are content to collect disability, and fuel the welfare system with an ever larger crop of bastard children.
It’s just that the welfare state went after the blacks first; they’ve been this way since the mid-1960’s. They started going after the whites about 20 years ago, and have largely succeeded.
White or black, if you fall into the pit, or are born there, there is little hope in getting out. And that is by design.
Child Support payments are the pathway to unmarried parenthood. It is the most blatant example of the government actively encouraging people to become dependent on government welfare.
To echo Brecht’s acidic jibe at the East German regime, every socialist state creates its own ‘new’ people - creatures of the state, as it were.
This includes ‘the masses’, the de-civilized proles, happy to live as so many cattle in government barns, and fed government hay.
It also includes ‘vanguard elements’ of careerist self-seekers eager to trod on the faces of underlings to gain preferment.
Luckily, due to its nonviability as an economic order, socialism can only be a historically temporary condition - no 1000 year reichs!
ART CASHIN: The Unemployed Are Now Going On Disability And It's Costing The Government Billions
The priorities in my family have been, are and always will be:
#1 My God
#2 My family
#3 My job
Soaking the rich encourages the kids to become parasites instead of producers. It sends the wrong signal in so many ways. They don’t even know they’re crippling themselves by reducing their opportunities.
That’s true. Whether we like it or not, most people of any class don’t have the tendency to stray from their cultural norms, and if nobody in Fishtown has useful work they’re eventually going to be useless citizens. The left wants to keep uselessness viable as the alternative is distasteful to them, and if we want to fix it (do I? undecided) we’ll have to come up with a counter-point that doesn’t sound like “conservatives want the poor to die” (according to the media).
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