That's what U Penn law professor Amy Wax says in today's Los Angeles Times.

Under the 1996 federal law, states can offer generous "income disregards" (which allow women to keep earnings while receiving some aid) as well as an array of in-kind and earmarked benefits and refundable tax credits. All this government help is designed to make up the difference between what a person can earn on her own and what is needed to get by. In the case of single-mother families, such a gap is virtually certain to exist. As scholar Charles Murray stated long ago, the mother-child family is not, and will never be, a viable economic unit. A single parent must play two roles — caring for children and earning a living — that wives and husbands traditionally assumed together. As a result, most such families end up poor.

....As in the past, a woman can still command public assistance simply by choosing to have a child she knows she cannot support. Similarly, a man can qualify his child for public aid simply by abandoning it. Under the 1996 law, the public — including those people who avoid government handouts at great personal sacrifice — are still left paying for others' failures. In this respect, welfare reform changes little. The old social rules that once defined out-of-wedlock childbearing as irresponsible — and paternal abandonment as exploitative — are gone, and the change has been cheered on by some left-wing thinkers, who attack the very foundations of the old rules. Academics such as Cass Sunstein, Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel have repeatedly assured us that self-reliance is a cruel hoax. According to these scholars, the economy cannot operate without the government, and we all lean on each other. Taken to its logical conclusion, their argument is that there is no coherent difference between private property and collective resources. Because no one is entitled to anything, what individuals possess is nothing more than what government allows them to keep. There can thus be no objection to taxing hard-won earnings and transferring them to others.

Feminists add their voices by asserting that all dependencies are alike, so living on welfare is no worse than relying on a husband's support. And anyway, because child care is a form of work as worthy as any other, they argue, the government should pay single moms to care for their own kids. Finally, left-leaning economists tell us that tax breaks of any kind — including those for the rich and for corporations — are just another form of welfare. So in the end, everyone's on the dole.....Once the old distinctions collapse and the value of self-reliance goes out the window, all bets are off and moral vertigo sets in.

Sometimes it's the mom who's the rolling stone, but far more often it's the dad. The "missing dad" affliction undeniably affects black children "disproportionately."

If welfare reform isn't working, neither is birth control. Teenage pregnancy rates are down, but too many young black women are letting themselves get pregnant with no commitment from fathers. As Wax notes, government still fills the gap. These young, under-educated moms then raise children who, lacking a father, are too often destined to repeat the cycle themselves. At the same time, there's a growing cadre of upwardly mobile professional black women who define self-worth through education and professional achievement, and refuse to settle for a "playa." It's just too bad more of them won't have a chance to breed.

Interracial marriages are one way out for black women. Church-based and non-profit campaigns to encourage responsible black fatherhood are well-intentioned and effective to a degree. It's culture that's the cancer. Misogynistic rap CDs and videos aren't going away.There are too many culturally-slumming young white male consumers of the genre and too many playas "keeping it real" for that to happen. But white-controlled media - including many urban daily newspapers, need to stop qeausily validating gangsta and ho narratives - turning resources to validating black fatherhood, two-parent black families and black professional and educational achievement. Daily newspaper coverage of troubled urban school districts, such as in my hometown of Seattle, needs to get away from the evavise racial "disproportionality" shtick and musty NAACP race-baiting, and instead squarely pin responsibility for academic failure where it belongs: on parents.

TECHNORATI TAGS: WELFARE REFORM, SINGLE PARENT FAMILIES, POVERTY, EDUCATION, BLACK WOMEN, BLACK MEN

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at October 23, 2006 09:08 AM

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