Poverty and crime: Obama ignores the culprit
On Monday, President Obama went to Camden, N.J., to talk about poverty, crime and upward mobility. He made news for his announcement that he was banning the sale of some military equipment to local police departments, a welcome change. He should have made news for leaving unmentioned the single largest contributor to poverty and economic immobility.
First, on policing, Obama made good points. He highlighted Camden’s remarkable drop in crime, which occurred after an increase in officers and a switch to community policing.
As Camden County Police Chief Scott Thomson said after the speech, “This is not about a reduction in crime, it’s about trust.”
Manchester Police Chief David Mara made the same point in an interview with this newspaper on Sunday.
Then Obama connected crime to poverty.
“We can’t ask the police to contain and control problems that the rest of us aren’t willing to face or do anything about,” Obama said.
“If we as a society don’t do more to expand opportunity to everybody who’s willing to work for it, then we’ll end up seeing conflicts between law enforcement and residents. If we as a society aren’t willing to deal honestly with issue of race, then we can’t just expect police departments to solve these problems.”
We, as a society, he said.
Children “shouldn’t have to go through superhuman efforts just to be able to stay in school and go to college and achieve their promise. That should be the norm. That should be standard. And if it isn’t, we’re not doing something right. We as a society are not doing something right if it isn’t.”
We, as a society, again.
About children, he asked, “Do they feel cared for by their community... Do they feel like the country is making an investment in them?”
More government investment, he said, would lead to more children rising from poverty. But it will not.
“The fraction of children living in single-parent households is the strongest correlate of upward income mobility,” concluded a study last year by the Harvard University Equality of Opportunity Project. That is, family breakdown is the biggest driver of income inequality.
Obama, though, mentioned families only in passing. Some kids “aren’t going to be lucky enough to have the structures at home that they need — in which case then, we all have to pick up the slack,” he said.
Not once did he call out parents for abandoning their children, men and women for abandoning each other. The fundamental building block of stable societies merited nary a mention in a major speech about creating a stable society.
Instead of calling out bad parents, Obama pressed for more social spending, preparing another generation for long-term poverty and dependency.
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