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By The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal - The progressive hits keep coming from the Biden Administration, and the latest is the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan introduced in broad strokes on Wednesday. It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it. Read More
By William P. Barr - Progressives can’t solve the problem because they won’t abandon the practices that cause it. The violent crime surge was preventable. It was caused by progressive politicians reverting to the same reckless revolving-door policies that during the 1960s and ’70s produced the greatest tsunami of violent crime in American history. We reversed that earlier crime wave with the tough anticrime measures adopted during the Reagan-Bush era. We can stop this one as well. Studies have repeatedly shown that most predatory crime is committed by a small, hard-core group of habitual offenders. They are a tiny fraction…
By Allysia Finley - Researchers gave cash to low-income people. It led them to spend more and work less. Did pandemic stimulus payments harm lower-income Americans? That’s the implication of a new study by social scientists at Harvard and the University of Exeter. Liberals argue that no-strings-attached handouts encourage better financial decisions and healthier lifestyles. The theory is that low-income folks become more future-oriented if they’re less stressed about making ends meet. The Harvard study put this hypothesis to the test and found the opposite. Read More
By Phil Gramm and John Early - The Census Bureau fails to count two-thirds of all government transfer payments to households in the income numbers it uses to calculate not only poverty levels but also income inequality and income growth. In addition to not counting refundable tax credits, which are paid by checks from the U.S. Treasury, the official Census Bureau measure doesn’t count food stamps, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, rent subsidies, energy subsidies and health-insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. In total, benefits provided in more than 100 other federal, state and local transfer payments aren’t…
By Steven Malanga - As a New Yorker, Siegel had witnessed the city’s rapid deterioration under … a vast expansion of crime and social disorder. Siegel and other conservative intellectuals at the Manhattan Institute argued that the sharp rise in urban chaos wasn’t inevitable or irreversible…In fact, disorder was a choice. By cutting police and sanitation budgets to boost welfare spending, …The worse things got, the more the city invested in addressing the supposed underlying causes of crime rather than re-establishing order. Siegel … called this “rewarding failure.” … Read More
By Jason L. Riley - A 2021 paper published by the University of Chicago’s Journal of Law and Economics put annual spending on policing and corrections at about $250 billion. Meanwhile, a study released the same year by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation “conservatively estimated” that the yearly cost of personal and property crimes in the U.S. is $2.6 trillion. By that comparison, it’s hard to conclude that we spend too much money on law enforcement. What’s even harder is putting a price on the psychic burden of crime—the constant fear that you or a loved one will…
By Jason L. Riley - The Giuliani administration won wide praise for making the city safe again, but William Bratton, the New York City police commissioner in the mid-1990s, told filmmakers that the dramatic reduction in crime stemmed from the ability of police to focus on maintaining order and not simply on capturing criminals after the fact. “In the 1970s and ’80s, police moved away from dealing with disorder on the streets and instead focused on responding to crime,” he said. “We didn’t deal with quality-of-life crime at all.” Most people didn’t want cops off the street and sitting in their…
By Jason L. Riley - George Gilder wrote about the importance of the nuclear family in “Sexual Suicide” (1973) and “Men and Marriage” (1986). Charles Murray, who had touched on it in his landmark study, “Losing Ground” (1984), made similar arguments in “Coming Apart” (2012). In 1994 David Blankenhorn published “Fatherless America,” and 1996 brought David Popenoe’s “Life Without Father: Compelling New Evidence That Fatherhood and Marriage Are Indispensable for the Good of Children and Society.” Other books that cover the same ground as Ms. Kearney include Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s “The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially”; James Q. Wilson’s…
By Robert Doar and Matt Weidinger - Universal basic income is about to arrive in America. Congressional Democrats’ $1.9 trillion stimulus bill provides for no-strings attached checks, limited only to parents of children under 18. This UBI for parents is billed as pandemic relief, but its real purpose is to put a stake in the heart of work-based welfare reform. Read More