ON RACE AND INCOME INEQUALITY

No, this isn't a racist rant, but as Eric Holder says, "We need to have a basic race discussion." 

Okay Eric, here's some facts.

New Study Raises Questions, Sheds Light on Race and Income Inequality
PAUL MIRENGOFF, powerline

The Washington Post reports on a study comparing black and white incomes. The study found that virtually nowhere in the United States do black boys grow up to earn incomes equivalent to white boys raised in the same neighborhoods by parents with comparable wealth and education levels. The disparity holds true even for black boys raised in the wealthiest of families, who grew up on the same block in the same affluent community and attended the same school as their white counterparts.

What’s the explanation? My first thought was that it might lie in differences in family structure. Perhaps, across all income levels, young black men grow up in less stable families.

It’s true that, in general, young black men labor under this disadvantage. But as I read the study, family structure does not explain differences in black and white incomes among those raised in families with comparable income in comparable neighborhoods. The authors state:

Black children are much more likely to grow up in single parent households with less wealth and parents with lower levels of education — all factors that have received attention as potential explanations for black-white disparities. 

But when we compare the outcomes of black and white men who grow up in two-parent families with similar levels of income, wealth, and education, we continue to find that the black men still have substantially lower incomes in adulthood. Hence, differences in these family characteristics play a limited role in explaining the gap.

Is the gap, then, explained by racism? Perhaps, but two clues suggest otherwise.
First, the Black-White income gap observed by the study exists only for men. Controlling for the income of parents and the neighborhood in which children are raised eliminates any income disparity between white and black women. If anything, black women apparently make out slightly better than their white counterparts.

Does white racism extend only to black males. It’s possible, I suppose. But someone should explain why that’s the case. I always figured that if you’re anti-black, you’re anti-black regardless of gender. Certainly, women were not exempt from Jim Crow laws.

Second, the study found that, black males are more likely to be incarcerated and less likely to attend college than their white counterparts from families of similar income level. Herein lies the answer, I think. Black boys/men are faring worse with regard to income than similarly situated white boys/men because of the decisions they make — e.g., decisions about whether to engage in crime and whether to attend college.

Leftists contend that blacks are incarcerated at higher rates than whites because of racism in the criminal justice system. I don’t believe this. But let’s assume it’s true and focus on the fact, established by the survey, that black boys are less likely to attend college than white boys from the same background.

Is this because of racism? Surely not. Colleges aren’t discriminating against blacks in admissions. To the contrary, most colleges are discriminating in favor of blacks, via race-based preferences that enable blacks to obtain admission with significantly worse credentials — grades and especially test scores — than whites.

And keep in mind that black women are doing fine compared to their white counterparts — both as to income and college admission. Are we supposed to believe that college admissions officials are discriminating against black men but not black women? The notion is ridiculous.

Are black boys being knocked or routed off the college track earlier in the process, as compared to white boys from similar circumstances? This notion too seems implausible.

Who is doing the knocking and how are they accomplishing it? Are racist guidance counselors discouraging black boys, but not black girls, from taking college track courses and/or from applying for college? Are racist teachers giving bad grades to black boy, but not black girls, for no good reason? Are they suspending them without good cause?

Few will have consumed enough identity politics Kool-Aid to believe that this is what’s going on. The logical explanation for the disparities observed in the study is that, across all income lines, young black males, to a disproportionate extent, are behaving in ways that do not optimize their future earnings.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/04/new-study-raises-questions-sheds-light-on-race-and-income-inequality.php

THE GREAT EARTH DAY YAWN

THE GREAT EARTH DAY YAWN
Steven Hayward, Powerline

Wait—yesterday was Earth Day! I must have yawned right through it. Like most Americans, if you go by the surveys showing increasing public indifference toward environmentalism.

I used to make a big deal out of Earth Day, pointing out for years that the data in rich countries showed an almost unbroken record of significant environmental improvement is just about every major category. This would send environmentalists into howls of outrage, because good news is bad news for Crisis Entrepreneurs.TM A good example of the broken (plastic!) record of environmentalism comes to us this morning courtesy of the usually half-sober folks at Nature magazine:

Well duh. Every adverse condition hits poorer countries first, BECAUSE THEY’RE POOR! I guess the Nature editors have never heard the old joke about how the New York Times would cover the imminent end of the world: “World to End Tomorrow: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit.” Maybe they have heard it, and don’t get it, which is entirely typical of people deprived of a sense of humor because of their fanaticism.

Just a hunch here, but if you ask people in poor countries what they’d most like to see the world emphasize right now—rich countries cutting their carbon emissions, or helping poor countries get rich—I’m pretty sure I know which option they’d choose. Because, based on the revealed preferences of what kind of energy systems poor countries are building—hint: a lot of it rhymes with “goal”—tell us the answer pretty clearly. Or ask yourself this question: which country is more able to handle any natural disaster from whatever cause: Singapore, or next-door Malaysia? This is the reason India has consistently said they want to get rich first before signing on to any future energy constraints.

Beyond the fading issue of climate change, the entire story arc of environmental disaster from the first Earth Day in 1970 has just about run its course. Increasingly you see more and more evidence of the spreading recognition of the dominance of human progress in all areas, whether it is Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now, or Charles Mann’s new book The Wizard and the Prophet (about how Norman Borlaug routed Paul Ehrlich in the real world), or the copious data work of Max Roser’s terrific data analysis project at Oxford University, Our World in Data, or a similar efforts housed at the Cato Institute, HumanProgress.org, just to name a few.

But perhaps my favorite effort at the moment is the posthumously published book just out from Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Rosling, who passed away last year at the too early age of 68, was called “the Jedi master of data” for his inventive ways of explaining trends. He founded the indispensable website called Gapminder (check it out—it makes data analysis fun!) A main reason for doing the book is that Rosling notes that even world leaders labor under huge misconceptions about the true state of humanity. “And this leads to terrible decisions. . . How is it possible that so many people are getting so many things so wrong?”

This five-minute video shows his kids explaining the project, and includes a couple of short explanations from the late Hans Rosling:

And here’s one of his classics—200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 minutes:

https://youtu.be/8-kbZiCX7h4

https://youtu.be/jbkSRLYSojo

The Ideology of Illegal Immigration

The Ideology of Illegal Immigration
Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

Gang members next door and dead dogs dumped in your yard? Don’t complain, or you’ll be called racist.

llegal immigration has become so deeply embedded for so long within contemporary power politics, demography, and cultural change, so charged with accusations of racism, nativism, and xenophobia, that we have forgotten its intrinsic contradictions.

We saw a glimpse of reality with the recent “caravan” of Central Americans. With a strong wink and nod from their Mexican hosts, the travelers assumed an intrinsic right to march northward into the United States. Had they done so, they would have confirmed the impression, advanced during the last administration, that the border is porous and that a sovereign United States and its citizenry have scant legal right to secure it.

How did we get to such a point of absurdity?

The ideology of illegal immigration rests on certain illogical assumptions that must not be questioned. Immigration exactly is one-way. But why exactly do we simply accept that without inquiry? What is it about a free-market, constitutional, transparent, and law-abiding America that draws in millions desperate to abandon their homes in otherwise naturally rich landscapes in Mexico and Central America?

In the absence of intellectual honesty about the need for political and economic reform in Latin America, mythologies can abound. Millions are desperate to enter a country antithetical to the protocols of their own. They are even more desperate to stay here — even as many mask that paradox by expressing ethnic and cultural chauvinism, along with anger at their hosts. Witness the signs, flags, and symbols of many open-borders, anti-immigration-enforcement rallies. Apparently, nations that create conditions that drive out their own can be the objects of romance, but only at a safe distance.

The ethos of the Mexican government has become surreal. Its racist and imperial classes welcome the flight of 10 percent of its indigenous population. It assumes that the United States cannot, must not, adopt immigration laws similar to its own. Driving out one’s own people apparently vents social tensions in lieu of reform, and the government is thereby exempted from accountability for its utter failures. About $30 billion arrive in return as remittances, many of these transferences subsidized by American social services and entitlements.

To hide the asymmetry, Mexico becomes accusatory, playing the same role that China does with trade. The aggressive party is always the victimized. Mexico constantly warns us that an anti-American, left-wing presidential candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, may soon be elected.

But what exactly would the feisty Obrador do in anger: Punish the U.S. by closing the southern border, unilaterally quit NAFTA, accommodate the repatriation of 12 million of its citizens, build a wall of his own, forbid the emigration of the impoverished of Oaxaca, expel U.S. companies and investments, cut off the reception of billions of dollars in American remittances, drive out U.S. citizens, or demand the extradition of its own citizens now in American jails and prisons? And what would be the U.S. reaction to such “punitive” measures?
Promises, promises?

The illegal-immigration project will ultimately fail because although its politics are transparent, its practice is incoherent, and chaos is therefore its only possible end. With the exception of an ailing European Union, no other country in the world — certainly not Mexico or China — would allow its open borders to become as politically weaponized as America’s. Yet no other nation is so faulted as illiberal as is the uniquely liberal United States. The result is a growing American exasperation. Ingratitude and hypocrisy stir human passions like few others traits.

The entire vocabulary of illegal immigration has become Orwellian. Once descriptive nouns and adjectives such as “alien” and “illegal” have melted into “undocumented” and “immigrant” and then into just “migrant,” ostensibly to mask the reality of both legal status and the fact that migrants go in one direction — and there is an existential difference between immigrants and emigrants.

Illegal immigration is defended as a gift to the United States, as if without millions of illegal arrivals, America would ossify. But aside from the fact that the labor participation rate of America is about 62 percent of the available work force, and millions have given up on seeking jobs, when the proponents of illegal immigration south of the border are asked politely to withdraw their supposed beneficence and generosity, they react with furor and slander rather than with gratitude and relief.

Once someone makes a decision to enter a country illegally — his first decision as an incoming alien — and thus breaks a U.S. law with impunity, then most subsequent decisions are naturally shaped by the idea of exemption. Zealots argue that entering the U.S. illegally is merely a civil infraction. But the IRS in 2017 identified some 1.2 million identity-theft cases, in which illegal aliens had employed illegitimate or inconsistent social-security numbers to file tax returns — and implicitly thereby cause innumerable problems for the U.S. tax system.

Any U.S. citizen who did that would be charged with a career-ending felony. And identity theft — the great unspoken twin of illegal immigration — is not just a minor infraction, as I can attest from having my name and checking-account number stolen by an illegal alien. False checks, identical in color and style to my own, were then printed up by him with his name and phony address on them, albeit using my banking router number at the bottom; he then cashed the checks at a compliant rural store, using a false identity, stamped on the back in the form of a fraudulent driver’s license and bank credit card. Multiply that reality thousands of times over per month — but never dare to suggest that such a crime is connected with illegal immigration or even constitutes much of a crime.

So much of the discussion of illegal immigration is predicated not just on fantasy, but on Soviet-style censorship, and not just of speech, but of our very thoughts. Taboo are suggestions that illegal immigration could be a prime reason that California now has the highest basket of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation; the highest number of welfare recipients (one of three in the United States), with a fifth of the state living below the poverty level; and now a fourth of all hospital admittances found to be suffering from diabetes or prediabetes; or that national rankings of infrastructure quality place the state nearly last in the country.

Talk of race has approached something like Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass, in which everything is upside down. “La Raza” — until recently the nomenclature of the nation’s largest Hispanic advocacy organization — has supposedly nothing to do with race, while others who would never have an odious desire to use its odious English equivalent, “The Race,” are deemed racists for their objections to La Raza terminology.

Residency is deliberately conflated with citizenship, as if the two are legally and morally equivalent. But again, nowhere else in the world is this true, and certainly not in Mexico. I have lived abroad for over two years. As a guest in Athens, I followed Greek politics closely. I paid steep Greek sales taxes and assorted fees and tariffs as a legal resident alien. But at no time did I imagine that taxes or my physical presence as a lawful guest on Greek soil allowed me to interfere with the politics of my host, much less to issue demands on Athens, or to give me de facto the same legal rights as Greek citizens. As a legal alien, I surely did not think I could vote. I knew better than to tell Greeks that their country was not to my taste. And I knew fellow aliens who overstayed visas, worked without permits, and did not register as foreign residents. At least before the days of the latest incarnations of the European Union, the resulting fines were stiff, and expulsions were uncontested.

Illegal immigration is embedded not within racial and political ecumenicalism but within an exclusionary ethnic and political matrix. There would be no lectures about principle and logic from a Jorge Ramos or Vicente Fox were a million a year from China or Africa entering the southwestern United States illegally — except as likely voices of opposition to such unlawful and asymmetrical influxes in their own countries’ neighborhoods. In our upside-down world, calls for diverse, legal, meritocratic, and measured immigration are considered xenophobic, precisely because they would be racially blind and not predicated on current racial and ethnic chauvinism.

Without illegal immigration at current levels, the powers of assimilation, integration, and intermarriage would turn most immigrants into Americans within two to three generations, as in the past. That fact apparently frightens ethnic chauvinists, who disguise the advantages they gain from identity politics by smearing those who wish to at least make race and ethnicity incidental and not essential to our characters. If Univision eventually went the way of 19th-century German-language daily periodicals, what would a Jorge Ramos do?

For those who live at the nexus of illegal immigration, life is lived quite differently than in the past, from the trivial to the existential. A few examples suffice. Last night I was awakened by automatic gunfire on the road at 2 a.m.; the shots came from a long-ago-sold farmhouse of one who was a friend and neighbor for 50 years, but whose house is now rented out to gang members, many from Mexico. No worry, within an hour, the shrieks of resumed cockfighting returned as usual.

Do PETA members object to illegal immigration? We play a sort of rescue-dog roulette. Dogs are tossed and dumped on the side of road, without licenses, vaccinations, unneutered and unspayed, and often injured. After we reach our limit of adoptions — six presently — we try to vaccinate, neuter, license, and heal additional strays that wander in off the road, put shiny collars with tags on their necks, and let them feed and roam near our fenced yard. Then a welcomed reverse but invisible process can sometimes follow: theft. Dogs formerly dumped are now recycled, as it were, snatched stealthily by new owners who steal back mysteriously “improved” pets rather than throw out a dog.

In rural California, the law as it once was is now often inoperative, if not sometimes nonexistent. Utility and common practice substitute. In my neighborhood, I assume that zoning and building-codes statutes apply only to those who are citizens and have the means to pay for permits and possible fines. Everyone else does what he pleases, assuming either that it would be illiberal to fine the Other or not cost-effective in a bankrupt state.

Illegal immigration and environmentalism war with each other. But the former usually is exempted from any green audit. No one much cares, certainly not law enforcement or the state and federal environmental agencies, that roadsides outside Central Valley towns are littered with abandoned appliances, furniture, tires — and toxic and wet garbage. I suppose if it became a county issue, the complainers would first be called whiners and then nativists. So silence reigns. In a pre-civilization manner, the law-abiding of all races and classes quietly pick up the garbage in their environs each week.

Behind the official silence is apparently the apologia that poverty prevents proper disposal, or that illegal arrivals still naturally follow protocols found south of the border, or that the citizen hosts are a bit too anal retentive and judgmental in harping about mere moldy mattresses or old televisions set in their alleyways or orchards.

Again, the logic of illegal immigration is that the guilty host must accommodate the uninvited but more virtuous guest, not vice versa. When I find a dumped rotten canine carcass with a rope still around its skeletonized neck or a tossed disemboweled chicken, I surely must not privilege my own culture and think that dog- or cockfighting is barbaric. Perhaps the pile of used hypodermic needles dumped by my barn were left by accident? Today I pick up sacks of wet garbage with the owner’s name and address on several bills: Does one redeliver back to the dumper, and if so, armed or not? Or does one find it not cost-effective to do so? (Do not suggest “call the authorities” — that is a complete waste of time.) These are the small, mostly trite decisions that a person at the nexus of illegal immigration makes every day.

When a foreign gang member drives in, without English fluency, looking for the house of a drug seller, or asking about a neighbor’s trailer of prostitution, I don’t impose my values on him, but offer a polite, “No lo se.”  Live and let live as it were — given the alternative of possibly facing criminal exposure by calling authorities and thereby by aiding and abetting ICE.

Most assume that if hit by an illegal-alien driver (with a license or not), the latter, if unhurt, flees the scene of the accident. Only a naïf would think that registration or insurance would ever be found on the abandoned vehicle. When someone scrapes my car in the parking lot, the driver, if caught, sometimes wants a quick cash transaction to avoid calling the police.

When Jerry Brown or Nancy Pelosi lectures the state on its illiberality, or on the immigration sins of Donald Trump, or the advantages of nullification and a sanctuary state, we assume that these are just the penultimate chest poundings and virtue signals of rich septuagenarians about to go into apartheid retirements in Napa or Grass Valley.

In that context, all of their legacies above make perfect sense.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON — NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won. @vdhanson

ON THE EPA: STAY ON TARGET!

ON THE EPA: STAY ON TARGET!
Steven Hayward, Powerline

There’s an old saying that when you’re taking a lot of flack, you know you’re over the target. Right now this explains the liberal/media freakout about EPA administrator Scott Pruitt. Pruitt is systematically dismantling the legacy of decades of egregious bureaucratic overreach by the EPA, including ending the corrupt “sue-and-settle” practice, stopping the practice of refusing to share raw data with outside researchers that bear on multi-hundred-billion dollar regulatory schemes, and deep-sixing the so-called “Clean Power Plan,” which was likely to fail in federal court anyway. (This week’s sensible decision to rescind the Obama new car fuel economy requirements is being completely misreported, of course, but that subject will require a separate post.)

The height of irony is Obama’s EPA head Gina McCarthy complaining that Pruitt is using the very same powers that she used—the administrator’s prerogative to decide policy. Here’s McCarthy’s complaint to the NY Times:

Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has announced that he alone will decide what is and isn’t acceptable science for the agency to use when developing policies that affect your health and the environment.

And just who was it who set up the EPA administrator with such plenipotentiary powers? That’s right: liberals did (to be sure, with the foolish acquiescence of Republicans a long time ago), because they understood that the bureaucracy could be transformed into a partisan tool to achieve their ends, all the better if single administrators were given lots of power and didn’t have much political accountability even inside their own agency. When I suggested in the Wall Street Journal back in 2013 that the EPA ought to be made into a five-member commission like similar regulatory agencies that observe the need to reflect the partisan divisions in the country over policy, environmentalists howled in protest that my idea would “cripple the agency!” Well, just now I expect they’d rather prefer my idea to Administrator Pruitt.

Pruitt’s changes are long overdue, and as in so many other ideas, no previous Republican administration has seen fit to attempt any of these essential reforms. The last President Bush gave us Christine Todd Whitman as head of the EPA, who was a fluffy lapdog for the EPA bureaucracy. Anyone think President Jeb Bush would have given us Scott Pruitt?  (And let’s recall who promoted Gina McCarthy in Massachusetts’s state environmental bureaucracy before she went to work for Obama: a governor named Romney.)

The Pruitt news-storm is obviously not a coincidence or a spontaneous interest: the Environmental-Industrial Complex is geared up into full battle mode, and is undoubtedly funneling pre-packaged attack stories to sympathetic producers, reporters, and editorial writers. This is a cage match that isn’t going to go away. A lot of congressional Republicans may get cold feet, and if Democrats take the House in November, Pruitt can expect to be appearing before House committees every day. The media may well contrive a scandal.