The True Black Tragedy: Minimum Wage

[El_Machinae]

They're talking about different things, really. One is talking about the mother being single. The other is talking about the father being involved.

We can see that fatherly participation is vastly higher when the father is living with the child.

 

[Yeekim]

We can see that fatherly participation is vastly higher when the father is living with the child.

A discovery of a decade, surely.

EDIT: That's me laughing in the general direction of sociologists involved in this study, not in yours.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, sometimes it's still worth measuring stuff we already know. Now we can measure if it goes up or down, for example.

 

[Formaldehyde]

if you take the time to read the article, you see that the statistics that the conservatives use to show a growing crisis have likely been exaggerated to a considerable extent.

The study also shows that black parents who don't live with their children spend more time with them than white fathers do. That in all cases except for eating meals with children who are 5-18 years old that they actually outperform their white counterparts.

EDIT: I actually posted a URL originally thinking that Think Progress would be subjected to less ad hominem attacks than the Daily Kos would. Here is the article which I just referred:

The absent black father myth—debunked by CDC

Single Parent Living Arrangements

White 22.1%

Hispanic 28.6%

Black 54.7%

So as you can see although the figures don't change much from married White couples with children to cohabiting but unmarried parents, it drops 14% for Hispanics and 13% for Blacks. Another issue I addressed in the 2nd update which rarely addressed by those who fault marriages alone as being the big problem with Black child-rearing is the issue of blended families. There are many cases which the married/unmarried statistic fail to address when the mother may not be living with or married to the father, but is instead living with and/or married to someone else.

So as you can see although the figures don't change much from married White couples with children to cohabiting but unmarried parents, it drops 14% for Hispanics and 13% for Blacks. Another issue I addressed in the 2nd update which rarely addressed by those who fault marriages alone as being the big problem with Black child-rearing is the issue of blended families. There are many cases which the married/unmarried statistic fail to address when the mother may not be living with or married to the father, but is instead living with and/or married to someone else.

There are no recent estimates on the percentage of children residing in blended families.

These statistics underestimate the number of U.S. blended families, because...

To date, government reporting of population figures indicate families in which the child resides. So if the child lives with a divorced, single parent and the other nonresident parent has remarried, the child is not included in the calculations as being a member of a blended family.

Estimates suggest that many children living in a "single parent household" (as designated by the Census Bureau) are actually living with two adults. Thus, their best estimates indicate that about 25% of current blended families are actually cohabiting couples.

And...

40% of married couples with children (i.e., families) in the US are stepcouples (at least one partner had a child from a previous relationship before marriage; this includes full and part-time residential stepfamilies and those with children under and/or over the age of 18). The percentage of all married couple households is 35%. (Karney, Garvan, & Thomas, 2003)

All of this means that the census bureau's data of "living arrangements" can be off by as much as 25% when dealing with blended families situations and even their much lower figures of Hispanic and Black single parent living arrangements could in fact be far, far lower than shown.

So the bottom line issue, once we get back to the CDC figures on how much fathers across the various races actually do the real working of parenting rather than just being nearby or within the same house - can we definitively say that qualitative difference proportionally overwhelms the quantitative [but grossly incomplete] data that proponents of the "Black Fathers Suck" faction seem to espouse?

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, there weren't any ad hom attacks, so I guess you were correct

 

[illram]

I guess I have sort of a foundational issue with the OP's article, specifically the argument that all someone needs is that first start at the very bottom rung of the ladder to move up. I.e., the black youth needs that $5 per hour job as a teen to begin their climb out of poverty, and minimum wage laws are stymieing that important first step.

I will ignore the more basic flaws here: for instance, that studies have shown minimum wage increases do not actually disparately harm racial groups, or that low wage employment opportunities are not noticeably affected by modest wage increases. Personally, more interesting to me is the problem we have with feeding the continued mythology of American economic opportunity. The argument that if you start at that $5 per hour job washing dishes, this alone somehow makes you more likely to succeed and pull yourself out of your hole and make more money later. That all you need is a good work ethic to make money. It ignores other critical factors like training, education, location, and so on.

I'd rather see our hypothetical black teenager's Mom and Dad (or just Mom or Dad, whatever) make more money with a higher minimum wage job so they can send their kid to get some vocational training, or save money for college, or have healthcare benefits so they don't go broke due to a healthcare emergency. I'd rather see more money in the hands of the family and their local community, as opposed to lowering the cost of labor in a race to the bottom, which only makes it more likely that their kid gets stuck washing dishes for pennies with little to no opportunities for true advancement in his or her community.

 

[bhavv]

But what if you're too ill in the USA to work enough, or any hours? Well, they probably have a better welfare system there compared to the UK where so many people are dying after having their benefits cancelled. Way to go Mr. Fat and hideous Iain Duncan Smith.

 

[Sonereal]

$7.25 an hour is not sufficient to live on? So what kind of prices do you have there?

If it makes a difference, it costs different amounts of money to live in Poland than in parts of the United States, and these numbers are probably not being adjusted to take into account purchasing power.