By Jim Geraghty
Wednesday, May 04, 2022
The reason many young working-class
women aren’t getting married isn’t that the tax code gives them incentives to
stay single. It’s that too many of their male counterparts aren’t worth
marrying.
Those words were written by Vance and published in National
Review on September 2, 2013.
At the national level, the link
between college education and productivity is virtually nonexistent. If we’re
not creating much value with the billions we spend on education, it’s worth
asking what those billions have bought. And the answer is: good jobs for
university employees, and a social system that disadvantages the poor.
That is also Vance, writing in National Review on
January 9, 2014.
Appalachia teaches us that breaking
people out of bad communities has more promise than changing those communities
wholesale; that encouraging family stability — or at least not discouraging it
through the tax code or needless incarceration — promotes upward mobility more
effectively than transfer payments; that educating people for employment
somewhere other than the depressed local labor market is a better investment
than short-term public works; and that helping kids overcome low expectations
creates more hope than giving money to those kids’ parents.
Vance again, writing in National Review on September
22, 2014.
The reality is not that black
Americans enjoy special privileges. In fact, the overwhelming weight of the
evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Last month, for instance, the
brilliant Harvard economist Roland Fryer published an exhaustive study of
police uses of force. He found that even after controlling for crime rates and
police presence in a given neighborhood, black youths were far likelier to be
pushed, thrown to the ground, or harassed by police. (Notably, he also found no
racial disparity in the use of lethal force.) No other study of comparable
rigor exists on the subject, and its conclusion is clear: that black youth
derive their fear of police from experience. The injury done to our black
citizens is important and no respectable party can ignore it. In law school,
the police regularly harassed one of my best friends, who is black, even though
he attended Yale just as I did. Republican senator Tim Scott (S.C.) recently
recounted with beautiful candor the many times Capitol police officers treated
him with disrespect despite his high office. Getting whipped into a frenzy on
conspiracy websites, or feeling that distant, faceless elites dislike you
because of your white skin, doesn’t compare. But the great advantages of
whiteness in America are invisible to the white poor or are completely
swallowed by the disadvantages of their class.
Vance, writing in National Review, August 29, 2016.
Growing up in a household that was,
by nearly every metric, “disadvantaged,” I loathed the cultural signal that
told me, in essence: “Because you are poor, you have no agency. Because you are
disadvantaged, you are a victim of the system, and you might as well give up.”
So I understand and agree with the premise of David French’s response to Tucker Carlson, but having spent some time
with Carlson, I don’t think he would disagree with the importance of
emphasizing resilience even in the face of adversity.
Vance, writing in National Review, January 7, 2019.
I don’t know about this guy who’s been running around
Ohio saying things like, “Honored to have Marjorie [Taylor Greene]’s
endorsement. We’re going to win this thing and take the country back from the
scumbags” and “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to
Ukraine one way or another.” I’m not sure about a guy who happily does
interviews with Steve Bannon and Jim Hoft and speculates that the Biden
administration is deliberately helping fentanyl across the border “to punish the people who didn’t vote for him, and opening
up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it.” That guy seems like the
embodiment of the worst aspects of modern populism.
But the Vance who used to write for National
Review seemed like a sharp, insightful, thoughtful, and empathetic
guy, exactly the kind of guy you would want to have in the U.S. Senate. Did
Vance get hit on the head and have a complete personality change?
With the Democrats’ having nominated Tim Ryan — a guy who
ran against Nancy Pelosi to be speaker of the House in 2016 and got 63 Democrats to vote for him, and whose campaign has more than $5 million in cash on hand as
of his latest campaign-finance report — the big question is, which J. D. Vance
is running for Senate? Or has this all been a giant rope-a-dope to let
Democrats think they were going to take on some ham-fisted, shoot-from-the-hip
conspiracy theorist, only to find they’re taking on an eloquent advocate for
Americans who have been left behind and forgotten?
‘To Choose to Abort a Child’
President Biden, yesterday: “The idea that we’re going to make a judgment that is going to
say that no one can make the judgment to choose to abort a child based on a
decision by the Supreme Court, I think, goes way overboard.”
I can’t help but notice he used the word “child.”
Pro-choice advocates keep telling me it isn’t a child.
If what is developing in a woman’s womb is a child —
a human life, not merely a blob of cells that are potential life — we wouldn’t
accept killing that child, now would we?
How Many Abortions Occur in the U.S. Each Year?
There are two institutions that attempt to count the
number of abortions performed in the United States: the Guttmacher Institute,
and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The two sets of numbers differ fairly significantly,
sometimes by up to 300,000 in a given year.
The Guttmacher Institute reported that in 1973, the year
of Roe v. Wade, U.S. medical personnel performed 744,610 abortions;
the CDC put the number at 615,831. That number steadily increased until 1990,
when it peaked at 1.6 million in the Guttmacher count and 1.42 million in the
CDC count.
The most recent number released by the Guttmacher Institute is
from 2017, and it showed that abortions dropped to 862,000, a 19 percent
decline from just six years earlier. In 2019, 628,898 legal induced abortions
were reported to the CDC from 49 reporting areas.
If you are pro-life, the good news is that advocacy,
sonogram images, women’s public discussions of their regrets about having an
abortion, and better resources for pregnant women have cut the number of
abortions roughly in half over the past 30 years. Use of birth control probably
improved that number as well. Our declining birth rate, and some reports of declining sexual activity, have also
likely played a role.
In Guttmacher’s 2017 numbers, 89 percent of U.S. counties
have no known abortion providers. The states of Kentucky, Mississippi, North
Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia each had one known abortion provider.
There is a perception that red states have few abortion
providers and blue states have many, but that is not always the case. The same
Guttmacher numbers found that Rhode Island has two; Delaware, the District of
Columbia, Hawaii, and New Hampshire have four; Wisconsin has three; and
Minnesota has seven.
We may not live in a pro-life country, but we live in a
country where abortion is much rarer than it was a generation ago.
ADDENDUM: Some liberals really think Clarence Thomas is going to lead the charge against interracial
marriage, huh?
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