@awcntdb:
The wording of your post, when you talk about ‘certain native born communities’ and such,is generally a code word for ‘those people’, and usually it is referring to blacks (and to a certain extend, hispanics), because in the popular media and in discussions, we talk about things like the 70% of black kids born to single mothers. Whether you were thinking of black kids or not, I don’t know, and I won’t accuse you of thinking ‘poor, unwed mother’ =black, though I do understand why others feel that.
The reality is the problem with poor, unwed mothers is not based entirely in race, it is based in economics, when people’s economic expectations fall you see the same ills coming to that area, that group of people. There was a recent article profiling the explosion of unwed mothers in areas that would shock many who cry about unwed mothers, it is in the bible belt, among women who are not black or hispanic, but white, in towns full of fundamentalist churches and are considered the ‘salt of the earth’ or whatnot, the out of wedlock birth rate has soared to close to 40%. Why?It has happened as economic expectations in those areas has declined, like with inner city blacks and rural blacks, it reflects the reality of their economic situation. And we are talking young women and the men who created those babies who are not from multi generation single mothers, like the stereotype of the inner city blacks, these are heartland folks facing economic decline.
As far as immigrants go, be careful of stereotypes, they are dangerous. Take a lot at the stats on certain groups, like the Hmong people, and what has happened with them, and you see the stereotype of inner city ills, they have become heavily involved in gangs and so forth. Among certain groups of Chinese immigrants, recent immigrants in a lot of cases, there has been problems there as well, and I suspect if you looked at the numbers, and looked at the economic levels of the family, and charted it, you would find at the lowel levels a lot of problems that are hidden by the ‘model minority’ syndrome. While many immigrants come from China and Korea who are poor, a lot of them come here who are middle class, educated and so forth, and you cannot compare people from that level with those coming in with nothing. Yes, I would bet that if you compared let’s say poor Chinese or Korean immigrants that came here, and looked at things like teen pregnancies and crime and so forth, you would see less problems, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
And the answer to your question is very simple, to quote the old Fram oil commercial, either you pay now or you pay later. I am not going to argue that government programs often do the right thing, but the idea that the answer is to get rid of government programs and make people ‘take responsibility’ leaves something very, very big out, as bad as it is now, what would happen if we did that? Take a look sometime at Newark or Detroit, cities that were devastated by riots in the 1960’s, do you think that maybe, just maybe, if we decided to basically cut all these programs off and said "take care of yourself’ that suddenly everyone would become joe and jane responsible? Do you think that all they need is to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’? One of the reasons we have all these programs, some of which stink, some of which work, some are in between is because people got scared, because those riots weren’t caused by communists or agitators or socialists, they were caused by people who were angry and fed up at being left to rot, ignored, whatever you want to call it. I also will add that what we saw with blacks in the 1960’s could very well happen with other groups, when people feel hopeless you see some pretty bad things happen. Put it this way, do some reading by people who witnessed the 1930’s, not the myth makers of today, and read about just how bad it got, what really was going on, and it wasn’t exactly all “The Waltons”.
Then, too, we have the myth of ‘private charity will take care of it’, it is a load of utter bs, given the scope of the program, any private charity working with the needy will tell you they cannot handle it alone.
You mention a popular myth, that for example of sending kids from poor areas to parochial schools and watch them blossom. It sounds all so tempting, the kids get the discipline of Catholic school, and become useful citizens and so forth. Every conservative worth his/her salt has been promoting voucher programs or school choice (though that isn’t entire altruistic, most of that is to allow religious fundamentalists the right to get vouchers to send their kids to Christian fundmantalist schools, basically using taxpayer money to pay for schools so their kids don’t have to learn evolution or science). The problem with that is there have been studies, Milwaukee did a pilot program like that, as did South Carolina I believe, and the outcome isn’t what people expected, when they did long term longitudinal studies they found the outcomes for the kids who stayed in public school versus those who went to parochial schools didn’t change that much…there are also problems with the parochial school model, because they cherry pick, they can take the kids who already have a parent or parents who take enough interest to have the kid succeed and if a kid is a problem, throw them out. More importantly, with voucher programs and the like, that means they had a parent or guardian who took enough interest to get them into the program, to make sure the kid did well…so for those who do achieve, if the long term studies are right, they might have achieved even if they stayed in the public school.
That doesn’t mean that a program sending kids to parochial schools won’t work, but it means we have to be very careful about how it was done, so that the parochial schools don’t cherry pick the best and leave the rest,it means having people making sure that kids from bad backgrounds get a chance and get the support they need, rather than taking a small percentage who otherwise might have made it and say “see, we did great work”. There are programs doing this, working with the troubled kids, and doing great things, but again the answer comes in finding out what works and applying it, not simply saying ‘the answer is to get rid of all programs and leave it up to the private sector’. The knee jerk “the government can’t do anything right” is classic anti thinking, instead of saying “what works” we get "government bad, private good’ and that is the bleating of sheep in Animal Farm, not thinking.