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But it is much harder as Steve likes to point out since when one is poor, one is living around other poor people.

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Even poor parents used to tell their kids, "Lie down with dogs get up with fleas." The poor should be encouraged to adopt bourgeois values and discouraged from white trash or thug values.

One of the great moral failings of our elites is they refuse to preach what they practice.

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1954 was the first year when more than 50% of 19 y/o were high school graduates. Exactly when was that time that poor parents were doing a good job?

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High school is a modern contrivance. That's an odd metric to focus on to gauge parenting.

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nitpicking instead of finding a time when parents were doing well is not a good look.

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By the metric of high school graduation rates the Amish are complete failures as parents; you probably can't believe we allow them to exist. I would look at metrics like drug use, suicides, family formation, religious praxis, obesity, single parenthood and criminality. I'll go out on a limb and say the poor were doing better on those metrics back in the Dark Ages before the Great Society expansion of the welfare state but maybe I'm wrong.

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One should try looking up data instead of depending on false narratives pushed by the media.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Twentieth-century-United-States-homicide-and-suicide-rates-wax-and-wane-over-time-but-at_fig1_233890079

And has one forgotten the reason for prohibition: drunken men.

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Fair enough, and I'm looking at the low-crime 1950s, when there was no Prohibition and that awful 50% HS graduation rate. That was back when people obsessed about Puerto Ricans and their switchblades.

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