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RUSH: I think I touched on this yesterday, and I want to mention this again. “Harvard Study: Single Parents are a Hindrance to Social Mobility.” Actually this study did not come up, but I’ll tell you how this topic came up yesterday. You know, I had an idea for Obama to propose in his State of the Coup Address. Let me review this. Let me set it up this way. You know as well as I do that the Democrats believe that there is political hay to be made in this whole argument of inequality.

How do they always suggest attacking it?

They always punish achievers: High earners, people that get good grades, and good teams that score more points than others. They always want to lower the rich, the people that excel in performance in other things. Lower them so that everything is more equal. They never seek to elevate people at the bottom. It does them no good to do that. They need a permanent underclass. They need a permanent underclass of helpless, dependent people — depending on government, depending on them — to, essentially, live.

Folks, this is not arguable. The Democrats punish achievers. They claim that achievers, high earners, whatever, somehow it’s unjustified. It’s unfair. They had advantages that other people didn’t have, or the Lucky Sperm Club that won life’s lottery or what have you. Okay, so Obama’s attacking inequality. I suggested what the president suggests here is in order to have equality.

We got the Millennials. We got young people coming out of high school and college, and they’re just starting out, and since we’re interested in the equality of outcomes, we have to also be interested in equal beginnings, a “level playing field,” and my suggestion is (using the way that Democrats approach this) to make sure everybody starts the same level. See, it’s unfair that some kids are spending all their day high or playing video games or sitting at the mall or what have you.

So we make everybody do that. We get everybody high, we get everybody playing video games, we bring all achievers down to the same level as the non-achievers, and that’s the starting point. As part of doing this, I observed that it’s been confirmed that children from two-parent families do much better in life than children from single-parent families. It’s not a criticism of anybody. It’s just factual data analysis. It just happens to be true that kids that come from two-parent families do better.

Well, that naturally means that kids coming from two-parent families have an unfair advantage, through no fault of their own. It’s not their fault their parents stayed together, and it’s not their fault that kids in single-parent families are the product of divorce. So using the Obama/Democrat way of fixing this, I suggested that we might want to force every two-parent family to get a divorce, so that every child is coming from a single-parent family.

That way, everybody’s equal, at the lower end of the scale.

So everybody is starting off with the same level. Nobody has an advantage over anybody else. This is the way the Democrats approach it, right? Now, you can sit out there and you can get mad and you can think this is insensitive. I’m just telling you, this is the way reality manifests itself. If you let the Democrats do what they would do normally without any checks or balances, this is essentially what you’re gonna end up with.

If you doubt me, go to anyplace they run the show, and you take a look at how people are living. You take a look at the economy, take a look at the unemployment rolls, take a look at the culture. You take a look at anywhere they’re in charge. When the liberal left is running the show, you’ve got an absolute disaster. You’ve got homes being bulldozed; you’ve got high unemployment. You’ve got absolutely no economic opportunity and people moving away if they can.

originalThis is the way the Democrats do things.

So here’s a Harvard study. “A new study from Harvard University on the ability of low-income children to achieve social mobility found that the largest hindrance to moving up the income ladder is being raised by a single parent. ‘The strongest and most robust predictor (of social mobility) is the fraction of children with single parents,’ the study said. Further, the study found that ‘(children) of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.'”

So single-parenthood disease is catching.

“Now, obviously,” it says here, “there are cases of successful children who were raised by single parents,” obviously that’s true, “but the study suggests that it is more likely for a child to climb the income ladder if they are living with both parents in a community of married parents,” a neighborhood. Forget this “community” crap. A neighborhood of married parents. You probably do not need a study to tell you that. You probably instinctively know this, either from your own life experience or what you’ve seen.

So how would the Democrats solve this?

What’s obviously the problem for upward mobility?

The problem is not single parenthood. No. The problem is the unfairness of kids who have two parents. That’s the way the Democrats look at it. They’ll see a study like this new study from Harvard, and they’ll see that Harvard has shown the upward mobility of low-income, single-parent children to be practically nonexistent. So rather than elevate and rather than talk about strong marriage (and rather than, you know, come out against abortion and all the cultural things that lead to single parenthood), “No, no, no, no!”

We can’t do that, because the Democrats need those victims. They need those people as victims. A single parent household is single parent because something in this country is wrong. And whatever is wrong has resulted in the inequality, the unfairness. Why should children from two-parent families have more upward mobility than children from a single-parent family? That’s not fair. And their solution is not to talk up marriage. Their solution is not to oppose abortion. Their solution is not anything oriented toward promoting a cleanup of the culture.

They really don’t talk about a solution. What they do is condemn the inequality and the unfairness and then they stigmatize the children who get ahead who came from two-parent families because they had an unfair advantage. If they played it out to its local conclusion, if they were unchecked, I mean, they would never do this, obviously, but they may as well blame marriage for the problem and two-parent families as an unfair advantage that these kids have, and take that away, because that’s what they do in every other circumstance where there’s inequality. They punish the people they think have the unfair advantage. In this case, it would be two-parent families.

They punish students who learn faster than others by slowing them down. They punish high achievers by stigmatizing them, impugning them, demonizing them, and then if they can, raising their taxes and regulating their businesses. They do everything they can to make them the enemy. It ought to be the exact opposite. Whether you call them the rich or whether you call them the achievers, or whether you have — look how the Democrats make fun of Beaver Cleaver and that old fifties notion of the nuclear family. They make fun of it, don’t they?

They make fun of it as, “Come on, you old-fashioned fuddy-duddy, we can’t go to back to that era. The genie’s out of the bottle. You just don’t understand anymore what life is like for most people.” Thereby insisting that we accept this and that we understand this, and then allow government to come in — i.e., Democrats — and devise programs to fix this which invariably involve expanding the welfare state, and then we just create the cycle that creates and expands and cements, if you will, the problem.

Now, the common-sense solution to a study like this, single-parent households are a hindrance to social mobility? Okay, well, then let’s do something about whatever’s happening in the culture that’s resulting in this, whatever we can do, not with a government program. What other things can we do to educate, to influence, to inspire, to motivate people? Well, one of the things you can do is point to those who are not suffering these problems as role models, but we can’t do that, either, because we’ve already tarnished them. We’ve impugned them. We have demonized them, and we have told people they are the problem. So we can’t use them as role models.

So what we basically do is do what Moynihan said: We define deviancy down. We simply say, you know what? Cultural things, we just can’t control ’em. The best thing we do is come up with a program to provide some kind of assistance and relief for the single-parent families out there, because most of them are women, and of course we’ve got a War on Women that the Republicans are waging. Did you hear Ann Coulter on Hannity last night? The only confirmed kill in the War on Women was by Ted Kennedy.

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