The Geography of a Woman and a Man

Woman in Life's Stages

The Geography of a Woman

Between 18 and 22, a woman is like Africa. Half discovered, 
half wild, fertile and naturally Beautiful!

Between 23 and 30, a woman is like Europe. Well developed and 
open to trade, especially for someone of real value.
Between 31 and 35, a woman is like Spain, very hot, 
relaxed and convinced of her own beauty.

Between 36 and 40, a woman is like Greece, gently aging 
but still a warm and desirable place to visit.

Between 41 and 50, a woman is like Great Britain, 
with a glorious and all conquering past.

Between 51 and 60, a woman is like Israel, has been through war, 
doesn't make the same mistakes twice, takes care of business. 

Between 61 and 70, a woman is like Canada, 
self-preserving, but open to meeting new people.

After 70, she becomes Tibet . 
Wildly beautiful, with a mysterious past and the wisdom of the ages.
An adventurous spirit and a thirst for spiritual knowledge.  


THE  GEOGRAPHY OF A MAN  
Between 1 and 80, a man is like Iran, 
ruled by a pair of nuts.

THE  END.

THE IRS FRAUD ON AMERICA

   CROSSHAIRS: The Internal Revenue Scandal [FULL MOVIE]

"Make them cry... You're not out there to take any prisoners... Enforce collection until they come to their knees." -- Instructions given at a 1996 IRS training lecture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RKdCvK4xz8&feature=player_profilepage

"More tax is collected by fear and intimidation than by the law. People are afraid of the IRS." -- Former IRS District Chief David Patnoe

For taxpayers everywhere, terror is spelled I-R-S -- but the Internal Revenue Service is much more than just the world's most fearsome and ruthless tax collection agency. Current and former IRS officials have described how the agency literally considers itself to be at war with the tax-paying public. Leaked videos of IRS employee training sessions have revealed how agents have been taught to use unethical and illegal means to extract money from long-suffering taxpayers, and to retaliate against anybody -- whether ordinary citizen or conscience-stricken agency employee -- who objects.

Since at least 2011, the IRS has carried out another role -- that of harassing and persecuting the Obama administration's political rivals, while granting special privileges to his allies. Anybody who belonged to a group with words like "Patriot" or "Tea Party" in its name found himself in the IRS's cross-hairs.

This illegal harassment wasn't limited to one state, or one region -- and it didn't end with invasive questions about finances, donors, and membership lists. Like secret police investigators in a Communist country, IRS officials looking into the activities of pro-life activists scrutinized the "content of their prayers" for supposedly inappropriate political content, and even tried to impose limits on their peaceful outreach and activism.

While the IRS was carrying out this campaign of persecution, its employees were spending tens of millions of dollars on extravagant employee retreats -- and unlike common taxpayers, they weren't required to keep track of their expenses. When they weren't busy abusing taxpayers and wasting their money, unionized IRS employees were preparing for the most radical expansion of the agency's mandate in its history, which will put it in charge of enforcing the new "Obamacare" law.

That's right: Under Obamacare, the IRS will have the power to make life-and-death decisions affecting every U.S. citizen -- and the officials directly responsible for the harassment of the Tea Party movement will have critical roles in administering the new government-run health care system.

How did we end up with the IRS? What are the dangers it represents to innocent taxpayers? What can be done to rein in that rogue agency -- and is it possible for us to be rid of it completely? You owe it to yourself to see "Crosshairs: The Internal Revenue Scandal" -- and to share what you learn with your friends and family. Your lives and those of your loved ones may literally depend on it.

***************************************************

References provided for your study: 

http://save-a-patriot.net/articles/confess.html  

http://famguardian.org/publications/greatirshoax/greatirshoax.htm 

http://mystrangemind.com/2006/08/irs-exposed-irs-is-privately-owned.html 

http://www.henrymakow.com/bankrupt_america_under_judicia.html 

http://research.lfb.org/research/video/lfl_taxes_0214?code=LLFLQ391&n=LFL_taxes_0214 

Tommy wrote a document titled The Memorandum. 

http://reviveamericanow.myfastforum.org/archive/hard-cold-facts-concerning-the-irs__o_t__t_57.html

Obamacare cuts Medicaid doctor pay 42 percent in 2015. Here's why.

Obamacare cuts Medicaid doctor pay 42 percent in 2015. Here's why.

Thousands of Medicaid doctors are bracing for a tough start to 2015: a 42 percent pay cut.
The Affordable Care Act temporarily boosted payment rates for primary care doctors who see Medicaid patients in 2013 and 2014. The idea was to make sure doctors kept participating in Medicaid — which typically has low reimbursement rates — even as the program expanded to cover millions more Americans this year.
That earlier Obamacare pay raise was big, averaging out to a 73 percent increase for primary care doctors across the country. But it was also temporary, lasting only two years, and is set to run out on December 31. That means, beginning January 1, 2015, Medicaid doctors will earn less each time they see a patient — or, they could decide to pull out of the program altogether. Nobody is totally sure which way doctors will go.
Here's a quick guide to why the raise happened, why it's running out, and what it means for the future of Obamacare.

1) Obamacare raised Medicaid's primary care payments in 2013 and 2014

It's long been true of the American health care system that Medicare (the federal insurance program that covers the elderly) pays doctors more than Medicaid (the state-federal insurance program that covers the poor).
On average, Medicaid paid doctors about two-thirds of what Medicare pays — although, as this map shows, there's lots of variation across the country.

(Kaiser Family Foundation)

Even though Medicaid paid less, it has usually done a pretty good job making sure patients can get in to see primary care doctors. But there was a worry that, after Obamacare, that might not be the case. Medicaid is one of the two big programs the law relies on to expand health insurance coverage (the other is the marketplaces). Forecasters had estimated that 13 million additional people would join the program in Obamacare's first decade, and 7 million of those people would sign up in the first year.
Research has found that doctors are more likely to accept new Medicaid patients when their payment rates are higher. And the Affordable Care Act included a provision that aimed to entice doctors to sticking with — or perhaps joining — the program as it expanded to cover millions more Americans.
Beginning in 2013, the law bumped Medicaid primary care doctors' reimbursement rates up to match those of Medicare (specialists did not get any increase). The law funded the increased payments through the end of 2014, setting up a looming cliff that we're now approaching.

2) Doctors will see a 42 percent pay cut in 2015

(Urban Institute)

That's an estimate from the Urban Institute, which ran the numbers on how payment rates will change in 2015.
The decline will vary a lot from state to state. That's because each state sets its own payment rates for primary care doctors. In a state like California, for example, which tended to pay Medicaid doctors very low rates, Obamacare has doubled their fees. But in North Carolina, where the two programs fees were more similar, the pay rate increase was much smaller.

3) The federal government will not extend the pay cut

Mostly because it's expensive: the two years of the pay-bump cost the federal government $11 billion.
Medicaid advocacy groups have lobbied Congress a bit to extend the pay cut for at least two years now. And Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) did introduce legislation that would extend the pay bump until 2016.
"We’re ready to lobby for what’s right to improve the situation," Roland Goertz, chair of the Academy of Family Physicians, had said in 2012 about extending the pay cut. "We’re ready to go to the mat for what works, and we need to be going in this direction."
But the issue hasn't gotten traction; the Murray-Brown bill has languished in committee since its introduction this past summer. And that means, barring any last minute miracle, Medicaid payment rates will decline in many states — but not all — on Thursday.

4) Fifteen states are stepping in to extend the payment raise

(Kaiser Family Foundation)

Medicaid is a joint federal-state program, with the two governments splitting the bill for patients' coverage. And, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 15 states will step in and provide funding to either fully or partially continue the payment increase.
What's notable about this map, however, is that the states stepping in tend to be those that were already paying Medicaid doctors pretty well in the first place. They are places like New Mexico that, before Obamacare, paid primary doctors 85 percent of the Medicare rate, or Mississippi, which paid 90 percent.
The states that have a much bigger gap between Medicaid and Medicare payments, like California, are not generally not stepping in to avert the payment cut. This is probably due to the fact that fixing the bigger gaps is so much more expensive.

5) Nobody knows what this will mean for Medicaid patients' access to care

The worry among Medicaid advocates is that lower payment rates will translate into fewer doctors being willing to see patients. This is a articulated in a recent New York Times article, citing data from Ohio:

A survey by the Ohio State Medical Association found that some Ohio doctors began accepting Medicaid patients because of the rate increase in 2013. Ohio doctors who were already participating in the program said they had accepted more Medicaid patients after the rate increase. And almost 40 percent of Ohio doctors indicated that they planned to accept fewer Medicaid patients when the extra payments lapsed.

Previous studies have shown that states that pay more for primary care in Medicaid do have more doctors accepting new patients. This chart from Health Affairs shows the correlation:

(Health Affairs)

Those are the reasons for concern — but there are also reasons to think things might go okay, too. Medicaid patients tend to have just as good access to primary care as patients in private coverage. One 2012 study commissioned by the federal government found that Medicaid patients are equally as likely to have had a routine check-up in the past year as those with private insurance. The real challenges in access tend to happen when patients seek speciality care.
And it's worth keeping in mind there were thousands of doctors who saw Medicaid patients prior to the Affordable Care Act's pay bump. These are people who, even before they got a big raise, thought it made sense to see these patients at lower rates. That gives decent reason to think that these doctors will stick around after the pay increase disappears, too.

Astonishing List of 71 Top Bankers Dead and No Natural Causes!

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I've recently stumbled across a list of top bankers that have been killed in cold blood, died in "accidents" or have allegedly committed suicide. In some of the cases, their deaths are so suspicious that the 'suicide' verdict is simply ridiculous, as you will see.

While searching for news reports documenting their deaths, I've managed to find a lot more cases of high ranking bankers that have been found dead in suspect circumstances. I've added the cases to the list and included the appropriate reference links.

The fact that none of them died of natural causes is absolutely stunning.

Before proceeding to the list, I suggest you reading the following piece: 'Suiciding' the Bankers and Billionaires -- Do You Know Why?

1. Nov - Shawn Miller, 42, Citigroup managing director - found dead in bathtub with throat slashed. Murder weapon is missing. - Reference.

2. Oct - Edmund Reilly, 47, a trader at Midtown's Vertical Group, threw himself in front of a speeding Long Island Rail Road commuter train. - Reference.

3. Jan - William 'Bill' Broeksmit, 58, HUNG/POSSIBLE SUICIDE - Reference.

4. June - Richard Gravino, 49, Application Team Lead, JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown/pending

5. June - James McDonald - President & CEO of Rockefeller & Co - apparently self-inflicted, GUNSHOT WOUND

6. May - Thomas Schenkman, 42, Managing Director of Global Infrastructure, JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH, cause unknown/pending

7. May - Naseem Mubeen - Assistant Vice President ZBTL Bank, Islamabad, SUICIDE jumped

8. May - Daniel Leaf - senior manager at the Bank of Scotland/Saracen Fund Managers, FELL OFF A CLIFF

9. May - Nigel Sharvin - Senior Relationship Manager Ulster Bank manage portfolio of distressed businesses, ACCIDENTAL DROWNING

10. April - Lydia (no surname given) 52, France's Bred-Banque-Populaire, SUICIDE jumped - Reference.

11. April - Li Jianhua, 49, Non-bank Financial Institutions Supervision Department of the regulator, HEART ATTACK

12. April - Benedict Philippens, Director/Manager Bank Ans-Saint-Nicolas, SHOT

13. April - Tanji Dewberry - Assistant Vice President, Credit Suisse, HOUSE FIRE

14. April - Amir Kess, co-founder and managing director Markstone Capital Group private equity fund, CYCLIST HIT BY CAR

15. April - Juergen Frick, 48, Bank Frick & Co. AG, SHOT Dead

16. April - Jan Peter Schmittmann - former CEO of Dutch Bank ABN Amro, (Possibly suicide, SHOT)

17. April - Andrew Jarzyk - Assistant Vice President, Commercial Banking at PNC Financial Services Group, MISSING/DEAD

18. March - Mohamed Hamwi - System Analyst at Trepp, a financial data and analytics firm, SHOT

19. March - Joseph Giampapa - JP Morgan lawyer, CYCLIST HIT BY MINIVAN

20. March - Kenneth Bellando, 28, (youngest) former JP Morgan, SUICIDE, allegedly jumping from his apartment building. - Reference.

21. Feb - John Ruiz Morgan Stanley Municipal Debt Analyst, died suddenly, NO CAUSE GIVEN

22. Feb - Jason Alan Salais, 34, Information Technology specialist at JPMorgan, FOUND DEAD outside a Walgreens pharmacy

23. Feb - Autumn Radtke, CEO of First Meta Bitcoin, a cyber-currency exchange firm, "Suspected SUICIDE" - Reference.

24. Feb - James Stuart Jr., Former National Bank of Commerce CEO, FOUND DEAD - Reference.

25. Feb - Edmund (Eddie) Reilly, trader at Midtown's Vertical Group, SUICIDE

26. Feb - Li Junjie, JP Morgan, Alleged SUICIDE after jumping from the JP Morgan HQ in Hong Kong - Reference.

27. Feb - Ryan Henry Crane, 37, Executive at JP Morgan, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown - Reference.

28. Feb - Richard Talley -- A coroner's spokeswoman Thursday said Talley was found in his garage by a family member who called authorities. They said Talley died from seven or eight self-inflicted wounds from a nail gun fired into his torso and head. -- Reference.

29. Jan - Gabriel Magee, 39, JP Morgan employee, dead after allegedly jumping from the rooftop of JP Morgan HQ in Europe - Reference.

30. July - Julian Knott, 45, JPMorgan Executive Director, Global Tier 3 Network Operations, allegedly shot his wife multiple times, then shot himself dead. - Reference.

The villa where Julian and Alita Knott were found shot dead

 31. Jan - Mike Dueker, Suicide -- “Suicide” By 13 Meter Embankment (40-50 feet). He may have jumped over a 4-foot (1.2-meter) fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment.” - Reference.

Dueker worked at Seattle-based Russell for five years, and developed a business-cycle index that forecast economic performance. He was previously an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. - Reference.

32. Jan - Carl Slym, SUICIDE

33. Jan - Tim Dickenson, Communications Director at Swiss Re AG, SUDDEN DEATH cause unknown

34. Dec 2013 - Robert Wilson, a retired hedge fund founder, apparent SUICIDE leaped to his death from his 16th floor residence

35. Dec 2013 - Joseph . Ambrosio, age 34, Financial Analyst for J.P. Morgan, died suddenly from Acute Respiratory Syndrome

36. Dec 2013 - Benjamin Idim, CAR ACCIDENT

37. Dec 2013 - Susan Hewitt - Deutsche Bank, DROWNING

38. Nov 2013 - Patrick Sheehan, CAR ACCIDENT

39. Nov 2013 - Michael Anthony Turner, Career Banker, CAUSE UNKOWN

40. Nov 2013 - Venera Minakhmetova Former Financial Analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, CYCLIST HIT

41. Oct 2013 - Michael Burdin, SUICIDE

42. Oct 2013 - Ezdehar Husainat - former JP Morgan banker, killed in FREAK ACCIDENT when her SUV crushed her to death

43. Sept 2013 - Guy Ratovondrahona -Madagascar central bank, Sudden death - cause not confirmed

44. Aug 2013 - Pierre Wauthier, SUICIDE

45. Aug 2013 - Moritz Erhardt, SUICIDE

46. July 2013 Hussain Najadi CEO of merchant bank AIAK Group, SHOT

47. July 2013 Carsten Schloter, SUICIDE

48. July 2013 Sascha Schornstein - RBS in its commodity finance, MISSING

49. April 2013 David William Waygood, SUICIDE

50. Mar 2013 - David Rossi - communications director of troubled Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS), SUICIDE

Lethal, but not fatal (more than one way to skin a banker)

51. Fang Fang - JP Morgan, China, DISGRACED

52. Nick Bagnall - Director at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, son accidentally killed himself while trying to re-enact a Tudor hanging

53. Robin Clark - RP Martin -Wolf of Shenfield City banker shot, SURVIVED

54. Kevin Bespolka - Citi Capital Advisors, Dresdner Bank, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, Seriously injured and son dead

55. Robert Wheeler, 49, a Deutsche Bank financial advisor, DISGRACED

56. Chris Latham - Bank of America, ON TRIAL, Murder for Hire

57. Igor Artamonov - West Siberian Bank of Sberbank, Daughter found dead (POSSIBLE SUICIDE)

58. Hector Sants, Barclays - resigned due to stress and exhaustion, after being told he risked more serious consequences to his health if he continued to work - a remarkable turnaround as the Church reportedly approached him two months later and was told he had made a full recovery.

More suspicious deaths 

59. April 21st Bruce A. Schaal, 63, died suddenly Banker in Twin Lakes for 35 years

60. April 20th Keith Barnish 58, Died Suddenly (Still working as Senior Managing Director at Doral Financial Corporation. Previously Bear Stearns, Bank of America Senior Vice President).

61. March 12th Jeffrey Corzine, 31, son of MF Global CEO and Chairman Jon Corzine involved in major banking crime was found dead in an apparent suicide.

62. Keiran Toman, 39, former banker who believed he was being stalked by a reality TV crew starved to death in a hotel room, after leaving the "do not disturb" sign on door for TWO weeks.

[Highly suspicious claims, as many of us probably know that the hotel cleaning staff will knock on the door after 24 hours and eventually enter the room if failing to respond].

An inquest was opened after his death in July 2010 but his family asked for a second hearing as they were not informed. Police found all of Mr Toman's possessions in the room, but despite documents mentioning his family, failed to tell them he had died. -- Reference.

63. Nicholas Austin, 49, A former bank manager from Hersden died after drinking antifreeze in an effort to "get high". was found in a coma by his wife Lynn at their home in Blackthorne Road on October 5. He died the same day. - Reference.

"I took special note of the last one - he died drinking antifreeze in an attempt to "get high"! Funny one that is, as if a banker would be stupid enough to try that. The list is shocking, I never saw so many suicides and car accidents. No gall bladder stones, cancer deaths, strokes, or simply falling ill, it is just a litany of action. That pretty much says it all." - Jim Stone Freelance

The list continues... 

64. Melissa Millian, 54, Senior Vice President at MassMutual Financial Group, stabbed in the chest near a jogging alley in Connecticut - Reference.

65. Karl Slym, 51, Tata Motors managing director - not a banker, but a top official that could be connected somehow to the others - discovered dead on the fourth floor of the Shangri-La hotel in Bangkok.

66. Geert Tack was a private banker for ING and managed portfolios of wealthy clients in Blegium. The cause of death was unknown at the time of the report, but he disappeared in mysterious circumstances, after driving his personal car to a garage from which he took a replacement car to an unknown destination. His body was found in November 2014 near the shores of the Ostend coast. - Reference.

67. Thieu Leenen, 64, Relatiemanager ABN/AMRO, Eindhoven, Nederland

68. Calogero Gambino, 41, Associate General Counsel and Managing Director at Deutsche Bank, America - Alleged SUICIDE by hanging - Reference.

69. Thierry Leyne, 48, banker at Anatevka S.A., Israël, "apparent SUICIDE"- Reference.

70. Tod Robert Edward, 51, Vice President of M&T Bank, Lancaster and Harrisburg Offices, and served as President of the Mortgage Banker's Assn - died on August 31st, 2014, on Grindstone Island, Clayton, NY, from injuries sustained in an accident. - Reference.

71. Therese Brouwer, 50, Managing Director ING, Nederland - Died in MH17 Crash - For me, this is absolutely HUGE, as I've spent weeks debunking the official story and, IMO, proving the false flag. - Reference.

If you stumble across more suspicious top banking deaths, please post the link in a comment down below and I will make sure to update the list. Thank you!

By Alexander Light, HumansAreFree.com; | Reference: Hang the banker;

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Hilarious Flight Attendant Safety presentation

I hope she works your next flight........a hoot. (IF YOU SAW THIS BEFORE. SEE IT AGAIN)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxNrizGdhtY&app=desktop

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video Hilarious Southwest Airline Safety Presentation (Open Captions)

Hilarious Southwest Airline Safety Presentation (Open Captions)

Americans have a duty to express unpopular opinions

Marquette University suspends a professor for arguing against classroom speech codes, a conservative writer blames liberal “hate speech” for the murder of two cops (echoing liberals who do the same again and again) and Sony shuts down a movie because of vague threats.
This all culminates months of colleges chasing away those with unpopular views, and social media mobs getting people fired for holding unfashionable opinions.
The pattern is this: The U.S., and the West more broadly, is becoming intolerant of expression that offends an angry minority or the elite sensibilities.
This intolerance shows itself in many ways, ranging from government censorship (mostly in Europe), to institutional censorship (in the American academy), to wild freakouts or blaming “hate speech” and “incitement” when a madman commits a murder.
Let’s look at two recent instances: Marquette and the New York Police Department.
“Hate speech leads to hate crimes,” Ira Straus wrote in National Review Online after a unstable man murdered two New York City cops. Straus doesn’t write about anyone who advocated cop-killing. Instead, he grouses about liberal academics and media elites who seem to blame Western civilization too much. Straus calls for prosecution of millions of Americans for the crime of “incitement.”
“It is vitally important that America find a way to stop its political and media leaders from continuing to incite hatred.”
I share Mr. Straus’s love of the West, and here’s one thing that makes the West so great: Mr. Straus is totally free to publicly share his censorious totalitarian dreams. Thankfully, almost nobody on the Right agrees with Straus. On the Left, there seems to be a little more comfort with blaming “hate speech” when someone commits a killing that smells a bit of politics.
When pro-life protestors began picketing outside an abortion clinic in Albuquerque in 2013, Salon writer Jill Filipovic warned that anti-abortion protests were a precursor to violence.
She blamed the “rhetoric” of pro-life groups for the murder of an abortionist: “They use offensive, overhyped language to impress upon their … followers the urgency of the situation….”
New York Times blogger Paul Krugman blamed the Tea Party when a psychotic young man killed six and wounded congresswoman Gabby Giffords in January 2011, saying the shooter merely took Tea Partyism “to the next level.”
Meanwhile, academia — exalted in the 1960s as havens of free speech — has become the least-free place for those who don’t walk the politically correct line.
Campus speech codes, kicked aside after a brief 1990s flare-up of political correctness, have returned with fury. Condoleezza Rice, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Christine Lagarde have been chased out of graduation-speaking gigs by delicate students who can’t bear opposing views — and enabling baby-boomer professors who have apparently lost their youthful zeal for dissent.
And this month, Marquette professor John McAdams was suspended after he publicly objected to one colleague’s in-class speech code. A teaching assistant had explained that in her class “homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.” Among the “homophobic comments” banned was anything opposing gay marriage. This would prohibit any articulation of Catholic teaching on marriage, or quoting President Obama’s views on gay marriage from before the 2012 election cycle.
The TA’s view is ignorant and intolerant — but that’s the nature of politically correct efforts to narrow the bounds of permissible dissent.
While American universities value free speech less and less, it’s mostly in Europe and Canada where government itself aims to snuff out offensive speech.
Those on the American Left and Right advocating more U.S. censorship always compare the speech they hate to the idea of “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” They may not realize what an odious precedent they are invoking.
Oliver Wendell Holmes used the “fire in a crowded theater” image to illustrate the limits of the First Amendment. Government, Holmes argued, was free to curtail speech that posed a “clear and present danger” to government interests.
The dangerous speech in question in that case? A socialist opponent of World War I was passing out leaflets encouraging young men to resist the draft. President Woodrow Wilson, of course, prosecuted such dissenters with vigor. Holmes and his court colleagues said Wilson was right to do so, and Congress right to prosecute him.
This is where we end up when free speech is eroded: the powerful use censorship to silence or imprison dissenters.
Growing intolerance of unpopular opinions ought to worry all who love freedom and debate, and all who worry about abuse of power.
It’s said that protecting one’s rights requires exercising them at times. Today, that means all who have unpopular opinions, and who have the ability to express them cogently and publicly, may in fact have the duty to do so.
Timothy P. Carney, a senior political columnist for the Washington Examiner, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. This column is reprinted with permission from washingtonexaminer.com.

It’s not just the economy devastating working-class families

The first step required to confront a problem is to get out of denial, and realize that you have a problem. Thanks to the work of scholars like Sara McLanahan, Isabel Sawhill, June Carbone, Naomi Cahn, and Andrew Cherlin, a growing number of family scholars, policymakers, and journalists now realize that we have a family problem in America. It is this: there is a growing marriage divide that leaves millions of men, women, and children in poor and working-class communities without ready access to the stability, emotional security, and financial resources marriage affords.
That this is a problem is no longer debatable. The retreat from marriage in working-class and poor communities across the United States hinders educational and economic opportunity, helps drive the crime rate higher in these communities, and exacts a serious social and emotional toll on children. It also—as Robert Lerman and I argue in a new report, “For Richer, For Poorer”—seems to account for almost one-third of the growth in family income inequality since the late 1970s.
To understand how to fix America’s family problem, we need an accurate diagnosis of it. Here, Andrew Cherlin’s magisterial “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America” provides a cogent, concise, and largely compelling account of why marriage is floundering in working-class communities, and flourishing in more affluent, college-educated ones. His account shows that conservatives “who insist that family changes are wholly a matter of cultural shifts” are as wrong as progressives who insist that America’s family problem is simply a “matter of economics alone.” Instead, Cherlin deftly points out how shifts in the economy and the culture have together combined to undercut the health of marriage and the stability of family life in working-class communities across the country.
The Decline in Working-Class Jobs Has Genuinely Hurt Marriage
“Labor’s Love Lost” contends that progressives rightly insist that the decline of stable, good-paying jobs among less-educated Americans has played a major role in fueling the nation’s growing marriage divide. In particular, I was struck by the close empirical connection Cherlin draws (see his Figure 1.1, above) between the parallel fortunes of manufacturing jobs and marriage among the working class; as these jobs have risen and fallen, so too have marriage rates in the working class. Cherlin also eloquently describes how steady employment has afforded working-class men a sense of dignity and channeled their “behavior onto constructive paths.” Without access to decent-paying, stable jobs since the 1970s, working-class men are much less likely to be seen as attractive candidates for marriage, to act in ways that make them attractive candidates for marriage, and to stay married. So, score one for the Progressive view that “it’s the economy, stupid.”
Cherlin also suggests that “economic inequality” and “marriage inequality” may be causally linked, and here he is less convincing. That’s because—according to his own Figure 1.2 (see above)—the nation’s retreat from marriage began in the late 1960s, before income inequality started to surge in the late 1970s. Let me underline the point here: the causal ordering is off, since the retreat from marriage was well underway before dramatic increases in income inequality began. Indeed, the temporal ordering of these events is more consistent with the idea that the retreat from marriage helped to fuel the upsurge in income inequality in America.
A Morality Shift Has Also Hurt Marriage
But the story of “labor’s love lost” is not just about money. It’s also about mores. Here Cherlin tells a largely conservative story. He notes that the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s—i.e., the sexual, feminist, and therapeutic revolutions of this tumultuous era—played a key role in making divorce, single parenthood, and nonmarital childbearing more acceptable to the public at large. Without the shifts in mores ushered in by these revolutions, the United States might have seen a decline in marriage rates in the last half-century, but it would not have seen the dramatic increase in family instability and single parenthood among the working class that it did. The Great Depression is instructive here, as Cherlin notes: “Despite a terrible job market in the 1930s, there was no meaningful rise in nonmarital childbearing because cultural norms had not changed.” So America’s family problem is not just about money, it’s about changes in mores that have weakened the links between lifelong marriage and parenthood.America’s family problem is not just about money, it’s about changes in mores that have weakened the links between lifelong marriage and parenthood.
Another argument that is both explicit and implicit in Cherlin’s book—and that is both economic and cultural—is that the ties between masculinity, marriage, work, and providership have remained strong over the last century. Without necessarily endorsing it, Cherlin nods to an argument made by the anthropologist David Gilmore that prosocial masculinity has been connected in many cultures to marriage and providership, and has imposed a valuable “structure and discipline on men’s lives.” For working-class men in the United States, the routines and responsibilities of work and marriage, and the status of being a breadwinner, have afforded them an important sense of identity as men. By contrast, denied access to work that allows them to be good providers, men have often fallen prey to a kind of toxic masculinity—on full display in Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’ book, “Promises I Can Keep”—that is marked by behaviors like infidelity, substance abuse, or violence.
What’s more: I think the value of breadwinning continues to be salient for men and women down and up the class ladder in ways that stand in tension with another idea advanced by Cherlin, as well as by Carbone and Cahn, that one reason better-educated Americans are doing better is that they embrace a more egalitarian approach to life. Because, although college-educated Americans are more likely to embrace egalitarian family ideas in theory, in practice they typically live what might be called neo-traditional family lives that are about as gendered as those of their less-educated fellow citizens.
Notes: Based on data from the American Community Survey. Sample is restricted to married-couple households with at least one child under the age of 18.
Take breadwinning. In married families, in 2012, college-educated men with children in the home earned 70 percent of their family’s income, on average (see figure above). In less-educated homes, married men with children earned 72 percent of the income—not much of a difference in practical terms. Of course, in actual dollars, college-educated men bring a lot more to the family than do their less-educated peers: in 2012, on average they earned about $90,000, compared to the $41,000 that less-educated men earned. In both cases, in the average married family, men typically lead in providing for their families. Furthermore, even today, a recent study tells us that within “marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline.” All this suggests marriage remains quite connected to gendered patterns of breadwinning, down and up the social ladder.
Notes: Based on data from the American Community Survey. Sample is restricted to married-couple households with at least one child under the age of 18.
What Government and Cultural Institutions Can Do to Help Working-Class Families
From all this, I draw three important conclusions about the “fall of the working-class family” chronicled in “Labor’s Love Lost”: this fall has been driven by declines in stable, decent-paying work for less-educated men, larger cultural shifts away from a kind of marriage-centered familism, and the erosion of a kind of working-class prosocial masculinity connected to providership. This diagnosis, in turn, suggests the need for a range of policy and cultural initiatives to renew the fortunes of working-class family life in the twenty-first century.
On the policy front, the federal government should reinforce work and marriage in at least four ways, all of which would strengthen the economic foundations of marriage and family life in working-class communities:
It should subsidize wages (through the Earned Income Tax Credit or a new approach not connected to household size) to boost the returns to work for less-educated Americans;
It should eliminate the marriage penalties embedded in many of our transfer programs;
It should boost the child-tax credit to $3,000 per child and make it applicable to income and payroll taxes; and
Along with state governments, it should increase funding for vocational and apprenticeship education—such as Career Academies—that raise adolescents and young adults’ odds of finding good-paying, middle-skilled jobs.
Given the cultural character of the problem, we cannot limit our thinking to government solutions. On the cultural front, civic, religious, and cultural leaders and opinion makers should seek to renew marriage and family life in working-class America in the following three ways:
1. Launch a civic campaign—modeled on the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy’s successful effort to reduce teen pregnancy—to encourage working-class young adults to put marriage before parenthood, value fatherhood, and slow down their romantic lives, both for their sake and especially the sake of their children;
2. Encourage secular and religious civic organizations—from soccer leagues to churches—to actively engage less-educated Americans, who are now much less likely to be involved in such groups than are college-educated Americans; and
3. Forge a new model of masculinity that encompasses not just breadwinning but also fatherhood and civic engagement—e.g., coaching—in ways that are attractive to ordinary men, especially working-class men, and draw them into the lives of their families and communities.
Efforts like these may seem quixotic. But without them, the possibility of reviving lifelong love in the laboring classes will be lost.
This article grows out of a symposium sponsored by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth on Andrew Cherlin’s new book, “Labor’s Love Lost,” and is reprinted from the Institute for Family Studies blog, with permission.
W. Bradford Wilcox directs the Home Economics Project at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies.