2008 Perspective: America, Resurgent
Filed under: US Elections
Publius Pundit wants to wish all its readers a prosperous, safe and very happy New Year!
O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain,For purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain.America, America, God shed his Grace on thee,And crowned thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea!
In the December issue of Commentary magazine, Peter Wehner, until recently the director of the White House office of strategic initiatives and currently senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and Yuval Levin, a fellow at Center, offered up an early Christmas present to America. Confounding the nutroot naysayers, Wehner & Levin showed that across a wide spectrum of social indicators, America is making breathtaking progress:
Crime, especially, has plummeted. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the rates of both violent crime and property crime fell significantly between 1993 and 2005, reaching their lowest levels since 1973 (the first year for which such data are available). More recent figures from the FBI, which measures crime differently from the NCVS, show an unfortunate uptick in violent crime in the last two years -- particularly in cities like Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Even so, however, the overall rate remains far below that of the mid-1990's.Teenage drug use, which moved relentlessly upward throughout the 1990's, declined thereafter by an impressive 23 percent, and for a number of specific drugs it has fallen still lower. Thus, the use of ecstasy and LSD has dropped by over 50 percent, of metham-phetamine by almost as much, and of steroids by over 20 percent.
Then there is welfare. Since the high-water mark of 1994, the national welfare caseload has declined by over 60 percent. Virtually every state in the union has reduced its caseload by at least a third, and some have achieved reductions of over 90 percent. Not only have the numbers of people on welfare plunged, but, in the wake of the 1996 welfare-reform bill, overall poverty, child poverty, black child poverty, and child hunger have all decreased, while employment figures for single mothers have risen.
Abortion, too, is down. After reaching a high of over 1.6 million in 1990, the number of abortions performed annually in the U.S. has dropped to fewer than 1.3 million, a level not seen since the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized the practice. The divorce rate, meanwhile, is now at its lowest level since 1970.
The moonbat America-haters were left with only two responses to these devastating facts: lies and suppression. Neither worked.
The nation's Moonbat of Record, the New York Times, tried first to hide these facts from their readers. No such luck. It's brilliant conservative columnist David Brooks pointed them out to readers in his column. Stymied, the Times turned to boldfaced lies, reporting in a breathless "news" item that divorce rates were skyrocketing. But speedily to the rescue rode Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School, who forced the Times to print an op-ed article exposing their fraud. Divorce rates are dramatically down, not up. (Outrageously, the Times neither linked to their news story in the online version of the column nor appended a correction to the news story itself). And by the end of the year, as we recently reported, the Times was announcing the addition of a second right-wing pundit to its stable of columnists.
America, more than any other country that has ever existed, is capable of learning from its mistakes, of reforming and improving, of reinventing itself. More than any other country, it looks forward to the future, and therefore shapes it. If you are lucky enough to be ushering in the New Year in the United States, consider yourself fortunate to be able to gaze upon the brightness of our future prospects. With due diligence on the part of her people, America will remain the world's beacon light of liberty throughout all human time.
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