Report says right wing is full of shit

Off Our Backs, Apr 1998 by Mantilla, Karla

A 40 page report by Political Research Associates said that the right wing is contradictory in its campaign about working women. According to the report, "conservatives argue that the absence of work produces dysfunctional families of the poor; simultaneously, they claimed that the entry of large numbers of white women in the work force produces a crisis in family values among the middle class." So, according to conservatives, poor women or women of color best preserve family values by working and middle class or white women best preserve family values by staying home with the kids. (We could have told them this made no sense years ago, but who listens to us?)

Some interesting factoids the report revealed:

Teen birth rates are significantly lower today than they were in the 1950s. In 1955, the adolescent birth rate (ages 1519) was 90.3 per 1000 families. In 1993, the corresponding figure was 59.6.

In 1970, one out of every six mothers was a teen. By 1992, that figure had dropped to one in eight.

48 to 70% of all welfare recipients left the rolls within two years, while a mere 7 to 15% of all recipients were on AFDC for eight consecutive years.

An estimated 1.1 million children will sink below the poverty line because of changes in welfare and other laws.

--info from Decades of Distortion, Political Research Associates, 12/97